New "Skeleton Key" Malware Allows Bypassing of Passwords

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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Dell’s security group has discovered new malware which they named Skeleton Key that installs itself in the Active Directory and from there can logon as any user. The bad news is it’s almost undetectable at this point, but the good news is it's extremely easy to remove the malware from your computer once it is detected.

It's not all doom and gloom though. The good news is that, in its current form, the malware does not survive a system reboot.
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A malware destroyed with a simple reboot, good news for most. But that's evil against us [H] which reboot every 3 to 4 months lol
 
MrPatate said:
A malware destroyed with a simple reboot, good news for most. But that's evil against us [H] which reboot every 3 to 4 months lol
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mmm never been a fan of leaving the PC on when I sleep unless its doing somthing, usaly j usaly just turn off b4 i sleep and leave it on all day, Why do you keep yours on for so long. Just curious :)
 
Savi said:
mmm never been a fan of leaving the PC on when I sleep unless its doing somthing, usaly j usaly just turn off b4 i sleep and leave it on all day, Why do you keep yours on for so long. Just curious :)
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Cuz turning it off is annoying, have to go in the basement to turn in on an access my stuff from my HTPC in the morning :p
Also, I rather have it always on for remote access, FTP, etc.
 
MrPatate said:
A malware destroyed with a simple reboot, good news for most. But that's evil against us [H] which reboot every 3 to 4 months lol
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Dude, how do you pull that off and Not develop network issues? I mean, If I don't restart my laptop for like 4-5 days, I get kicked off my wifi network, even with an ipconfig /flushdns. Router goes like: nope
 
commissioneranthony said:
Dude, how do you pull that off and Not develop network issues? I mean, If I don't restart my laptop for like 4-5 days, I get kicked off my wifi network, even with an ipconfig /flushdns. Router goes like: nope
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Cat5e connected to a DLink DIR-655, Win7 Pro, nothing fancy. Sorry I can't help more...
 
...the installation requires administrator access...
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if you have admin access then you already have access to everything the users do and don't need this malware right?
 
MrPatate said:
Cuz turning it off is annoying, have to go in the basement to turn in on an access my stuff from my HTPC in the morning :p
Also, I rather have it always on for remote access, FTP, etc.
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I turn my PC off when I am not using it. Saves me about $150 a year in electricity as I idle at about 200w. Plus I have a tablet that I can use for those times I don't want to bother to turn the PC on just to look something up quick.
 
I use hibernate... it's an awesome feature. I wonder why people don't use it more often, its like turning it off without turning it off.
 
MrPatate said:
Cuz turning it off is annoying, have to go in the basement to turn in on an access my stuff from my HTPC in the morning :p
Also, I rather have it always on for remote access, FTP, etc.
Click to expand...

Now days for a lot of reasons this thinking is outdated.

1 you can turn any computer on with a wake on lan packet. This can be done with the phone you almost surely have by pressing a single widget.

2 SSDs are common and cheap enough everyone can have one and they speed up booting to the point that most machines will be on and waiting for you before you can get into the room.

3 Windows 8 and later just boot insanely fast anyway.

4 you can configure your computer to autologin to a specific account.

5 All of these gains can be had remotely through VPN.

So unless your computer needs to run for some reason it just seems like its worth it for you, your energy bill and the environment to alter your habits to turning off when ever you are not going to be using it for more than 30 minutes.
 
rudy said:
Now days for a lot of reasons this thinking is outdated.

1 you can turn any computer on with a wake on lan packet. This can be done with the phone you almost surely have by pressing a single widget.

2 SSDs are common and cheap enough everyone can have one and they speed up booting to the point that most machines will be on and waiting for you before you can get into the room.

3 Windows 8 and later just boot insanely fast anyway.

4 you can configure your computer to autologin to a specific account.

5 All of these gains can be had remotely through VPN.

So unless your computer needs to run for some reason it just seems like its worth it for you, your energy bill and the environment to alter your habits to turning off when ever you are not going to be using it for more than 30 minutes.
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Wake on LAN rarely if ever works the way it should in my personal experience. Maybe in some precisely configured and coordinated enterprise environment it works well, but in the real home world, good luck. $200 / year in electricity is easily worth the hundreds of hours of troubleshooting it would probably take me to get all my computers and router and switch to handle wake and sleep properly.

Not to mention it's a huge inconvenience for me to have to wait even 30 seconds for my desktop and not have all my programs open and ready to go.

