The latest on BlueKeep and DejaBlue vulnerabilities — Using Firepower to defend against encrypted DejaBlue

Over the past few months, Microsoft has released several security updates for critical Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)-related security bugs. These bugs are significant for IT infrastructure because they are classified as “wormable,” meaning future malware that exploits them could spread from system to system without requiring explicit user interaction. These vulnerabilities could be exploited by an attacker sending a specially crafted request to the target system’s Remote Desktop Service via RDP. We have seen how destructive these kinds of attacks can be, most notably WannaCry. We highly recommend organizations immediately apply Microsoft’s patches. Cisco Talos released detection coverage for CVE-2019-0708 and also enhanced guidance to help organizations facilitate inspection of RDP sessions here. Microsoft published additional security updates last month to mitigate two additional remote code execution vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1181 and CVE-2019-1182, affecting several versions of Microsoft Windows. These bugs are referred to as “DejaBlue” due to their similarities to BlueKeep.

Once again, Cisco Talos started working immediately to reverse-engineer the RCE vulnerabilities. Exploits and protections for both CVE-2019-1181 and CVE-2019-1182 now exist to keep your systems secure. SID 51369 for SNORT® correctly blocks exploitation of CVE-2019-1181 and CVE-2019-1182. In this post, we’ll run through the details of how to protect against this “DejaBlue” exploit and walk through the steps to protect your environment.