Getting RDP Access what ports to use/open up? Then TCP port 3389 is what you need to tell him, although I'd like to think the admin should know that information. SSH port forwarding (of RDP, VNC, HTTP etc) over serial ports is enabled on a Port basis. You can now select which Users can have access to these ports Step 3 - SDT Connect. The remote desktops must have View Agent 6.1.1 or later installed with the Serial Port Redirection setup option, on the parent or template virtual machines. This setup option is deselected by default. Hi all, I'm trying to redirect /dev/ttyUSB0 device as COM3 to my Remote Desktop session. And it's working very strange. First of all, I made a test serial hard device that can receive data and send back confirmation about it. How to redirect Serial Ports in Windows Server 2012 RDS/VDI. Now the Remote Desktop Client will redirect its COM1 port to the Server. For example, we have an issue where we have thin clients that have a signature pad connected to them (through serial). The thin client connects to an internal RDS farm then from there, connects.
Amongst features of terminal desktop services running RDP port, there is port redirection of parallel/serial from remote to local PC. Can this redirection be somehow used to transfer large data to avoid using Clipboard (due to the known stack bug which may force user to close terminal desktop and re-logon)? Com port redirection under Windows Server 2008 R2 Ask question. Also do the same on a RDP connection with Port Redirection enabled? Share this post. Link to post. The client application sends output directly to the serial port, therefore no drivers are required.
Thanks to Sophos security experts Peter Mackenzie and Paul Ducklin
for their behind-the-scenes work on this article.
If there’s an unexploited niche caused by insecure software or behaviour then sooner or later a crook is going to wiggle into it and attempt to use it as a way to make money from someone else’s misery.
Sophos has recently uncovered a new ecological niche in the great internet hack-o-sphere that’s equal parts low-cunning and directness: crooks who are breaking into computers one at a time and running ransomware on them manually – clickety click – in the same way that you might run Word, Notepad or Solitaire.
We normally think of ransomware as something that’s catapulted into victims’ computers using some form of mass distribution.
For example, the criminals behind WannaCry and NotPetya used a stolen NSA exploit to create worms that copied themselves from one computer to another, encrypting files, demanding ransoms and creating mayhem as they zig-zagged through and between networks.
More common still is phishing. Why bother with worms and exploits when you can simply sign up for crimeware online and click a button to crank out booby-trapped email attachments?
Phishing is a numbers game: most of your emails won’t get through, many of those that do will go unread, and even those that get opened may find themselves hitting a brick wall – a patched system, for example, or a user who realises that something phishy is going on and stops just short of getting infected.
The phishing crooks only make money if they can repeatedly find new ways to persuade users to open emails and do things their IT team have warned them about, such as saving attachments to disk and then launching them, or opening Office documents and deliberately enabling macros.
For this reason, some cybercriminals have decided that if you want something doing properly, you have to do it yourself.
Many companies, notably small businesses, outsource their IT to, or pay for lots of help from, outside contractors.
These contractors might live in another part of town, or elsewhere in the country, or even on the other side of the world.
To let remote sysadmins look after your Windows networks, the most widely-used tool is Microsoft’s own Remote Desktop Protocol, or RDP for short.
RDP, for those who haven’t used it, effectively turns your IT guy’s laptop into a remote screen, keyboard and mouse connected over the internet to your local computer.
When they move their mouse in the RDP client software far away, they’re controlling your computer; when a software dialog pops up, they see it on their remote computer. Watch fullmetal alchemist brotherhood.
RDP is like being right there, and allows remote use even of fully-graphical applications that can’t be scripted or operated via a command prompt.
In other words, the RDP password you’ve chosen for your remote sysadmin (or that you’ve let them choose for themselves) is essentially the key to your office – a weak password is like a server room door that’s propped open, inviting any passing snooper to take a look inside.
So, if the crooks notice that you’ve got RDP open to the internet, for example by using a network search engine such as Shodan, you can be sure they’ll take a poke around.
Sophos security experts who’ve investigated a spate of recent RDP attacks have frequently found evidence that a tool called NLBrute was used to try a whole range of RDP passwords – a so-called brute force attack – in the hope of sneaking in.
Once they’ve got your RDP password – whether they use NLBrute, or simply look you up on Facebook to find your birthday and your pet’s name – they’ll logon and immediately create various brand new administrative accounts.
That way, even if you get rid of the crooks and change your own admin password, they’ve already got backup accounts they can use to sneak back in later.
Once they’re in, here’s what you can expect to happen next, based on what we’ve seen in a number of attacks we’ve investigated:
Tools of this sort are regularly used by legitimate sysadmins for troubleshooting and emergency recovery, especially if they use kernel drivers to let you to pull off modifications that the operating system usually prevents. This includes: killing off processes that usually disallow shutdown, deleting locked files, and changing configuration settings that are usually locked down.
The crooks go after the passwords of administrator accounts so that they’ll enjoy all the power of a legitimate sysadmin. If they can’t get an admin password, they may try logging in as a regular user and running hacking tools that try to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities to get what’s called EoP, or elevation of privilege.
EoP means that already logged-on users can sneakily promote themselves to more powerful accounts to boost their powers. We’ve seen EoP tools left behind on attacked systems that tried to abuse vulnerabilities dubbed CVE-2017-0213 and CVE-2016-0099, patched by Microsoft back in May 2017 and March 2016 respectively.
Files such as SQL databases are usually locked while the database server software is active, as a precaution against corruption that could be caused by concurrent access by another program. The side-effect of this is that malware can’t get direct access to database files either, and therefore can’t scramble them to hold them to ransom.