Lastly, I have teamviewer and network folders on both my desktop and server. I like them all accessible at any time from anywhere I am. As said above, I don't give a shit about how many pennies I save turning them off because it's nothing compared to the importance of 100% availability.
 
So if it's almost undetectable,

and it doesn't survive a reboot,

That would be seriously BAD because most computers infected by it, that have their passwords compromised, would reboot and destroy the malware without the user or admin ever being aware that it was there or the password compromised.

Um, that's actually quite spectacularly bad.

The only good news is that a piece of malware that cannot even survive a reboot likely doesn't spread very well. Hopefully...
 
dr/owned said:
Wake on LAN rarely if ever works the way it should in my personal experience. Maybe in some precisely configured and coordinated enterprise environment it works well, but in the real home world, good luck. $200 / year in electricity is easily worth the hundreds of hours of troubleshooting it would probably take me to get all my computers and router and switch to handle wake and sleep properly.
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I have my HTPC set to go to sleep after an hour of non use. It automatically wakes 5 minutes before a show records, which is enough time for it to setup the cable card.
If I want to access something and it's off, I have a program on my PC and on my phone that wakes it up. Easy to setup and works fine.

Saves me over $100 a year on electricity.
 
dr/owned said:
Wake on LAN rarely if ever works the way it should in my personal experience. Maybe in some precisely configured and coordinated enterprise environment it works well, but in the real home world, good luck. $200 / year in electricity is easily worth the hundreds of hours of troubleshooting it would probably take me to get all my computers and router and switch to handle wake and sleep properly.

Not to mention it's a huge inconvenience for me to have to wait even 30 seconds for my desktop and not have all my programs open and ready to go.

Lastly, I have teamviewer and network folders on both my desktop and server. I like them all accessible at any time from anywhere I am. As said above, I don't give a shit about how many pennies I save turning them off because it's nothing compared to the importance of 100% availability.
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Wake on lan is working great on 6 computers in my home. There is only one time WOL fails on some computers. That is if I am too lazy to change the BIOS settings or they do not exist to set the mobo to the right power state when the computer is off after it recovers from a power failure. But I would guess that if you or anyone has a power failure your computer will not reboot into the exact state you left it in and you will have lost your "30 seconds" anyway. At any rate I am saying this less for people who may be very set in their ways like you and more just so that the general person passing by in this thread sees the other side of the argument. I know a lot of people who still keep computers on all the time and the main complaint I hear is they don't want to wait for it to boot up. If I come back from the store, work, wake up, I just press one button on my phone and any of 6 computers I want turns on. By the time I enter the room the computer is waiting for me to do whatever I want.

The only way I see this failing is if you bought some computer from one of the big OEMs that has some garbage locked down bios or NIC drivers that simply don't work or don't give you the options. And I think it has most to do with the motherboard because thinking back on the issue I just reinstalled windows on 4 machines due to a SSD swaps and all of them, all 4 were working with wake on lan with no configuration. 1 windows 7, 2 windows 8.1 and one windows 10.
 
I have a file server running 24 x 7 that's always doing something. But all of the desktops in the house hibernate when not in use. My home automation software hibernates my desktop if I'm not home or in bed or something like that. It also kills power to the outlet that the monitor is plugged into. When I get home or get out of bed the HA software sends a WOL packet to the desktop and powers up the monitor. If I go outside the monitor looses power and it's restored when I come back inside. It's been 100% reliable.
 
rudy said:
Now days for a lot of reasons this thinking is outdated.

1 you can turn any computer on with a wake on lan packet. This can be done with the phone you almost surely have by pressing a single widget.

2 SSDs are common and cheap enough everyone can have one and they speed up booting to the point that most machines will be on and waiting for you before you can get into the room.

3 Windows 8 and later just boot insanely fast anyway.

4 you can configure your computer to autologin to a specific account.

5 All of these gains can be had remotely through VPN.

So unless your computer needs to run for some reason it just seems like its worth it for you, your energy bill and the environment to alter your habits to turning off when ever you are not going to be using it for more than 30 minutes.
Click to expand...

I access my computer daily by Teamviewer, FTP, etc Always ON is a requirement for me. If you don't need it, good for you. My HTPC hibernates, but my main computer is and will always be ON at all time.
WOL never really worked reliably for me and it needs to be sent from the same network(might be mistaking on that).
 
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