US Senator Calls for Investigation into Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Practices
A prominent US senator has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for what he describes as "gross cybersecurity negligence." The senator, Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), claims that the company’s continued use of an outdated and vulnerable encryption method is a major contributor to last year’s breach of the healthcare giant Ascension.
Microsoft’s RC4 Encryption Policy Under Fire
The encryption in question is RC4, a stream cipher developed by RSA Security’s Ron Rivest in 1987. Despite its known vulnerabilities, Microsoft continues to support RC4 as the default means for securing Active Directory, a Windows component used to configure and provision user accounts inside large organizations. While more robust encryption options are available, many users don’t enable them, causing Active Directory to fall back to Kerberos authentication using the vulnerable RC4 cipher.
Kerberoasting: A New Attack Technique Exploiting Microsoft’s Weakness
The use of RC4 in Kerberos has led to a new attack technique known as "kerberoasting." This form of attack uses offline password-cracking attacks against Kerberos-protected accounts that haven’t been configured to use stronger forms of encryption. Matt Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University, notes that the continued support of Kerberos and RC4, combined with a common misconfiguration that gives non-admin users access to privileged Active Directory functions, opens the network to kerberoasting.
Senator Wyden’s Investigation into the Ascension Breach
Sen. Wyden’s investigation into the 2024 ransomware breach of Ascension found that the default use of RC4 was a direct cause of the breach. The attackers initially infected a contractor’s laptop after using Microsoft Edge to search Microsoft’s Bing site. They then expanded their hold by attacking Ascension’s Active Directory and abusing its privileged access to push malware to thousands of other machines inside the network.
Microsoft’s Response to Senator Wyden’s Criticisms
In response to Sen. Wyden’s criticisms, Microsoft stated that it has already deprecated the use of DES, another encryption scheme with known vulnerabilities. However, they acknowledged that disabling RC4 completely would break many customer systems and instead plan to gradually reduce its use while providing strong warnings against it.
Timeline for Disabling RC4
Microsoft announced plans to deprecate RC4/Kerberos last year but has yet to provide a timeline for doing so. Sen. Wyden criticized the company for declining to explicitly warn its customers that they are vulnerable to kerberoasting unless they change the default settings chosen by Microsoft.
Conclusion
The use of outdated encryption methods like RC4 is a significant contributor to cybersecurity threats, and it’s essential for companies like Microsoft to take responsibility for their actions. The continued support of RC4 in Active Directory and the lack of clear communication about its vulnerabilities have put millions of users at risk. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft will take concrete steps to address these issues and ensure the security of its customers.
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