MSE Install fails with 0x8004FF91

Well, this was an annoying one, and it’s hard to find the one thread that actually addresses it amongst the ones conflating it with an off-by-one error code (subtract one from 0x8004FF91. not going to actually say it here to avoid poisoning Google).

TL;DR if you can’t install Microsoft Security Essentials – even on a brand new install of Win7 64 bit – it’s probably due to Windows Update KB3004394. Uninstall that update, and MSE will install just fine.

UPDATE: KB3004394 has been acknowledged as bad by MS. And the problems are actually a lot more far-reaching than just MSE installs; the KB botched an implementation of root certificate checking that causes all code signing checks to fail. Affected systems (Win7 SP1 and Win2008 R2 SP1 at least) will not be able to install signed device drivers, will not be able to install MSE, will get unexpected UAC prompts in weird places (due to signed code suddenly appearing unsigned and therefore untrusted)… oh, yeah, and Windows Update will fail, meaning that they’ll have to be manually fixed by either uninstalling the bad KB (at which point Windows Update will work again) or by manually downloading and installing KB3024777. Repeat manually – you can’t get it from Windows Update until Windows Update actually works, so…

Get it all in one sock, Microsoft.

The SSLv3 “POODLE” attack in a (large) nutshell

A summary of the POODLE sslv3 vulnerability and attack:

A vulnerability has been discovered in a decrepit-but-still-widely-supported version of SSL, SSLv3, which allows an attacker a good chance at determining the true value of a single byte of encrypted traffic. This is of limited use in most applications, but in HTTPS (eg your web browser, many mobile applications, etc) an attacker in an MITM (Man-In-The-Middle) position, such as someone operating a wireless router you connect to, can capture and resend the traffic repeatedly until they manage to get a valuable chunk of it assembled in the clear. (This is done by manipulating cleartext traffic, to the same or any other site, injecting some Javascript in that traffic to get your browser to run it. The rogue JS function is what reloads the secure site, offscreen where you can’t see it happening, until the attacker gets what s/he needs out of it.)

That “valuable chunk” is the cookie that validates your user login on whatever secure website you happen to be browsing – your bank, webmail, ebay or amazon account, etc. By replaying that cookie, the attacker can now hijack your logged in session directly on his/her own device, and from there can do anything that you would be able to do – make purchases, transfer funds, change the password, change the associated email account, et cetera.

It reportedly takes 60 seconds or less for an attacker in a MITM position (again, typically someone in control of a router your traffic is being directed through, which is most often going to be a wireless router – maybe even one you don’t realize you’ve connected to) to replay traffic enough to capture the cookie using this attack.

Worth noting: SSLv3 is hopelessly obsolete, but it’s still widely supported in part because IE6/Windows XP need it, and so many large enterprises STILL are using IE6. Many sites and servers have proactively disabled SSLv3 for quite some time already, and for those, you’re fine. However, many large sites still have not – a particularly egregious example being Citibank, to whom you can still connect with SSLv3 today. As long as both your client application (web browser) and the remote site (web server) both support SSLv3, a MITM can force a downgrade dance, telling each side that the OTHER side only supports SSLv3, forcing that protocol even though it’s strongly deprecated.

I’m an end user – what do I do?

Disable SSLv3 in your browser. If you use IE, there’s a checkbox in Internet Options you can uncheck to remove SSLv3 support. If you use Firefox, there’s a plugin for that. If you use Chrome, you can start Chrome with a command-line option that disables SSLv3 for now, but that’s kind of a crappy “fix”, since you’d have to make sure to start Chrome either from the command line or from a particular shortcut every time (and, for example, clicking a link in an email that started up a new Chrome instance would fail to do so).

Instructions, with screenshots, are available at https://zmap.io/sslv3/ and I won’t try to recreate them here; they did a great job.

