CyberInsecure.com

Archive for the ‘SQL Injections’ Category

Domestic appliance manufacturer Whirlpool has come under fire for failing to clean up a malware infection on one of its sites, months after it was notified of a problem by UK anti-virus firm Sophos.

Sophos tried for months to clean-up its Kitchenaid.com website, without success, before going public on the problem on Friday. The kitchen utensil selling site remains infected with the Badsrc-C (AKA Asprox) strain of malware five months after a Sophos customer reported a problem, which the security firm forwarded to the white goods firm.

The malicious script points towards nowhere at present, so there isn’t an immediate risk. The problem is that this may change at any time, hence the need for remedial action that Whirlpool seems reluctant to take.

“I and several of my colleagues have been trying to talk to contacts at KitchenAid and Whirlpool to inform them of the issue and offer assistance. We have consistently hit brick walls,” reports senior Sophos threat analyst Paul Baccas.

Whirlpool’s lack of action is symptomatic of a wider problem. Reports of malware problems on websites are hard even for security firms to send to the right person, are often disregarded and sometimes met with indignation, Baccas writes.

The Asprox strain of malware still lingering on Kitchenaid.com’s website has been linked to phishing spam. SQL injection attacks on vulnerable website have been a preferred method for spreading malware.

Credit: The Register

A Romanian grey hat hacker has disclosed an SQL inject (SQLi) vulnerability on a website belonging to the United States Army, which leads to full database compromise. The website, called Army Housing OneStop, is used to provide information about military housing facilities to soldiers. The website has been taken offline.

The Army Housing OneStop (AHOS) is “the official Army website for soldiers who need information about Military Family Housing (MFH), Unaccompanied Personnel Housing (UPH) and/or Community (Off-Post) Housing. It includes both comprehensive and quick-reference information for Army installations worldwide.”

A self-confessed security enthusiast, who goes by the online handle of TinKode, documented a proof-of-concept attack against the onestop.army.mil on his personal blog. The published screenshots reveal that the Web server runs on Microsoft Windows 2003 with Service Pack 2 and the database engine used to power the ASP website is Microsoft SQL Server 2000:

#Version: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 - 8.00.2282 (Intel X86) Dec 30 2008 02:22:41 Copyright (c) 1988-2003 Microsoft Corporation Enterprise Edition on Windows NT 5.2 (Build 3790: Service Pack 2
#User: Dynatouch
#Database: AHOS
#Host Name: AHSGSVDAHQIT130

The AHOS website seems to have been developed by DynaTouch Corporation, a third-party government contractor that provides software and hardware solutions to create “self-service kiosk systems.” The company’s client portfolio includes a long list of local and federal government organizations.

There are a number of 76 databases on the server, but TinKode focused his attention on the one called “AHOS.” There are various tables in this database containing general website configuration information, but two in particular stand out as they are called “mgr_login” and “mgr_login_passwords.”

Upon investigating the latter, the hacker stumbled upon passwords stored in plain text, a major security oversight. Storing cryptographic hashes instead of the actual password strings has been a common practice in Web application programming for years now. Furthermore, if for convenience the hashes are generated with a weak algorithm, a technique known as “salting” can be employed to make them nearly impossible to crack.

In a time when even the most amateur programmers follow such security practices, the fact that many business or government websites do not boggles one’s mind. Additionally, the administrative account is called “Dynatouch” – who would have guessed that? – and its password is “AHOS” – yes, really.

Credit: Softpedia News

Security researchers warn that the Fox Sports website has been compromised by unknown attackers, who injected malicious code into a custom error page. There are two separate offensive script tags, each of them created by a different infection.

The page was detected by the ThreatSeeker Network system developed and operated by Websense, a Web security vendor. Security researchers investigating the suspicious link determined that it was pointing to a custom “Page not Found” document, displayed in case of a 404 error.

Webmasters deploy such pages in order to help visitors who are looking for a Web resource that is no longer available. They include suggestions or search boxes that can be used to find the new location of the document.

The msn.foxsports.com website is operated by the Fox Sports division of the Fox Broadcasting Company and according to Alexa, it is in the top 330 websites in the world as far as traffic goes. This website is ranked at position 88 in the United States and is part of the MSN network.

The first malicious script tag loads a script for an external domain used in cybercriminal operations before. In particular, this script is part of the latest version of a mass injection attack known as Gumblar. Highly obfuscated code is used to perform various checks to determine a visitor’s browser, operating system or installed software, and then execute exploits for known vulnerabilities.

“After deobfuscation, the page uses PDF and Flash exploits to run malware in order to control a victim’s computer. In addition, a piece of VBScript is executed to download malware,” the Websense researchers explain.

