#Vault7 ‘Athena’: CIA’s anti-Windows malware

[ABParticipant 762]

DaveV wrote:

Most IT departments trialed upgrades on a simple standalone test network system, and only after rigorous testing over weeks would they release the upgrade/patch to the company.

The worst one Windows ever released was Vista…absolute and total cr*p, unsupported by most hardware manufacturers. After that my approach is wait at least 3-4 years after Windows releases any new operating system to see if it’s actually worth it…and aside from Win 7…everything they have produced has been …well cr*p

As an IT Manager I agree with the above in it’s entirety.

My entire network is still Windows 7.

And don’t even mention “the cloud” to me!

No-one's yet explained to me exactly what's so great // About slaving fifty years away on something that you hate // About meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity // Well if that's your road then take it, but it's not the road for me.

[Anonymous 11]

The nastiest migration I ever handled was moving an Exchange server platform off of NT4 over to Windows 2000.

I was once testing roaming profiles with Windows 2000 Server and Professional. I had a BSOD on my workstation. I had a complicated T-SQL script I had been working on that was stupidly stored on my desktop and to be backed up on the server later as that was where my profile was stored. I lost it all though at least I had the code figured out so the rewrite took 1/4 the time.

I’m a kamikaze. I’m all Windows 10 and Server 2016/2012 R2 plus a Mac at my office. I like solving problems without many references.

[ABParticipant 762]

Solid wrote:

Did you guys really believe that those exploits are just “bugs” ?
I believe that the bug was planted, and it was intentional, someone was paid to plant those bugs there, so the government could exploit them.

My personal opinion is profit over security – like we see in the games industry. They have pretty much dropped all debugging and testing – they release a half arsed product to consumers and patch it retrospectively. This is why a lot of games go on sale at beta test stage, and they then “patch as necessary” until it’s a final product.

This is why events like DefCon exists. It’s cheaper to pay someone skilled in hacking to uncover vulnerabilities than pay a team to try and break the code.

Windows is f~~~ed anyway. Windows 10 was supposed to be the end product that they just leave as the standard architecture and “bolt on” new services and features. Look up Atom Bombing and you will understand why Windows need to build a new OS from the ground up. A nice unpatchable privilege escalation code injection technique; if anyone accesses your PC with a remote control vulnerability, they can access root admin processes with no way too prevent it.

No-one's yet explained to me exactly what's so great // About slaving fifty years away on something that you hate // About meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity // Well if that's your road then take it, but it's not the road for me.

[ABParticipant 762]

Anonymous wrote:

The nastiest migration I ever handled was moving an Exchange server platform off of NT4 over to Windows 2000.

Ugh, Exchange is a bastard. When it works, it’s great, when it doesn’t…

No-one's yet explained to me exactly what's so great // About slaving fifty years away on something that you hate // About meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity // Well if that's your road then take it, but it's not the road for me.

[Anonymous 11]

AB wrote:

Ugh, Exchange is a bastard. When it works, it’s great, when it doesn’t…

You will damn sure know when it doesn’t.

I had to handle a piece of s~~~ grey box server that had a RAID stripe parity error right smack in the middle of the information store. It took me 45 minutes to physically replace a single drive. I did convince them they needed a real server after that incident.

The older versions of Exchange would have a service shutdown and restart order that had to be followed, or bad things could happen. I hated that.

[ABParticipant 762]

Anonymous wrote:

You will damn sure know when it doesn’t.

I had to handle a piece of s~~~ grey box server that had a RAID stripe parity error right smack in the middle of the information store. It took me 45 minutes to physically replace a single drive. I did convince them they needed a real server after that incident.

The older versions of Exchange would have a service shutdown and restart order that had to be followed, or bad things could happen. I hated that.

I’m relatively new to the game of server management. I inherited a build and it is f~~~ing torturous when s~~~ goes pear. I am still in disbelief that you cannot reduce the .edb size on a physical hd without offline defragging – f~~~ing whitespace!

No-one's yet explained to me exactly what's so great // About slaving fifty years away on something that you hate // About meekly shuffling down the path of mediocrity // Well if that's your road then take it, but it's not the road for me.

[Anonymous 11]

AB wrote:

I inherited a build and it is f~~~ing torturous when s~~~ goes pear.

I hate that situation. Tread very carefully is the best advice I can give. I imagine you’d be running Exchange 2007/2010 on Server 2008 or 2008 R2. 2010 Exchange is better than 2007.

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