I will note specifically here that there’s a fix for Chrome users on Ubuntu that does fairly trivially mitigate even use-cases like clicking a link in an email with the browser not already open:


* Open /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop in a text editor
* For any line that begins with "Exec", add the argument --ssl-version-min=tls1
* For instance the line "Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable %U" should become "Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --ssl-version-min=tls1 %U

You can test to see if your fix for a given browser worked by visiting https://zmap.io/sslv3/ again afterwards – there’s a banner at the top of the page which will warn you if you’re vulnerable. WARNING, caching is enabled on that page, meaning you will have to force-refresh to make certain that you aren’t seeing the old cached version with the banner intact – on most systems, pressing ctrl-F5 in your browser while on the page will do the trick.

I’m a sysadmin – what do I do?

Disable SSLv3 support in any SSL-enabled service you run – Apache, nginx, postfix, dovecot, etc. Worth noting – there is currently no known way to usefully exploit the POODLE vulnerability with IMAPS or SMTPS or any other arbitrary SSL-wrapped protocol; currently HTTPS is the only known protocol that allows you to manipulate traffic in a useful enough way. I would not advise banking on that, though. Disable this puppy wherever possible.

The simplest way to test if a service is vulnerable (at least, from a real computer – Windows-only admins will need to do some more digging):

openssl s_client -connect mail.jrs-s.net:443 -ssl3

The above snippet would check my mailserver. The correct (sslv3 not available) response begins with a couple of error lines:

CONNECTED(00000003)
140301802776224:error:14094410:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert handshake failure:s3_pkt.c:1260:SSL alert number 40
140301802776224:error:1409E0E5:SSL routines:SSL3_WRITE_BYTES:ssl handshake failure:s3_pkt.c:596:

What you DON’T want to see is a return with a certificate chain in it:

CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=1 C = GB, ST = Greater Manchester, L = Salford, O = COMODO CA Limited, CN = PositiveSSL CA 2
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:0
---
Certificate chain
0 s:/OU=Domain Control Validated/OU=PositiveSSL/CN=mail.jrs-s.net
i:/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=COMODO CA Limited/CN=PositiveSSL CA 2
1 s:/C=GB/ST=Greater Manchester/L=Salford/O=COMODO CA Limited/CN=PositiveSSL CA 2
i:/C=SE/O=AddTrust AB/OU=AddTrust External TTP Network/CN=AddTrust External CA Root

On Apache on Ubuntu, you can edit /etc/apache2/mods-available/ssl.conf and find the SSLProtocol line and change it to the following:

SSLProtocol all -SSLv2 -SSLv3

Then restart Apache with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart, and you’re golden.

I haven’t had time to research Postfix or Dovecot yet, which are my other two big concerns (even though they theoretically shouldn’t be vulnerable since there’s no way for the attacker to manipulate SMTPS or IMAPS clients into replaying traffic repeatedly).

Possibly also worth noting – I can’t think of any way for an attacker to exploit POODLE without access to web traffic running both in the clear and in a Javascript-enabled browser, so if you wanted to disable Javascript completely (which is pretty useless since it would break the vast majority of the web) or if you’re using a command-line tool like wget for something, it should be safe.

Allowing traceroutes to succeed with iptables

There is a LOT of bogus half-correct information about traceroutes and iptables floating around out there.  It took me a bit of sifting through it all to figure out the real deal and the best way to allow traceroutes without negatively impacting security this morning, so here’s some documentation in case I forget before the next time.

Traceroute from Windows machines typically uses ICMP Type 8 packets.  Traceroute from Unixlike machines typically uses UDP packets with sequentially increasing destination ports, from 33434 to 33534.  So your server (the traceroute destination) must not drop incoming ICMP Type 8 or UDP 33434:33534.

Here’s where it gets tricky: it really doesn’t need to accept those packets either, which the vast majority of sites addressing this issue recommends.  It just needs to be able to reject them, which won’t happen if they’re being dropped.  If you implement the typical advice – accepting those packets – traceroute basically ends up sort of working by accident: those ports shouldn’t be in use by any running applications, and since nothing is monitoring them, the server will issue an ICMP Type 3 response (destination unreachable).  However, if you’re accepting packets to these ports, then a rogue application listening on those ports also becomes reachable – which is the sort of thing your firewall should be preventing in the first place.

The good news is, DROP and ACCEPT aren’t your only options – you can REJECT these packets instead, which will do exactly what we want here: allow traceroutes to work properly without also potentially enabling some rogue application to listen on those UDP ports.

