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RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

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Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#41

Post by hnlmorg »

IshKebab wrote: post #19
labelbabyjunior wrote: post #6

A local privilege escalation to root via an exploitable service? Doesn't Linux have one of these CVEs...each week?

Not quite every week, but yeah it has a lot. And if the target uses sudo at all you don't even need an exploit! But nobody mentioned Linux. There's no need for whataboutism. They both shouldn't have these vulnerabilities.

> And if the target uses sudo at all you don't even need an exploit!

Why would a target executable use sudo? There are proper mechanisms for automated elevation of permissions and sudo isn’t it.

sudo is designed for user interactivity. And by default prompts for a password. However some people get lazy and disable the password entry requirement.

Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#42

Post by IshKebab »

hnlmorg wrote: post #41
IshKebab wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite every week, but yeah it has a lot. And if the target uses sudo at all you don't even need an exploit! But nobody mentioned Linux. There's no need for whataboutism. They both shouldn't have these vulnerabilities.

> And if the target uses sudo at all you don't even need an exploit! Why would a target executable use sudo? There are proper mechanisms for automated elevation of permissions and sudo isn’t it. sudo is designed for user interactivity. And by default prompts for a password. However some people get lazy and disable the password entry requirement.

A target user. If you get local code execution on the account of a user that uses sudo you can trivially got root. Doesn't matter if they disabled the password authentication or not.

Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#44

Post by IFC_LLC »

uep wrote: post #39
IFC_LLC wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009... Yes, I've just checked, even in 2009 you still have IE over 64% of browser usage.

They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular. I wouldn't dispute that IE was more commonly used at the time. Just checked your link and this fits with what I thought in terms of marketshare. You can see that Firefox was ~25% of marketshare in 2009. Which is an enormous share of the pie when you consider that they couldn't stick a download link on the front page of the most dominant search engine, and it di…

Oh don't tell me about Nero, Winamp, eMule, Download managers, auto-dialers, free internet on Saturdays after 2am till 9am, miranda NG, PHPBB, etc.

The internet was awesome.

Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#45

Post by nailer »

uep wrote: post #39
IFC_LLC wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-2009... Yes, I've just checked, even in 2009 you still have IE over 64% of browser usage.

They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular. I wouldn't dispute that IE was more commonly used at the time. Just checked your link and this fits with what I thought in terms of marketshare. You can see that Firefox was ~25% of marketshare in 2009. Which is an enormous share of the pie when you consider that they couldn't stick a download link on the front page of the most dominant search engine, and it di…

> They said IE was the best browser, not the most popular.

TBF I should have said 'most popular' for all those categories.

Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#46

Post by hulitu »

layer8 wrote: post #33
lexicality wrote: post #26

helpfully the user provides a second tool which automatically turns off Windows Defender so you can't be affected by this: https://github.com/Nightmare-Eclipse/UnDefend

> It runs in two modes, passive and aggressive Lol

Unlike Windows Defender which is passive aggressive.

Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#47

Post by arcfour »

bux93 wrote: post #17
labelbabyjunior wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kind of have to, though. If malware exploits a privilege escalation vuln, what's the AV going to do about it when it's reduced to the software equivalent of a UK police officer? Observe and report? Stop or I'll say "stop" again? AV requires great power, which requires great responsibility. The second part is what often eludes AV developers.

Windows has separate SeBackupPrivilege for backup software, so why not for AV?

What would this privilege look like that is meaningfully different from SYSTEM while being properly protected from/able to deal with malware that has an LPE?

Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#48

Post by technion »

hathym wrote: post #16

cl /std:c++17 /EHsc /W4 /O2 /DUNICODE /D_UNICODE /wd4005 /Fe:RedSun.exe RedSun.cpp advapi32.lib ole32.lib user32.lib

Seriously this is my bugbear with code for windows: how did you figure that invocation out?

Anything for Linux you just type "make". If the author skipped a makefile, theres rarely much to it.

But when someone has a cpp file for Windows it looks like this.

Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#49

Post by hulitu »

toyg wrote: post #27
IFC_LLC wrote: post #20

I remember the times when Microsoft had a lot of problems 20 years ago because of Sasser and other viruses that were taking over Windows. They did not have any contenders. Yet they have stopped any software development for 9 months just to re-work their entire codebase to prevent things like direct memory execution and stuff like that. The result of that was Windows XP Service Pack 2. After that thing windows XP beca…

I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP. It was already dominant, and it's mostly remembered as "legendary" because it had become the target platform for every hardware and software vendor on the planet. Windows 98 was too flaky to engender any serious friction to upgrades, and Windows 2000 was not consumer-friendly enough; XP effectively unified the consumer and professional desktop marke…

> I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP

The general knowledge was to wait until the SP were stable. This was hard. 4.0 had SP6, 2k had SP4.

Re: RedSun: System user access on Win 11/10 and Server with the April 2026 Update

#50

Post by hulitu »

IFC_LLC wrote: post #30
uep wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on everything except the browser. I'm pretty sure I was using Firefox (or maybe Opera?) on Windows before the release of Vista. I know I was still using IE for some ActiveX web apps for a while. This was the era that I switched over to Linux full-time, but both Windows 2000 and XP were great OSes at this time. Linux was painful to adopt, but I really loved the promise of "full-control" over my comput…

Boy oh boy, have we forgotten the Maxthon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon I remember the times when IE passed ACID test? Do we remember the ACID? http://acid2.acidtests.org/#top Ah, what the times were those. Firefox was just gaining traction. And I agree. Slack is sitting there, consuming over gig of memory on my computer, and Miranda NG was able to do the same functionality with cool skins and just 30 megs o…

> Boy oh boy, have we forgotten the Maxthon?

Never heard about it (Europe).

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