By now, you’re probably aware of a serious ASP.NET Vulnerability going around. The ASP.NET team has been working around the clock to address this. Quite literally as last weekend, I came in twice over the weekend (to work on something unrelated) to find people working to address the exploit.

Recently, Scott Guthrie posted a follow-up blog post with an additional recommended mitigation you should apply to your servers. I’ve seen a lot of questions about these mitigations, as well as a lot of bad advice. The best advice I’ve seen is this - if you’re running an ASP.NET application, follow the advice in Scott’s blog to the letter. Better to assume your site is vulnerable than to second-guess the mitigation.

In the follow-up post, Scott recommends installing the handy dandy UrlScan IIS Module and applying a specific configuration setting. I’ve used UrlScan in the past and have found it extremely useful in dealing with DOS attacks.

However, when I installed UrlScan, my blog broke. Specifically, all the styles were gone and many images were broken. It took me a while to notice because of my blog cache. It wasn’t till someone commented that my new site design was a tad bit bland, that I hit CTRL+F5 to hard refresh my browser to see the changes.

I looked at the URLs for my CSS and I knew they existed physically on disk, but when I tried to visit them directly, I received a 404 error with some message in the URL about being blocked by UrlScan.

I opened up the UrlScan.ini file located:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\urlscan\UrlScan.ini

And started scanning it. One of the entries that caught my eye was this one.

AllowDotInPath=0         ; If 1, allow dots that are not file
                         ; extensions. The default is 0. Note that
                         ; setting this property to 1 will make checks
                         ; based on extensions unreliable and is
                         ; therefore not recommended other than for
                         ; testing.

That’s when I had a hunch. I started digging around and remembered that I have a custom skin in my blog named “haacked-3.0”. I viewed source and noticed my CSS files and many images were in a URL that looked like:

https://haacked.com/skins/haacked-3.0/style/foo.css

Aha! Notice the dot in the URL segment there?

What I should have done next was go and rename my skin. Unfortunately, I have many blog posts with a dot in the slug (and thus in the blog post URL). So I changed that setting to be 1 and restarted my web server. There’s a small risk of making my site slightly less secure by doing so, but I’m willing to take that risk as I can’t easily go through and fix every blog post that has a dot in the URL right now.

So if you’ve run into the same problem, it may be that you have dots in your URL that UrlScan is blocking. The best and recommended solution is to remove the dots from the URL if you are able to.