So all you really need on your server to allow incoming traceroutes to work properly is:

# allow ICMP Type 8 (ping, ICMP traceroute)
-A INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type 8 -j ACCEPT
# enable UDP traceroute rejections to get sent out
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 33434:33523 -j REJECT

Note: you may very well need and/or want more ICMP functionality than this in general – but this is all you need for incoming traceroutes to complete properly.

Selectively disabling Windows UAC for individual applications

Today a client emailed me to report that since installing Quickbooks “Enterprise” (note the scare quotes there. they are used with malice), her users (who are, sensibly, not Administrators) were faced with a User Account Control prompt (“Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to your computer?”) every time they opened the new version of Quickbooks.  A little further investigation showed that “DBManagerExe.exe” was the actual file throwing the UAC dialog.  Absolutely no information from Intuit is available whatsoever about how or why this program wants Administrator privileges, ways to nerf it, etc – apparently this “Enterprise” product is just supposed to be run in “Enterprises” by users who are allowed full Administrator privileges.  Because, you know, that’s what “Enterprises” do.  Delightful.

I chased the issue around and around trying to figure out what DBManagerExe.exe actually wanted access to, so I could just grant that to the users… but eventually I was forced to give up and just disable UAC selectively for that one program.  Luckily, while the process is rather arcane, it’s not actually HARD.  So let’s document it here.

1. Download the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit.  I won’t link it here, to avoid creating stale links – just Google it, it should come right up.  Pick the latest version available (currently, 5.6).  Run the installer.

2. start –> all programs –> Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit –> Compatibility Administrator (32-bit) or Compatibility Administrator (64-bit), as appropriate. Note: just because your system is 64-bit does not necessarily mean that’s the Compatibility Administrator you want here – this needs to match the application you want to selectively allow UAC-less admin privileges for, not the system as a whole!  For DBManagerEXE.exe, I needed to select 32-bit.  Further note: if you are not logged in as the actual Administrator account, you should right-click and “Run As Administrator” to open the Compatibility Manager.  Otherwise, your “fix” won’t fix anything.

3. Click the “Fix” icon on the top toolbar.  Click “Browse” to find the executable you want to enable – for me, it was C:\Program Files (x86)\Intuit\QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions 14.0\DBManagerExe.exe.  Now, enter the name of the program and vendor in the two text boxes above the location in the dialog – this will make it easier to manage later, if you ever need to figure out what you’ve done and to whom.  Click Next.

4. Under Compatibility Modes, click none.  You don’t want this.  (Unless you do, of course, but Compatibility Modes aren’t needed for nerfing UAC dialogs, they’re for something COMPLETELY different and certainly aren’t applicable to running Quickbooks Enterprise 2014, in this case.)  Click Next.

5. Find RunAs Invoker on the list of Compatibility Fixes.  Check it.  Don’t mess with anything else.  Click Next, then click Finish.

6. Save your database (from the button on the toolbar).  Give it a name that makes sense, and save it in C:\Windows\System32. 8. File –> Install from the top menu.  You’ll get a dialog box confirming that you’ve installed your fix.  You should be done now.

Log in as an unprivileged user and test – in my case, for enabling non-Administrators to open Quickbooks “Enterprise” 2014, it worked flawlessly – no more UAC prompt, now the user went straight to the new setup wizard as they should.

Disable_UAC_selectively

Note: for this particular diabolically badly written application, just disabling UAC probably won’t be enough: QuickBooks also tends to fail miserably at starting its database manager service due to not placing its service user group into the local Administrators group. Each year of QB will create its own service user, in the form QBDataServiceUser24 or similar. If you’re here specifically for Quickbooks and you still get a nasty, this time NON Windows “you need to be administrator” prompt when you launch QB, you’ll need to find your local service user for the year of Quickbooks in question and add it to the local Administrators group on your machine. Yay, Intuit.

