Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Database Compromised!
Today the the Slashdot database was compromised by 2 hackers from the Netherlands. !(Nohican && {}) They secured the hole and send an email to the admins, they even should be reading it now. Update: 09/29 11:04 PM by michael : We know about it, blah-blah-blah. Don't email us. I think it's safe to say that whatever happened, you'll hear the full details soon enough. Thanks.
He's a hole allright. "Security Hole" isn't the first hole that comes to mind though.
I would hope that /. boys coded the whole database so that passwords were one-way encrypted. Then it would be that much of an issue to change your password.
They aren't. If you forget your password, Slashdot will mail it to you (the "mailpasswd" button on /users.pl when you're logged out). Slashdot emails you your password, in clear text. So, even if the passwords are encrypted, they can be decrypted. How else would Slashdot be able to tell you your password?
No, the rfc1918 are non-routed addresses, but they aren't specifically localhost like 127. Now if someone is in a network where rfc1918 addresses are in use up to the point of contact with the outside world, then you might get them. Or _something_ on their network... If they aren't on a rfc1918 network, it'll probably get dropped at the first router, and definitely get dropped at the first well admined router.
itachi
I pronounce it as "bracketbracket" :)
- Nohican
Let's see what WebFerret (The only way to search the Web!) makes of "nohican"..
[time passes..]
Ha!
Anybody want to drop the joker a line?ps: read his posts; I think from the context, and from the fact that this is the only "nohican" that came back, that...
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
/. didn't mention it.
The article was posted by the hackers, that's the whole point.
You know that's why they cracked the DB, so they could post with +1 for everything.
:)
Maybe that ought to be a rule - anyone that cracks the DB and does no damage gets automatic GOD karma rating.
Nope. When an exploit is being actively used, you publish details immediately. Especially in this case, where the code can be patched by the end users themselves. (this all assume it's a hole in the slash code of course, and not some other problem.)
Reading through the posts is kind of funny. Half the people are freaking out... "OH MY GOD! /. HAS BEEN HACKED!!!" and the other half are going "Phhhft... Yeah right..".
Whats the worst that can come of a successful hack against the /. database? A password leak, a few karma points added/deleted, a few posts getting majored?
Guys and girls, if you use the same password on /. that you use on other services around the internet, then you're begging for trouble. It doesn't matter if its /. or any other service, you should always use a different password for each. As inconvenient as it is, its the only real way of being secure. There are plenty of programs out there that will let you mantain a "secure" database of all your usernames/passwords if you really think you're going to have a hassle remembering them all. Just search zdnet or any of the other major shareware/freeware sites. Admittedly most of them are Win32 based, but using things like wine you can usually get around that problem.
The biggest issue is the possibility of the articles being tampered with. I don't know what else is done on the box that hosts slashdot, but if the usual rules are applied, the database should be secure on a seperate machine to the web server.
This is a blessing more than it is a curse. The great wonders of opensource have shown us that even the mighty /. has an exploit in it now and then. I wonder if this would've been made so public if the slashcode wasn't opensource. As it stands, the flaw has been located and supposedly fixed.
Oh well, could be worse I guess. ;) At least they didn't deface the site or destroy the database or any other number of things that could've been done.
<panic>OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!! SLASHDOT HAS BEEN HACKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!</panic>
Tripwire is good for identifying a breakin. However, to rely on it is dangerous. The most secure way of checking is to take the drive out of the box that's using the drive, install it in another box that's standalone, mount it, run tripwire, and write the file to CD/readonly floppy. Then you've gota do it every time that you want to check. But things can get complicated as a hacker could put things in a home dir, or some other writable part of the filesystem that wont get checked by tripwire since that stuff changes so often. It's brutal. Tripwire is good for identifying change, but not so great for making sure that there are no reminants. There's always room for error. Better safe than sorry.
No they are bad, the whole point is that now VA needs to check the servers and maybe everything else behind the firewall. That's a drain on resources whichver way you look at it.
There's no such thing as a friendly hack.
In other ramblings of my mind, our friends in the server room should make a mandatory password change. It is always good practice
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Any loss (especially of stories and comments) would be highly undesirable for a site such as Slashdot, imho. Then there are even more important systems, such as those that handle financial transactions, in which it is probably mission-critical to not lose any information in the event of a crash or a crack. What methods do database administrators employ for recovery in such situations?
