Now believe it or not, the purpose of this skill was not to go through and just completely
wreck house and explain how to exploit memory vulnerabilities. It was actually to go through
and fix them. And I'm going to point out to you one of the easiest ways to be able to
do that by swapping over here real quick and showing you Windows Update. And that's right,
Windows Update does a lot of this vulnerability patching that we've been discovering on this
targeted system. Now I'm not going to do it because that would mess up the lab template
here. But I would highly encourage you to go through and apply updates to your system
inside the lab environment. I know it would take a bit. And then run another vulnerability
assessment from Meta Printer inside of MSF Console. More specifically, MSF Console using
that exploit search that we went over previously in the skill. Now you may be wondering, does
this take care of all the memory exploits? And absolutely not. And the reason for that
is because there's going to be third party programs on a particular system that don't
necessarily belong to Microsoft. A lot of those programs like Adobe's guilty of it a
good bit where they'll have vulnerabilities pop up out of nowhere. Some of them are even
zero day pop ups. And that's unfortunate because zero days, as we know, don't have
a known fix for them or at least publicly. Now in order to really go through and do this
and find where the exploits are, that's what pen testers are for. And that's why we're
here. So it's not necessarily that we go through and exploit every vulnerability that we find.
We just make note of it. So in the previous instance of this skill, we would just make
a note saying, first of all, we were able to exploit it just for connection purposes.
If you go through the CVE notes that we read linked above, you would also see that there's
a possibility of administrative privileges escalation. Now we would note in for our report
that we were not able to do that in this particular instance. And that's a good thing. So that
means that other controls are put into place that prevent that. But the connection was
still there, causing more problems later on. So it could be that a hacker has gotten
into the system, uses that particular exploit, says, I'm not able to elevate permissions
the way I wanted to. So they go through and do another vulnerability assessment and then
go through and find a way to get into the actual administrative side of the house on
your target system. Now there's a whole lot of what if in this scenario, but that's what
we pen testers are here for. And again, one of the easiest and quickest fixes to be able
to fix memory exploits is making sure that we do Windows updates and also apply applicable
updates to the targeted pieces of third party software that our organization may utilize.
Now I do want to kind of pick on you programmers out there a little bit because I'm guilty
of this too, that when we do create our programs, that we make sure that we do input validation,
and all this other great stuff. Because we've seen the code examples above where we get to have
potential memory overflow problems and memory exploitation problems. And that's essentially
what happened against notepad.exe in our example from the skill. So it's imperative to go through
and actually make sure that we have somebody troubleshoot and stress test the code that
we're developing for our programs. But remember, it's all about the patching,
all about the pen testing going behind them. And the security technicians can do this too.
It's just that pen testers are a neutral third party that can come in and give an unbiased
report based on their actual findings.