Executive brief
A vulnerability in the Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) on older Windows NT systems allows remote attackers to disrupt operations. By sending a flood of specially crafted network packets, an attacker can exhaust system resources, causing the server to slow down significantly and fill its storage with error logs. This can lead to a total denial of service, impacting the availability of network name resolution services.
Technical details
The Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) in Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 is vulnerable to a remote denial of service attack. An attacker can send a flood of malformed packets to the WINS service (typically on port 42). This causes the service to consume excessive CPU and memory resources while simultaneously flooding the system event logs with error messages. The resulting resource exhaustion can lead to severe performance degradation or a complete system hang. The attack is unauthenticated and can be launched over the network using raw sockets to transmit garbage data to the target service.
Affected products
- Microsoft Windows NT 3.51, 4.0
Timeline
- 1998-05-09: disclosed: Exploit code 'coke.c' published on Bugtraq.
- 1998-05-09: advisory