This Microsoft Engineer Has a Really Good Argument for Ditching SMBv1

Ned Pyle, Principal Program Manager in the Microsoft Windows Server team, has made a solid case for the retirement of the SMBv1 protocol from active duty and is pleading with organizations to stop using it.

The Server Message Block protocol provides shared access to files, printers, and serial ports and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. Like most protocols these days, it has gone through a series of iterations and is currently at version 3.1.1.

Pyle: Stop using SMB1. For your children. For your children’s children.

Pyle, the Microsoft engineer tasked with SMB maintenance, has gone on an epic rant on the Microsoft blogs, and with good arguments, if we can say so ourselves, hinting that anyone still deploying the protocol is just looking for trouble.

What caused this rant? It was a recent Microsoft security bulletin issued last week, MS16-114, which addressed denial-of-service and remote execution vulnerabilities in Microsoft...