The secondary script tag loads a potentially malicious JavaScript file from a .cn domain. However, the server hosting this threat was offline and the security analysts couldn’t determine its nature. The Fox Sports page seems to be clean now, but there is no way of telling for how long this infection ran until it was discovered.

It is worth noting that a similar issue was found on the MSN Canada website back in June. In that case, a redirect page, invisible to the user, but parsed by the browser, was infected with malicious code.

Credit: Softpedia.com

A Romanian hacker who goes by the handle “unu” has struck again: this time, he demonstrated how a SQL injection vulnerability left personal information in the form of passports exposed on an Intel Corp. Website.

Unu, who previously exposed SQL injection vulnerabilities in The Wall Street Journal and Kaspersky Lab’s Websites, this time focused on an Intel site that runs online registrations for channel partner events. The site, which is currently down, has a message posted that it’s offline for maintenance.

An Intel spokesperson says the company has taken down the site and is “investigating the matter.”

In his blog post on the Intel site’s vulnerability, unu says: “Not only is the website vulnerable to sql injection but it also allows load_file to be executed making it very dangerous because with a little patience, a writable directory can be found and injection a malicious code we get command line access with which we can do virtually anything we want with the website: upload phpshells, redirects, INFECT PAGES WITH TROJAN DROPPERS, even deface the whole website.”

He was able to hack into the front-end Web application and then discovered that server administrators had their passwords stored in clear text, according to the post.

Security experts at Praetorian Security Group who analyzed Unu’s hack say most alarming about the hack is a screenshot that appears to show people who registered for an event, along with their passport numbers, birth dates, and credit card types. “Unu acknowledges that he simply is not showing the credit card numbers, expiration dates, and CW/CID codes but they are also in the table,” they blogged.

Daniel Kennedy, a partner with Praetorian, says the site had been defaced before by someone else before. “So Intel or the supporting vendor has to take a long look at who besides Unu could have been in that database,” Kennedy says.

“Intel realistically has to notify everyone who could be affected … this is passport and credit card data,” he says.

Credit: DarkReading.com, unu123456.baywords.com

Millions of user passwords to social networking sites have been exposed, after a serious SQL injection flaw on the Rockyou.com website left login details - stored in plain text - up for grabs.

RockYou - which develops apps for social networking sites including Facebook, Bebo and MySpace - stored usernames, passwords and email addresses in plain text. That’s bad enough in itself, but then an SQL injection flaw on RockYou’s website exposed the information to prying eyes.

Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer with the data security firm Imperva, said the passwords exposed will often be the same as those users utilize for webmail accounts associated with their social networking profiles, creating yet more potential problems.

The first issue is that RockYou attempted to downplay the entire incident, first by covering it up by not notifying users and then downplaying it in an official statement as being an issue that only affected ‘older’ applications. The hacker responsible for the initial breach published a small portion of the dataset he had retrieved and was able to show that not only did he have access to their entire database, but also passwords were stored in the clear. This matter now appears worse than originally suspected as the dataset also contains a table where RockYou have stored user credentials for social networks and other partner sites.

The database consists of a table containing partner data, and another table that has stored the credentials for those partner sites that users have entered. This includes social networks such as MySpace but also webmail accounts.

The initial exploit took advantage of a trivial SQL injection vulnerability, a technique that has been well documented for over a decade. The method of vulnerability is extremely basic in execution, yet catastrophic in impact – which RockYou, and the sites users, are now learning the hard way. It is more of a surprise that this had not happen sooner – as the RockYou platform is a swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities and poor practices.

“The bad news is that the SQL injection flaw could have allowed hackers to access the 32 million entries of user names plus passwords in the Rockyou.com database… since the user names and passwords are by default the same as the user’s webmail account — such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail — this is a major lapse in security,” Shulman said.

“Unfortunately some accounts had already been compromised before the vulnerability was fixed,” Shulman said. “All users need to be cautious and ensure they change their email passwords as their credentials may have been put at risk.”

It’s unclear why RockYou left passwords on its systems without encrypting them in the first place. We dropped a note to the developers asking for a response on this point on Tuesday, but are yet to hear back. We’ll update this story as and when we know more.

RockYou has reportedly fixed the issue, but this may have come too late for some.

Credit: The Register, TechCrunch.com

A security researcher has identified a new attack that has infected almost 300,000 webpages with links that direct visitors to a potent cocktail of malicious exploits.