Fascinating insight into IT and non-profits

If you’ve ever wondered what the typical non-profit looks like in terms of IT budget – everything from salaries, to head count, to non-salary budget per staff, to non-salary budget per category (project management, outsourced services, hardware, software, more…) looks like, NTEN has got you covered.

http://www.nten.org/research/download_it_staffing_2012

This is a free download, though they do ask for your name and email address before you can click through to the PDF.  Fascinating, very deep dive, and totally worth it whether you’re a decision maker in a non profit yourself, a service provider with non-profit customers, or even just somebody curious about how organizations function.

OpenVPN on BeagleBone Black

beaglebone_black
This is my new Beaglebone Black. Enormous, isn’t it?

I needed an inexpensive embedded device for OpenVPN use, and my first thought (actually, my tech David’s first thought) was the obvious in this day and age: “Raspberry Pi.”

Unfortunately, the Pi didn’t really fit the bill.  Aside from the unfortunate fact that my particular Pi arrived with a broken ethernet port, doing some quick network-less testing of OpenSSL gave me very disappointing 5mbps-ish numbers – 5mbps or so, running flat out, encryption alone, let alone any actual routing.  This bore up with some reviews I found online, so I had to give up on the Pi as an embedded solution for OpenVPN use.

Luckily, that didn’t mean I was sunk yet – enter the Beaglebone Black.  Beaglebone doesn’t get as much press as the Pi does, but it’s an interesting device with an interesting history – it’s been around longer than the Pi (more than ten years!), it’s fully open source where the Pi is not (hardware plans are published online, and other vendors are not only allowed but encouraged to build bit-for-bit identical devices!), and although it doesn’t have the video chops of the Pi (no 1080p resolution supported), it has a much better CPU – a 1GHZ Cortex A8, vs the Pi’s 700MHz A7.  If all that isn’t enough, the Beaglebone also has built-in 2GB eMMC flash with a preloaded installation of Angstrom Linux, and – again unlike the Pi – directly supports being powered from plain old USB connected to a computer.  Pretty nifty.

The only real hitch I had with my Beaglebone was not realizing that if I had an SD card in, it would attempt to boot from the SD card, not from the onboard eMMC.  Once I disconnected my brand new Samsung MicroSD card and power cycled the Beaglebone, though, I was off to the races.  It boots into Angstrom pretty quickly, and thanks to the inclusion of the Avahi daemon in the default installation, you can discover the device (from linux at least – haven’t tested Windows) by just pinging beaglebone.local.  Once that resolves, ssh root@beaglebone.local with a default password, and you’re embedded-Linux-ing!

Angstrom doesn’t have any prebuilt packages for OpenVPN, so I downloaded the source from openvpn.net and did the usual ./configure ; make ; make install fandango.  I did have one minor hitch – the system clock wasn’t set, so ./configure bombed out complaining about files in the future.  Easily fixed – ntpdate us.pool.ntp.org updated my clock, and this time the package built without incident, needing somewhere south of 5 minutes to finish.  After that, it was time to test OpenVPN’s throughput – which, spoiler alert, was a total win!

root@beaglebone:~# openvpn --genkey --secret beagle.key ; scp beagle.key me@locutus:/tmp/
root@beaglebone:~# openvpn --secret beagle.key --port 666 --ifconfig 10.98.0.1 10.98.0.2 --dev tun
me@locutus:/tmp$ sudo openvpn --secret beagle.key --remote beaglebone.local --port 666 --ifconfig 10.98.0.2 10.98.0.1 --dev tun

Now I have a working tunnel between locutus and my beaglebone.  Opening a new terminal on each, I ran iperf to test throughput.  To run iperf (which was already available on Angstrom), you just run iperf -s on the server machine, and run iperf -c [ip address] on the client machine to connect to the server.  I tested connectivity both ways across my OpenVPN tunnel:

me@locutus:~$ iperf -c 10.98.0.1
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 10.98.0.1, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 21.9 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 10.98.0.2 port 55873 connected with 10.98.0.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.1 sec 46.2 MBytes 38.5 Mbits/sec
me@locutus:~$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 4] local 10.98.0.2 port 5001 connected with 10.98.0.1 port 32902
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 47.0 MBytes 39.2 Mbits/sec

38+ mbps from an inexpensive embedded device?  I’ll take it!

