The Hack FAQ

16.0 NT Denial of Service


This section deals with Denial of Service attacks that are specific to NT.


16.1 What can telnet give me in the way of denial of service?

There are several DoS attacks involving a simple telnet client that can be used against an NT server.

First, by telnetting to port 53, 135, or 1031, and then typing in about 10 or so characters and hitting enter will cause problems. If DNS (port 53) is running, DNS will stop. If 135 answers, the CPU utilization will increase to 100%, slowing performance. And if port 1031 is hit, IIS will get knocked down. Typically the fix is to reboot the server, as it will be hung or so slow as to render it useless.

Telnetting to port 80 and typing "GET ../.." will also crash IIS.

If the latest service pack is loaded the attack will not work.

16.2 What can I do with Samba?

Don't get me started ;-)

As far as DoS, if you connect to a server with Samba to 3.X NT that does not have the latest service pack loaded, you can send it "DIR ..\" and crash it.

16.3 What's with ROLLBACK.EXE?

If the file ROLLBACK.EXE is executed, the registry can be wiped. You must re-install or do a complete restore if this happens to you. Sys Admins will probably want to remove this file. Renamed, it makes for one hell of a nasty trojan.

It is reportedly possible to lock onto a port, say like port 19, and when the server crashes and comes up ROLLBACK.EXE will start trying to unlock the port and subsequently opens up the registry for anyone to wipe it. I was unsuccessful in getting this to happen in the lab, but probably because I find DoS attacks rather lame I didn't try very hard to get it to work. But others claim it can happen, so keep it in mind.

16.4 What is an OOB attack?

This attack is fairly simple, and a fair amount of source code is available. Basically it involves sending an out-of-band message to a Windows operating system. Typically port 139 is used. This was patched with SP3 and a Hot Fix but apparently with a little monkeying around with the code you can get around this.

This DoS is very popular, mainly because of the wide variety of implementations of sockets. I've seen Unix and Windows NT versions of code, an implementation in Perl, and even an implementation using the Rexx Socket APIs on OS/2.

If you are so inclined, try a web search for "winnuke" which will get you probably a thousand locations with the code.

16.5 Are there any other Denial of Service attacks?

If a domain user logs onto the console, creates a file and removes its permissions, it is possible that another user can log onto the console and delete the file. The problem affects all versions of NT. However, this isn't what I'd consider "Denial of Service" as it is more like denial of a file. Depending on the file, though, it could be used as DoS.

If you are running smbmount with version 2.0.25 of Linux, you can crash an NT server. smbmount is intended to be run on Linux 2.0.28 or higher, so it doesn't work right on 2.0.25. You also need a legit user account. Running as root, type smbmount //target/service /mnt -U client_name, followed by ls /mnt will hang the shell on Linux (no biggie) and blue screen the target server (biggie).

The final DoS I'm aware of involves Microsoft's DNS on NT 4.0 server. If you send it a DNS response when it did not make a query, DNS will crash.

The latest service packs and post service pack patches fix all of these problems.


Top | Next: NT Logging and Backdoors | Previous: NT Client Attacks | Table of Contents