The SQL injection attacks started in late November and appear to be the work of a relatively new malware gang, said Mary Landesman, a researcher with ScanSafe, a web security firm recently acquired by Cisco Systems. Hacked sites contain an invisible iframe that silently redirects users to 318x.com, which goes on to exploit known vulnerabilities in at least five applications.

At time of writing, this web search showed more than 294,000 webpages that contained the malicious script. Infected sites included yementimes.com, parisattitude.com and knowledgespeak.com.

People who visit infected pages receive an invisible link that pulls code from a series of sites tied to 318x.com. The code looks for insecure versions of Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer, and several other Microsoft applications, and when they are detected it exploits them to surreptitiously install malware known as Backdoor.Win3.Buzus.croo. The rootkit-enabled program logs banking credentials and may do other nefarious bidding, Landesman said.

At the moment, about two percent of the requests ScanSafe sees are for sites infected by the malicious link, an indication the threat is significant, Landesman said.

SQL injection attacks prey on web applications that fail to adequately inspect user supplied input before passing it off to a webserver’s backend database. They are a favorite way of adding malicious links and content to third-party websites and were also the the chink that allowed Albert Gonzalez and other hackers the toehold they needed to steal more than 130 million credit card numbers from card processor Heartland Payment Systems and four other companies.

The fingerprints on this latest attack lead Landesman to believe the perpetrators are new to the SQL injection game. More sophisticated mass attacks using the method, such as the Gumblar infection inject unique, dynamically-generated links that prevent researchers from being able to locate them using web searches.

Gumblar also uploads exploits directly to infected sites, which greatly complicates white hat efforts to clean up the mess. Rather than shutting down a single site that’s hosting the malware, thousands of mom and pop sites must be disinfected one at a time.

“I’m not convinced SQL injection is the method they’re most accustomed to,” Landesman said of the gang behind the most recent mass infection. “It’s almost as if they’re a seasoned attacker but this is their first foray into managing a wide-scale web attack.”

Credit: The Register

Miscreants took advantage of weak security to hack into two NASA-run websites over the weekend.

The websites of NASA’s Instrument Systems and Technology unit and Software Engineering division were broken into and screenshots illustrating the hack posted online. Hackers appear to have taken advantage of SQL Injection flaws and poor access controls in mounting the attack, reports Gunter Ollmann, an ex-IBM security expert who is now VP of Research at security firm Damballa.

Obfuscated screenshots from the hack were subsequently posted onto a full disclosure mailing list.

The motives and perpetrators of the attack remain unclear at the time of writing. Messing around with sites run by the space agency is a risky business for hackers, as Gary McKinnon and others have discovered, though whether anything will happen over the latest break-in is unclear.

Credit: The Register

A self-proclaimed grey-hat hacker has located a critical SQL injection vulnerability in a website belonging to security giant Symantec. The flaw can be leveraged to extract a wealth of information from the database including customer and admin login credentials, product serial numbers, and possibly credit card information.

According to the hacker an insecure parameter of a script from the pcd.symantec.com website allows for a blind SQL injection attack to be performed. In such an attack, the hacker obtains read and/or write permission to the underlying database of the vulnerable website.

During a regular SQL injection attack, the result of a rogue SQL query is displayed inside the browser instead of the normal web page output. Meanwhile, in a blind SQL injection, the query executes, but the website continues to display normally, making it much more difficult to extract information.

The content of the pcd.symantec.com website is written in Japanese and it serves a product called Norton PC Doctor. Accessing most of the website’s sections requires authentication, and in order to exploit the blind SQL vulnerability, the hacker had to use a few specialized tools. The Web server appears to be running Windows Server 2000 as operating system, Microsoft IIS 6.0 with ASP support and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 as database back-end.

From the screen shots released by the hacker there are many potentially interesting databases, but the one he chose to look at is called “symantecstore.” One of the tables in this database is named “PaymentInformationInfo” and contains columns such as BillingAddress, CardExpirationMonth, CardExpirationYear, CardNumber, CardType, CcIssueCode, CustomerEmail, CustomerFirstName, CustomerLastName or SecurityIndicator.

For demonstration purposes, the hacker extracted 6 of these entries at random, revealing customer names and login credentials with the passwords stored in plain text; a major security oversight. The hacker also notes that passwords for the accounts in a different table called TB_EMPLOYEE are also stored in a similar insecure way. There are 122,152 entries in the SerialNumber column.

Symantec has confirmed the existence of a vulnerabiliy in the pcd.symantec.com:

“A SQL injection vulnerability has been identified at pcd.symantec.com. The Web site facilitates customer support for users of Symantec’s Norton-branded products in Japan and South Korea only. This incident does not affect Symantec customers anywhere else in the world.

