…“The vulnerable driver ships with every version of Windows, up to and including Server 2025,” Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, said. “Maybe your fax modem uses a different chipset, and so you don’t need the Agere driver? Perhaps you’ve simply discovered email? Tough luck. Your PC is still vulnerable, and a local attacker with a minimally privileged account can elevate to administrator.”…
Thanks for the details!
I wonder how often they clean stuff up like this. That crossed my mind earlier, I’m sure there is a bunch of “dormant” software that could be cleaned out or made optional in some way.
But the making it optional idea is easier said than done. Especially from a standpoint of discoverability and usability.
Right, it was referenced in one of the articles that a bunch of legacy industrial machines likely still use this hardware, so the people using those old machines are probably going to have to go dig up PCI modems from that era without the Agere/Lucent chipset.
I’m sure you’re right and there’s lots of stuff they’ve missed like this over the years that they sort of kept on for compatibility but that opens exploits due to how old they are.
People using that legacy hardware generally can’t run Windows 10, which just ended support this month. The patch is only for Windows 11, which won’t run on older hardware.
The patch is for Windows 10, Windows 11, and Server 2008 up to Server 2025.
Further, there’s companies that make custom-built modern machines that support classic PCI and modern operating systems and classic operating systems.
It’s conceivable that legacy systems are using modern OSes with virtualization running a legacy OS and legacy PCI cards, for example. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility.
https://nixsys.com/legacy-computers/pci-slot-computers
Yeah, some extremely expensive equipment at my job runs on Adobe Flash. Modern machines won’t even allow Flash to run because it’s so insecure. We just updated the control PC for that equipment last year; It’s a computer that is dual-booting Windows 11 and Windows XP. It boots into WinXP by default, to be able to run Flash. Then if you ever need to update it, you can swap over to Win11 to be able to connect to the internet.