Month: August 2017

I have been playing VR games and decided to take a plunge into Technolust.  Some of the reviews were hit or miss, but if you actually explore around the game and appreciate all the options and content, you may enjoy it nearly as much as I have and continue to do.  I wanted to start noting how much I enjoy it, as this is why I jumped into repairing a save issue I had.

You can save in the game but I had an issue where each time I loaded the game back up, it looped me to the intro portion, instead of the MURC teleport menu you should see, after having saved your game.  I shared some of this info on the Oculus forums and Steam once I got a fresh file to work with saving.  Quoted below.

In this case, I moved a copy of my stuck save file, as it was not working due to that 1st character of ‘ý’ in the save.txt.  Using various text editors showed me varied results in the save.txt.  ConText editor showed me mostly blank space and some of the item strings; Notepad seemed to show everything, but without formatting, and Notepad++ showed me a dump of each parameter and their set flags.
Here are some screen caps from each editor showing the same file, along with the registry keys.

ConText Editor

Notepad (Windows standard text editor)

Notepad++

Registry Keys

Most all of this information is overkill, since I was only a couple of hours in.  To resolve the save issue I copied the broken save file to another folder and deleted it from the save folder.  Once the game made a new file, I was able to save without issue onward.  I had fun checking the save file for stuff I missed but didn’t successfully change any flags for stuff I did not find in-game.  For conversations sake, the registry values match my arcade high scores.  When my new save file was made, simply playing the games I won again, without beating my prior high score, toggled back to my high score, once I interacted with them on the fresh save.
You can migrate your save.txt and registry info to another machine, as I did on my laptop to test that I got all the save data.

If there is any take away from the thread, be sure to check files in multiple editors.  I also messaged the gave dev to say thanks for a rad game.  He noted that encrypting the save file seemed like it would have been contrary to the concept of the game.  Thanks for not doing that, because it was also fun to splunk through the save data and see how it applied to in-game content I encountered.  I’ll recap the start of the thread by saying I really enjoy this game.  Hell it was so good, I was concerned enough to figure out the intro looping issue.  Hopefully you don’t have the same issue, but if you do, it’s relatively easy to fix.

Especially over the last few months, the public face of SMBv1 and how it is quite vulnerable, has become a solid talking point. If you have poked around on some Windows Servers and also some Nix file servers, you may have noticed these legacy-era protocols still running. Even if you have a more recent Windows Server Deployment, they tend to have SMB 1 enabled by default.

Oh Lordy. If you have done any nmap scans you may have also noticed there have been notifications about SMB1 for a loooong time. Lucky for us, I would like to think by disabling SMB1, all your existing systems would work. Please note the optimism, because that’s all it is if you do not confirm things still work, after having turned off SMBv1 or for that matter, any service.

Microsoft has a guide using powershell to manage these. Before you go wild, do make sure to note that SMB 2 and 3 are related and enable relevant network features too.

If you still have XP devices connecting to servers (gods save you), you will lose communication when you turn off SMB v1. Another fine reason to finally push and accomplish getting rid of those things. I think cryptolockers scared non-security people enough this year, to give your pitch some viability.

Looking at the PowerShell syntax, Windows 8 and Server 2012 have some really clean powershell cmdlets. On Windows 7, Server 2008, etc, you are essentially changing a registry key on the command line / by script. If you are rolling an Active Directory domain, you can push the SMB 1 disable out over group policy. Once again, pausing to make sure stuff works after you do this, and it would not hurt to test this in waves, as to not cause a huge problem in one fell swoop.

You can also have fun diving into some PCAPs to get a feel for SMB levels in use. You can apply filters to weed out noise from your scan. Keep good notes. I don’t know about you, but when I tell people I’m doing security maintenance, some folks like to come up with some fantasy stories of things they say worked prior. Typically stuff that never worked or something that way decommissioned months prior, not the week of your rollout.

Jolly August. Fall is creeping up :)

Just bumping as a reminder that SMB 1 natively is enabled up to and including Server 2016 test builds. Running the below may shock you in seeing that EnableSMB1Protocol is by default, set to True.

Get-SmbServerConfiguration | Select EnableSMB1Protocol, EnableSMB2Protocol

On the Windows 2012 or greater machines, you don’t have to reboot after the change, unlike the older server and workstation machines. To disable SMB1, do up the following, then re-run the check above to verify it’s off.

Set-SmbServerConfiguration -EnableSMB1Protocol $false