Ignorance is curable. I want to learn. Thanks in advance. :)
Maturity? Obviously you've missed the point of this story, but in any case you seem to have odd delusions about personal property and information security. Regardless of whether the powers that be need to audit their code better, the fact that the site could be cracked in no way justifies the actions of the childish losers who went ahead and broke in. I'll avoid the tortured analogies to an unlocked house, but I certainly expect that polite users will stay the fuck away from my machines, whether or not I overlooked the buffer-overflow-du-jour. I wouldn't for a moment trust any asshole who ended up with a root prompt on a system I use or run without authorization.
I agree with earlier posters that the second-rate pieces of shit that did this shouldn't be sued or legally harassed- have their parents spank them and send them to bed early without dessert. But it's hard to imagine these vandals serving any more useful purpose than as a focus for the contempt of their middle-school classmates.
On E-Bay:For sale ANY /. user account you want. Who needs to purchase a high karma account when you can just buy your enemies accounts and trash thier karma, reputation/image? That's right! Step right up boys and girls. 5r1p7 k1dd135 Inc. will for a limited time only give you access to any account you desire and you may trash away at will:) Call 1-800-urh4x0r3d in the next sixty seconds and we will even throw in a snippet of code that will gaurantee you the same access to any slash based site.
Wait! Theres more! mention OpenSource and we will even throw in a free kernel upgrade and the link to the actual HOW-TO's will also be yours! Here's the best part!!! If you call and say CmdrTaco sent you we will even throw in his account and all the censoring powers that come with it. Imagine, you and your friends can kill off quickies and JonKatz with a single click(TM). /. $authors)
Note to self: IF s/N ratio>=facts(old news +
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
I kind of think they blew a great opportunity though; imagine the chaos that would ensue if they inserted a story titled "Linux 2.4 Released!" with a link to goatse.cx cleverly hidden as a link to kernel.org...
- Joe
-Joe
Wait up, man...
Maybe some other sites running the Slash code would like five minutes or so to secure their sites before everyone else in the world knows about it?
Or rather, let's make sure everyone's got the fixes before we go passing around the exploits, ok?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
--
I would expect that actions like this occur fairly often, however: If this had been a 'secure' e-commerce web site, would they have posted this at all? No way! They would have hid it at best, and tried to sue the 'hackers' at worst. I did something similar (No, I'm not a cracker, and I can't 'hack' web servers, I just noticed a gaping hole) for a company I used to work for, and I didn't even get a 'thank you' from the company. Do you think this company told their customers? Yeah right. That incident, like probably thousands upon thousands of others, was pushed under the rug, hopefully to be forgotten.
Yes, this is most likely the best way to find and fix security problems, but we have to be *very* careful about attitudes such as the one you're proposing. What would have happened had Slashdot carried our credit card numbers as well? Would we be as happy that some people were poking around the website? According to the attitude you're suggesting, the answer would be a resounding YES! YES, because there could be other people out there who are malicious and if the hole didn't get fixed this way it could have turned out to be much worse if other people had found it. But the fact of the matter is that unauthorized hacking is wrong whenever it is committed. A blind faith in white hat hackers is very dangerous because there is no telling what their motivations are, no matter what they say. How in the world do you know that they didn't take CmdrTaco's passwords? If /. had credit cards, how do you know none had been taken? Because they told us about the security hole? That is not enough proof. Hell, the best way to commit a crime would be to hack in, steal a few things, and then report the problem. And they would be held up as heros, not hackers because "luckily, the boys at slashdot "get it""
Property is property, period. Just because this is IP, and just because it is on the Internet does *not* make it any different.
I think that's true regardless of whether there are any visible hacks to the site. Even if they had just emailed the slashdot crew a patch saying "this is broken and allows an exploit", slashdot or VA would still have to check the servers and maybe everything else on the possibility that someone has used the exploit. It doesn't make good security sense to say "well, I don't see any hacks even though there's this exploit, therefore I wasn't hacked into" -- especially on such a high-profile site.
