Possible hole in Win XP MS Client networking

From: Daniel Swarbrick (danielat_private)
Date: Mon Dec 24 2001 - 21:09:02 PST

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    Hi, I hope this is the correct contact for this kind of thing.
    
    I've just had somebody drop Nimda viruses on my Windows XP Pro
    workstation from Korea. Here's how it happened.
    
    I had a Windows share on a FAT32 drive, which granted read/write to
    Everybody (I know, bad practice, but it was just a temporary "Incoming"
    directory from a file swap session with a friend a few nights ago). I
    noticed my modem lights going, even though I was not downloading
    anything at the time. At that moment, Norton Antivirus started popping
    up warnings about Nimda viruses in .EML files in the shared directory. I
    suspected my friend's files had come with a little extra bonus, so went
    to check the directory myself. I couldn't find more than one .EML file
    at a time (as NAV kept moving them to quarantine), but new ones kept
    arriving. That's when I clicked as to what was happening, and ran
    netstat from a DOS window.
    
    Netstat revealed an ESTABLISHED connection from a host in Korea to the
    microsoft-ds service on my machine. It also showed a TIME_WAIT
    connection to windowsupdate.microsoft.com, although I had not been to
    that site - possibly unrelated, as Windows does tend to phone home a
    bit. Anyway, I promptly stopped sharing the directory, and disconnected
    from the Internet, reconnecting in order to get a new IP.
    
    I then checked my network configuration, and double checked that Client
    for Microsoft Networks was not bound to my modem, which indeed it
    wasn't. Now I don't run the XP firewall for my dialup connection, but
    how is it that a connection can be made to a service that is not bound
    to the dialup adapter?
    
    Is this a hole? Can you guys perhaps replicate the condition and see if
    it is? My machine has all the current critical updates applied from
    Windows update.
    
    Any other information you might need, I will try to supply.
    



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