Apache 2.4 / Ubuntu Trusty problems

Found out the hard way today that there’ve been SIGNIFICANT changes in configuration syntax and requirements since Apache 2.2, when I tried to set up a VERY simple couple of vhosts on Apache 2.4.7 on a brand new Ubuntu Trusty Tahr install.

First – the a2ensite/a2dissite scripts refuse to work unless your vhost config files end in .conf. BE WARNED. Example:

you@trusty:~$ ls /etc/apache2/sites-available
000-default.conf
default-ssl.conf
testsite.tld
you@trusty:~$ sudo a2ensite testsite.tld
ERROR: Site testsite.tld does not exist!

The solution is a little annoying; you MUST end the filename of your vhost configs in .conf – after that, a2ensite and a2dissite work as you’d expect.

you@trusty:~$ sudo mv /etc/apache2/sites-available/testsite.tld /etc/apache2/sites-available/testsite.tld.conf
you@trusty:~$ sudo a2ensite testsite.tld
Enabling site testsite.tld
To activate the new configuration, you need to run:
  service apache2 reload

After that, I had a more serious problem. The “site” I was trying to enable was nothing other than a simple exposure of a directory (a local ubuntu mirror I had set up) – no php, no cgi, nothing fancy at all. Here was my vhost config file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName us.archive.ubuntu.com
        ServerAlias us.archive.ubuntu.local 
        Options Includes FollowSymLinks MultiViews Indexes
        DocumentRoot /data/apt-mirror/mirror/us.archive.ubuntu.com
	*lt;Directory /data/apt-mirror/mirror/us.archive.ubuntu.com/>
	        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
	        AllowOverride None
	</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Can’t get much simpler, right? This would have worked fine in any previous version of Apache, but not in Apache 2.4.7, the version supplied with Trusty Tahr 14.04 LTS.

Every attempt to browse the directory gave me a 403 Forbidden error, which confused me to no end, since the directories were chmod 755 and chgrp www-data. Checking Apache’s error log gave me pages on pages of lines like this:

[Mon Jun 02 10:45:19.948537 2014] [authz_core:error] [pid 27287:tid 140152894646016] [client 127.0.0.1:40921] AH01630: client denied by server configuration: /data/apt-mirror/mirror/us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

What I eventually discovered was that since 2.4, Apache not only requires explicit authentication setup and permission for every directory to be browsed, the syntax has changed as well. The old “Order Deny, Allow” and “Allow from all” won’t cut it – you now need “Require all granted”. Here is my final working vhost .conf file:

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName us.archive.ubuntu.com
        ServerAlias us.archive.ubuntu.local 
        Options Includes FollowSymLinks MultiViews Indexes
        DocumentRoot /data/apt-mirror/mirror/us.archive.ubuntu.com
	<Directory /data/apt-mirror/mirror/us.archive.ubuntu.com/>
	        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
	        AllowOverride None
                Require all granted
	</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Hope this helps someone else – this was a frustrating start to the morning for me.

Using LogMeIn remote control with Linux

In 2013, LogMeIn decided to start forcing the download of a Windows-only executable file for remote control of computers. This, of course, leaves Linux users in the lurch.

The previous Flash interface is still THERE, and in fact it’s SUPPOSED to be available with a click – if you don’t have the plugin, you’re supposed to be presented with a page offering to let you download the plugin OR click another link to go to the Flash interface. Unfortunately, on Linux (Ubuntu at least), said page just instantly flashes away and takes you back to the splash page for the computer you’re connected to.

The workaround here is to log into your LogMeIn account, click the computer you want to control and connect to it (using your login credentials), and then INSTEAD OF CLICKING REMOTE CONTROL go to your address bar and replace “/main.html” at the end of the current URL with “/remctrl.html?type=flash” instead. Hit enter, and your remote control session will start as normal.

BOO to LogMeIn for making this so freaking difficult. >=[

Heartbleed SSL vulnerability

Last night (2014 Apr 7) a massive security vulnerability was publicly disclosed in OpenSSL, the library that encrypts most of the world’s sensitive traffic. The bug in question is approximately two years old – systems older than 2012 are not vulnerable – and affects the TLS “heartbeat” function, which is why the vulnerability has been nicknamed HeartBleed.

