[2] The vulnerability was first reported to Microsoft by security researcher Tom Tervoort from Secura on 17 August 2020 and dubbed "Zerologon".
[1][3] Zerologon was given a Common Vulnerability Scoring System v3.1 severity ranking of 10 by the U.S. American National Institute of Standards and Technology and a 5.5 by Microsoft.
[4][3] In the penultimate step, the password is set to an empty one, allowing the attacker to follow the normal protocol procedure from this point on.
A less strict one in August 2020 and a later one in February 2021 that enforces signing and encryption for MS-NRPC calls by default, with the ability to allow certain devices to handle legacy support.
[8] In 2020, Zerologon started to be used by sophisticated cyberespionage campaigns of threat groups such as Red Apollo in global attacks against the automotive, engineering and pharmaceutical industry.
[5] Unusually, Zerologon was the subject of an emergency directive from the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.