Shadow copies act as real-time, online backups that can make recovery from ransomware a quick and easy process. That’s why crooks often go looking for shadow copies first to remove them.
You can guess what happens next.
Because they’ve used their sysadmin powers to rig the system to be as insecure as they can, they can often use older versions of ransomware, perhaps even variants that other crooks have given up on and that are now floating around the internet “for free”.
The crooks don’t have to worry about using the latest and greatest malware, or setting up a command-and-control server, or running a hit-and-hope spam campaign.
In one attack, we saw a folder on the desktop containing four different types of ransomware. The crooks ran each in turn, until one of them worked.
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Many ransomware attacks are distributed indiscriminately, and therefore rely on a “pay page” – a Dark Web server set up specially to tell victims how much to pay, and how to pay it.
But these RDP crooks are already personally involved to the extent of logging into your network themselves, so there’s often what you might call a “personal touch”.
Rather than automatically squeezing you via a website, you’ll probably see a pop-up something like this, telling you to make contact via email to “negotiate” the release of your data:
At the time of writing the Bitcoin address used by that attacker contained BTC 9.62, currently worth just over $60,000.
Only one of the transactions matched the 1BTC amount demanded in the ransom, which might indicate that the account is being used for other activities at the same time, or that some victims managed to negotiate a lower price.
The victims of this kind of attack are almost always small-to-medium companies: the largest business in our investigation had 120 staff, but most had 30 or fewer.
With small scale comes a dependence on external IT suppliers or “jack-of-all-trades” IT generalists trying to manage cybersecurity along with many other responsibilities.
In one case a victim was attacked repeatedly, because of a weak password used by a third-party application that demanded 24-hour administrator access for its support staff.
If you’re using a third-party IT company and they haven’t already suggested the precautions we’ve listed above, why not ask them why, and ask yourself if they’re the right people to be looking after your network?
Be careful out there – don’t let the Remote Desktop Protocol for your IT team turn into a Ransomware Deployment Process for criminals.
Author:Peter Brown
Based in Palo Alto, Peter Brown is a director of R&D for VMware EUC and leads development for VMware Horizon Cloud Service.
By Peter Brown, Director of R&D, VMware, London, UK
In December 2014, we gave a sneak peak of the serial port redirection feature in View virtual desktops which we have been working on. We are delighted to announce that we have officially made this function available with our June 2015 Horizon 6 release.
The new serial port redirection feature allows serial ports, either physical COM ports or USB-to-serial adapters, to be redirected from a Windows client machine to a Windows VDI desktop. The ports can then be used by third-party applications to communicate with legacy serial devices such as printers or scanners.
This feature works only in PCoIP sessions (RDP supports serial redirection natively anyway); RDSH is not supported.
In order to use this feature you must have both of the following:
During installation of the agent component, the Serial Port (and Scanner) Redirection options are made available. Note that they are both deselected by default, so if you want to use them, you must specifically enable them. USB redirection is also deselected by default (see this blog post on USB redirection in View virtual desktops for an overview of why); USB redirection is not required, and should not be used, to redirect scanner or serial devices. Using USB redirection for these devices would bypass the scanner and serial redirection capabilities. It is possible to co-install scanner and serial redirection with USB redirection, but make sure that the scanner and serial devices are not forwarded to the guest using the USB redirection option.
Figure 1: View Agent Installer Options
After installation of the View Agent on the virtual machine in the data center, the serial port redirection icon appears in the tool tray when the user connects to the View virtual desktop with a compatible Horizon Client.
Figure 2: Tool Tray Icon for Serial Port Redirection
From the tool tray, the user must right-click the serial port redirection icon to configure COM port mappings and properties.
Figure 3: Tool Tray Pop-Up User Interface
COM ports can be configured to be auto-redirected. With auto-redirection enabled, the next time the user connects to the agent, the COM ports will connect without requiring manual intervention.
In Figure 3, the text COM1 mapped to COM3 indicates that the physical COM1 port from the virtual desktop is being mapped into a virtual COM port on the guest VM under the name COM3.
Figure 4: Device Manager Showing COM Port Redirected into Guest
After a COM port has been mapped to the guest VM, a third-party application in the virtual desktop can access the COM port and open it, send and receive data, and close it just like it could on a physical machine.
In addition to the UI allowing port properties to be configured, there is also a Group Policy file that allows the configuration to be managed via group policy on a per user or per desktop pool basis. The GPO file is available in the Horizon 6 View GPO Bundle download, along with all of the other group policy files shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5: GPO Configuration of Serial COM Redirection
One important configuration item that might affect some of you is the configuration option Serial2USBModeChangeEnabled. This option must be set if you are connecting to a USB-to-serial adapter that contains the Prolific chipset. We found during testing that if this key is not set, the virtual COM port received, but did not transmit, data. Setting this configuration option puts the COM port in a different mode and allows it to work with these specific devices.
Remember when using serial port devices that the baud rate and other settings for serial communication must match exactly between the device and the third-party application. For example, if a device operates at 9600 bps, 8 stop bits, 1 data bits, and even parity, then the third-party application software needs to be configured to operate at these exact values, too. There is no configuration required in the VMware serial port redirection software for this.
As a reminder, for this feature to work, you must have both of the following newly released components:
And be sure to confirm that the serial port redirection feature is selected during View Agent installation.
This feature is for Windows only. In some cases, serial port device drivers must be installed on the client system to enable the redirection capability (this is more common when using USB-to-serial adapters). You can find additional information on serial port redirection in the following documentation:
We look forward to hearing how you get on with the feature, and welcome feedback on some of the devices that get redirected using this capability!