The bug allows a malicious remote user to scan arbitrary 64K chunks of the affected server’s memory. This can disclose any and ALL information in that affected server’s memory, including SSL private keys, usernames and passwords of ANY running service accepting logins, and more. Nobody knows if the vulnerability was known or exploited in the wild prior to its public disclosure last night.

If you are an end user:

You will need to change any passwords you use online unless you are absolutely sure that the servers you used them on were not vulnerable. If you are not a HIGHLY experienced admin or developer, you absolutely should NOT assume that sites and servers you use were not vulnerable. They almost certainly were. If you are a highly experienced ops or dev person… you still absolutely should not assume that, but hey, it’s your rope, do what you want with it.

Note that most sites and servers are not yet patched, meaning that changing your password right now will only expose that password as well. If you have not received any notification directly from the site or server in question, you may try a scanner like the one at http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/ to see if your site/server has been patched. Note that this script is not bulletproof, and in fact it’s less than 24 hours old as of the time of this writing, up on a free site, and under massive load.

The most important thing for end users to understand: You must not, must not, MUST NOT reuse passwords between sites. If you have been using one or two passwords for every site and service you access – your email, forums you post on, Facebook, Twitter, chat, YouTube, whatever – you are now compromised everywhere and will continue to be compromised everywhere until ALL sites are patched. Further, this will by no means be the last time a site is compromised. Criminals can and absolutely DO test compromised credentials from one site on other sites and reuse them elsewhere when they work! You absolutely MUST use different passwords – and I don’t just mean tacking a “2” on the end instead of a “1”, or similar cheats – on different sites if you care at all about your online presence, the money and accounts attached to your online presence, etc.

If you are a sysadmin, ops person, dev, etc:

Any systems, sites, services, or code that you are responsible for needs to be checked for links against OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f. Note, that’s the OpenSSL vendor versioning system – your individual distribution, if you are using repo versions like a sane person, may have different numbering schemes. (For example, Ubuntu is vulnerable from 1.0.1-0 through 1.0.1-4ubuntu5.11.)

Examples of affected services: HTTPS, IMAPS, POP3S, SMTPS, OpenVPN. Fabulously enough, for once OpenSSH is not affected, even in versions linking to the affected OpenSSL library, since OpenSSH did not use the Heartbeat function. If you are a developer and are concerned about code that you wrote, the key here is whether your code exposed access to the Heartbeat function of OpenSSL. If it was possible for an attacker to access the TLS heartbeat functionality, your code was vulnerable. If it was absolutely not possible to check an SSL heartbeat through your application, then your application was not vulnerable even if it linked to the vulnerable OpenSSL library.

In contrast, please realize that just because your service passed an automated scanner like the one linked above doesn’t mean it was safe. Most of those scanners do not test services that use STARTTLS instead of being TLS-encrypted from the get-go, but services using STARTTLS are absolutely still affected. Similarly, none of the scanners I’ve seen will test UDP services – but UDP services are affected. In short, if you as a developer don’t absolutely know that you weren’t exposing access to the TLS heartbeat function, then you should assume that your OpenSSL-using application or service was/is exploitable until your libraries are brought up to date.

You need to update all copies of the OpenSSL library to 1.0.1g or later (or your distribution’s equivalent), both dynamically AND statically linked (PS: stop using static links, for exactly things like this!), and restart any affected services. You should also, unfortunately, consider any and all credentials, passwords, certificates, keys, etc. that were used on any vulnerable servers, whether directly related to SSL or not, as compromised and regenerate them. The Heartbleed bug allowed scanning ALL memory on any affected server and thus could be used by a sufficiently skilled user to extract ANY sensitive data held in server RAM. As a trivial example, as of today (2014-Apr-08) users at the Ars Technica forums are logging on as other users using password credentials held in server RAM, as exposed by standard exploit test scripts publicly disclosed.

Completely eradicating all potential vulnerability is a STAGGERING amount of work and will involve a lot of user disruption. When estimating your paranoia level, please do remember that the bug itself has been in the wild since 2012 – the public disclosure was not until 2014-Apr-07, but we have no way of knowing how long private, possibly criminal entities have been aware of and/or exploiting the bug in the wild.