This has fun implications for when you upgrade an OS (or anything else) to patch a security hole; if you're really security conscious, you have to do some risk analysis to decide whether to react as if someone has used the hole already to backdoor your system.
There's no such thing as a friendly hack.
/home/
/var/MySQL/
/. is no to delete posts unless there's something messing with the page display, was it that infamous hello.jpg, or worse?
Let's see, a still-working site, or
#
#w00t
w00t- not found
#rm -rf
#rm -rf
Of course that's overly simplistic, but think about it. Even if the person found the security hole, and sent in a a patch privately, who's to say the discoverer or someone else hasn't already been quitely exploiting it? Of course now that an exploit has been found (and assuming they DID get the email), There still exists an exploit.
They'll still have to check and make sure that's what really happened, examine their entire system and probably do a whole lot of reinstalling, but that's what happens. I would hope they'd be doing that anyway if someone turned in an exploit+patch.
Which also brings up another point. This site in particular seems to have an inordinate amount of content being passed back and forth that is simply incredulous. How many times a week must Rob &Co. get email to the effect of "3y3 0VVn Jo0!"? How do you know when someone is serious? When the hacker posts a story about it, of course! I'd say this is probably the best (if not funniest) way to let everyone know at once. BTW I do feel sorry for the crew up there having all the shit to go through that they must right now.
One question I do want to see answered, even before the how-to on the crack...EXactly what DID they put in the 1rst post that got it deleted so quickly? Remember that The policy on
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
Hahahaha, not even Taco has grammar that bad!
Even if you *haven't* been compromised, the only way to know no trojans, etc. are installed is to do a fresh install. Just have a little faith, man.
Of *course* you still have to do a risk assessment and decide if you might have been robbed while the door was open, possibly by the person leaving the note. That's true of the real-life front door to your house as well as a web site.
The person leaving the note has done two things for you, though: alerted you (and possibly others who visit your house while you're out) that there may have been a problem; and helped reduce the window of exposure to the threat. You do *not* get to conclude that therefore there was no exploit, in part because you don't know how long your front door has been sitting open.
Your IP/property comment strikes me as a non-sequitir; there is nothing wrong with leaving a note on someone's door in real life, so by your argument it should be fine to leave a note on someone's door on the internet.
I may have missed your point, though; if you're instead making an argument that "seeing an open vunerability on a web site is inherently *different* than seeing that someone's door is open in real life, and we should close our eyes on the internet lest we see open doors", well, I disagree. But it would make for a good discussion :)
Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.
Okay, so you've hacked Slashdot, fixed the security hole and pulled a classic white hat move which will live in infamy.
What are you going to do now?
We're going to DISNEYLAND!!!
I don't think they actually store the /. user account passwords in /etc/passwd
~
~
~
~
:wq
I know what you're getting at and sometimes I do feel that way. Also though, I think it can be a very gray area and IMHO it's risky the way you're going with it.
I'll use the car-in-the-parking-lot scenario. Would I mind someone leaving a note on my car if they noticed one of the doors was unlocked? Within reason, probably not. But do I think people have the right to walk around the parking lot trying to open car doors, just to see which ones aren't locked? Of course not.
There are metaphors everywhere. I can encrypt my email to prevent people reading it. Do I want anonymous strangers to try to decrypt it as long as they promise not to read it? Not really. If I say I don't mind, it gives anyone who wants to break it an easy back-door out of being prosecuted. Imagine what it would be like if govco could get away with saying "we were only trying to show you that your cryptography was faulty. Oh and by the way, we stumbled on this evidence which we're going to use against you.". It always starts with small things, and I can't see why it wouldn't lead to that.
Obviously I'd like to know if anyone stumbles on a way in accidently or sees something by chance, but I'd like to arrange for it to be tested on my own, thank you.
So I guess my point is that if it's ethically okay to try to crack websites etc in the interests of improving security, it suddenly makes it ethically okay to crack them. As long as someone hasn't actually stolen the credit card numbers yet, it makes it okay.
Sure some crackers mean well, but it shouldn't be an excuse to let them off. If they really want to test a site that way they should ask permission first. Let sites decide whether they want everyone trying to break them or not. Most of them will say no, and at that point, what right does anyone else have to force their "better" opinion on another person or company regardless? I've had enough of that from govco and I don't want to start getting it from random unidentified script kiddies.
