{"id":90173,"date":"2019-11-07T13:05:30","date_gmt":"2019-11-07T21:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/security\/blog\/\/?p=90173"},"modified":"2023-05-15T23:06:21","modified_gmt":"2023-05-16T06:06:21","slug":"the-new-cve-2019-0708-rdp-exploit-attacks-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/security\/blog\/2019\/11\/07\/the-new-cve-2019-0708-rdp-exploit-attacks-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft works with researchers to detect and protect against new RDP exploits"},"content":{"rendered":"

On November 2, 2019, security researcher Kevin Beaumont<\/a> reported that his BlueKeep<\/a> honeypot experienced crashes and was likely being exploited. Microsoft security researchers collaborated with Beaumont as well as another researcher, Marcus Hutchins<\/a>, to investigate and analyze the crashes and confirm that they were caused by a BlueKeep exploit module for the Metasploit penetration testing framework.<\/p>\n

BlueKeep is what researchers and the media call CVE-2019-0708<\/a>, an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in Remote Desktop Services on Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft released a security<\/a> fix for the vulnerability on May 14, 2019.<\/p>\n

While similar vulnerabilities have been abused by worm malware in the past, initial attempts at exploiting this vulnerability involved human operators aiming to penetrate networks via exposed RDP services.<\/p>\n

Microsoft had already deployed a behavioral detection for the BlueKeep Metasploit module in early September, so Microsoft Defender ATP customers had protection from this Metasploit module by the time it was used against Beaumont\u2019s honeypot. The module, which appears to be unstable as evidenced by numerous RDP-related crashes observed on the honeypot, triggered the behavioral detection in Microsoft Defender ATP, resulting in the collection of critical signals used during the investigation.<\/p>\n

Microsoft security signals showed an increase in RDP-related crashes that are likely associated with the use of the unstable BlueKeep Metasploit module on certain sets of vulnerable machines. We saw:<\/p>\n