“This incident impacts customer support in Japan and South Korea but does not affect the safety and usage of Symantec’s Norton-branded consumer products. Symantec is currently in the process of updating the Web site with appropriate security measures and will bring it back online as soon as possible. Symantec is still investigating the incident has no further details to share at this time.”

Credit: Softpedia News

Programming errors on a website that helps commuters carpool to work are exposing sensitive information of workers for hundreds of employers in Southern California, including at least one military installation.

The bugs, discovered last month on RideMatch.info, allow hackers access to a variety of personal information, including individuals’ names, home addresses, phone numbers, the times they commute to and from work, and in some cases employee numbers. The SQL injection vulnerability remained active at time of writing, more than two weeks after it was reported to a developer who runs the website.

“There’s sensitive data there that definitely shouldn’t be on the internet,” said Kristian Hermansen, a security researcher who identified the vulnerability after receiving an email from his employer saying he was required by law to provide the information. “The reason I am bringing this to your attention is that the issue is not being fixed by the admins and most companies don’t even know that their employees’ personal and corporate information, like employee ID and login ID, may have been compromised.”

The form Hermansen was required to complete asked for a wealth of personal information, including his typical work hours, the times he begins work on each workday, and his employee ID. “The state can impose monetary penalties on companies that fail to complete this survey,” an email sent by Hermansen’s employer warned.

The website is a joint project developed by transit authorities in five regional governments in Southern California. Individuals enter their work and home addresses and the time they leave from each, and the website pairs them up with others with home and office locations and commute times that are suitable for carpools. Hermansen said virtually all of the data is accessible to anyone who knows how to exploit the vulnerability. His tests revealed that at least one military institution was among the employers that used the website.

A spokesman for the Riverside County Transportation Commission, one of the agencies responsible for the website, said administrators are working to fix the problem with the help of Trapeze Group, an Ontario, Canada-based company that designed the carpool software.

“We’re confident we should have a fix for this in the next few days,” the spokesman, John Standiford, said. “Trapeze being the provider of that software, they’re trying to work with us and I guess others to come to a solution and fix the security problem.”

The security lapse on RideMatch.info is only the latest reminder of the perils of SQL injection vulnerabilities. Three weeks ago, federal prosecutors revealed that hackers who stole more than 130 million payment card numbers were able to penetrate the network defenses of Heartland Payment Systems and four other companies after exploiting the garden-variety bug.

The flaw is the result of web applications that fail to adequately scrutinize user-generated text entered into search boxes and other fields on websites. Hackers can exploit them to pass commands directly to a website’s backend database. Once identified, they can often be fixed in a matter of minutes, by changing a line or two of code.

The other agencies responsible for the site are: The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Orange County Transportation Authority, the San Bernardino Associated Governments and the Ventura County Transportation Commission.

Malicious hackers have managed to infect about 57,000 web pages with a potent exploit cocktail that targets a variety of vulnerable applications to surreptitiously install malware on visitor machines.

The exploits install an assortment of nasty software, including Gologger, a keystroke logging trojan, and a backdoor that attempts to connect to a website hosted in China, according to Mary Landesman, a researcher at ScanSafe, a company that protects end users from malicious websites.

The attackers were able to plant a malicious iframe in the pages by exploiting SQL injection vulnerabilities. Once in place, the script silently pulls down javascript from a0v.org that silently runs while people are visiting one of the infected websites. Affected sites included health care organizations such as the New York Methodist Hospital, charitable and nursing facilities such as howellcarecenter.com, sweetgrassvillagealf.com, foodsresourcebank.org, and morningsideassistedliving.com, and others.

The vast majority of search results returned by Google and Yahoo failed to detect the threat despite the use of technology on both sites that’s supposed to prevent users from clicking on malicious links.

Once called, the malicious javascript contacts one of a half-dozen other domains that actually serve the exploit code. The sites were registered on August 3, so it’s clear the attack is less than three weeks old. ScanSafe has been blocking the attack since August 14.

Web infections are an increasingly common way for criminals to get their malware installed on end-user machines. Because the attacks occur while people are visiting sites they know and are often operated by reputable businesses and charities, few victims have any reason to suspect what’s happening behind the scenes.

Landesman said in an email that she’s been tracking a separate mass infection that in late June was used to deliver exploits targeting a zero-day ActiveX vulnerability. While the number of infected sites was once in the millions, it has since slipped to about 70,000.

SQL injection attacks exploit weaknesses in web applications that fail to adequately scrutinize text that users enter into search boxes and other web fields. The attacks have the effect of passing powerful commands to the website’s back-end database.

Credit: The Register