HBGary, Juicy Fruit, & 0-Day

If you have not been following the HBGary & Anonymous story, Ars Technica has a couple great writeups on it.

In the aftermath of this whole saga, Anonymous has made public ~72,000 emails from top HBGary leaders (Founder, CEO, etc), including Greg Hoglund, of rootkit.com & “Rootkits: Subverting the Windows Kernel” fame.

Using the emails as a source, Ars Technica did a great review of some of the more interesting emails, including a couple discussing “Juicy Fruit.”  From Ars Technica:

“HBGary kept a stockpile of 0-day exploits. A slide from one of the company’s internal presentations showed that the company had 0-day exploits for which no patch yet existed—but these 0-day exploits had not yet even been published. No one knew about them.

One of the unpublished Windows 2000 exploits, for instance, can deliver a “payload” of any size onto the target machine using a heap exploit. “The payload has virtually no restrictions” on what it can do, a document notes, because the exploit secures SYSTEM level access to the operating system, “the highest user-mode operating system defined level” available.”

Though this is all interesting, the pertinent detail I wanted to point out can be found in one of the emails, found here.  As you can see, one of the 0-days is ESX & ESXi.  The email is dated Dec 6, 2009, so just over a year ago.

Though we do not know what kind of access would have been able to gained, (“Even with unique access to the innermost workings of a security firm, much remains opaque; the real conversations took place face-to-face or on secure phone lines, not through e-mail, so the glimpses we have here are fragmentary at best. This care taken to avoid sending sensitive information via unencrypted e-mail stands in stark contrast with the careless approach to security that enabled the hacks in the first place.”), we can see from other emails that we are not talking about some kind of script kiddie-level exploit.

The salient point that I want to hammer home is thus:  HBGary is a small private sector security company that did some contracting work for the industrial defense space–If HBGary has access to these types of 0-days, it is not hard to imagine what state-sponsored attackers might have access to–Both homeland and overseas.

Are we ready?

-Josh