===
So, let's hear some details. Howdya do it? Remember, we're techies and not magicians; we can reveal our secrets.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
i think something like this truly embodies the hacker ethic (yes, we're talking about the one you hear about in the news :(
Technically, you could sue these guys and have them thrown in prison (with certain international legal asumptions). Luckily, the boys at slashdot "get it." - This is truly the open source of cracking. Finding a problem and making fixing it. I feel like there should be a sign on the front porch of the internet that says "Please leave this place tidier than you found it"
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
They claim to be good guys, but there's no proof of it. If you use the same passwords for slashdot as you do for other systems, change them. I realize that it's unlikely that any hacker would pick you out of the hundreds of thousands of accounts on slashdot, but they might. I hope that the admins have stuck a fresh slashdot up online (new box, new install, installed patch for the problem, etc) or are doing that now. If you're hacked, the only ways to know that no trojans are around are to wipe clean and start over, or make sure that you were running the box off of a cdrom disk and you've replaced writable areas. Even doing file digest scans are not trickyness-proof.
Just curious if we'll have a report on what happened and how it was done after everything is cleaned up. With slash being full-open-source, it would be a good way to educate the community.
Not that I think we should expect something in the next hour or anything, but in a week or so, maybe...
I want my membership money returned. Actually, make it 5X my membership fee. What's 5 x $0.00???
Fight Spammers!
Well, I've been a little worried for awhile about the generally poor quality of stories on Slashdot. But finally, something worth reading about.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
So, does that mean /. is going to be rebuilt from a known backup? What do companies normally do? This could be a pretty good scam: pretend to be open about what happened so that /. isn't rebuilt, but really set themselves up for something more malicious.
Maybe in their quest to l33t-dom, they fixed the obvious bug in Slash. Here's the rogue code:
while(1) { if($c%2==1) { post_article("Cease and Desist Letter to %s","UPCDatabase.com || F---edcompany.com || Napster || FlyingButtMonkeys"); } else { post_article("%s Sues %s for %s","MPAA || RIAA || D:C, FlyingButtMonkeys || Microsoft || 2600, MP3s, DeCSS, CueCat Decoder"); } ++$c; }
I'm surprised no one has caught it yet; it's a pretty big mistake.
#disclaimer.h
I like the MPAA/RIAA/Napster/DeCSS/CueCat/FBM/MP3 stories. I just thought it's fun to get some karma, too.
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Tonight on Fox: Deadliest Executions Part XVII
Nohican and {} were unreachable for comment, and when we got in touch with Greyfox, he did the ``Blow Me Dance'' at us. The community declined to comment officially but some members of it said that they were pretty much doing the ``Blow Me Dance'' and ignoring Kenyon and Kenyon, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Maybe I'm over paranoid but there is no way in hell I let that box stay up.
-- Are you an EFF member yet?
Assuming that the story is true (that the hackers closed the hole and then informed the Slashdot admins of what had happened, rather than planting bombs, scripts, backdoors, etc), I believe that this is a good example of the fact that hackers aren't all bad - that they can, despite the media's poor representation of them (let's not go into the hacker vs cracker argument) actually serve a useful purpose.
:)
Guys, well done for showing some maturity. I assume you've boosted your Slashdot karma scores to reflect your recent real-life boost in karma?
I'm sure hundreds of people have submitted this as a story to the slashdot guys....
THEY DELETED THE FIRST POST!
You bastards!
hehe
Hackers only DOS and Nuke people.
;)
No, the people you're reffering to are '31337 h4xx0r5'. There's a fine line
-- Dr. Eldarion --
April Fools! Ha, bet you thought you had me, Taco, didn't you? Just because I believed that Microsoft really DID sue Slashdot in '99 doesn't mean I'll fall for your trickery twice, "CmdrTaco" - if that's even your real name!
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
...that they also took away the privilege of first post: http://slashdot.o rg/comm ents.pl?sid=00/09/29/0231248&cid=1
and also that the sid uses tomorrow's date.
First Post: Hours of time waiting for a new story to appear
/. article: Priceless
reached the 50 karma cap: Months of posting links to partners.nytimes.com
Look on CmdTacos face when he sees the newest