Slashdot Mirror
Yup, Somebody Cracked Slashdot
What a great way to wake up! I went to bed at about 10 last night, completely exhausted (stuff unrelated to Slashdot stressing me out). I guess the upside is that I had a good night's sleep: the downside is I still haven't had a morning cup of coffee ;)
Allright, so by using the 31337 haxx0r tool known as "Common Sense", {} and Nohican managed to get a Slashcode test site's administrative access (this isn't a root shell or anything: its only a series of Web forms used to post stories, and configure various parts of the site). This was our biggest mistake: the password (God/Pete) was never changed on the test site. From there, it was a cake walk.
By exploiting a known security hole in pre-2.0 versions of Slashcode, they executed some perl of their own devising through our template system, and managed to run netcat on the the box. The hole itself required "God" access on a Slashcode site, so it was never a problem before... but since the password was the Slashcode default of God/Pete, it wasn't hard. We knew about the potential problem but since nobody ever had God access besides me, it was never a problem!
From there they managed to get ahold of our backup database (updated nightly). And due to another hole (one that is also fixed in the upcoming 2.0 "Bender" source tree ;) they managed to pull my Slashdot administrative passwd from the dump, and login as me, to the real Slashdot. (our db stores passwords in plaintext. Yes it's stupid, but I wrote this code 3 years ago and had no clue).
Apparently that's where they stopped: all they wanted was to post a story claiming victory. Immediately after that, they e-mailed us and told us how they did it. Our crack team plugged things back up immediately. (and the guys were nice enough to chat a bit with them on IRC explaining a few things).
The moral? Our biggest mistake was not changing the default data on the test site, and I'm sure that we'll patch the next version of Slashcode to require new administrators to change their passwords during installation. The eval hole (we've been working on removing this problem for some time now and replacing it with a templating system that is secure, flexible, and easier than the really crappy one we're using now) and the password problem (also fixed in bender) won't be a factor in Slashcode 2.0.
It doesn't appear at this stage that they actually did anything beyond posting their story. (We're taking all the appropriate precautions to make sure. Hugs to Yaz, Liz and Pat who are gonna have it the worst). You should also change your Slashdot User Password right now just to be safe.
The whole Slashdot authentication is ridiculously insecure. I coded it years ago when I didn't really know anything about scalability or security. Since then various bugs in Web browsers have changed a lot of things, so we decided to fix the problems in Slashcode 2.0. Unfortunately it's not done yet, but it's getting there. Of course, anyone with functioning neurons knows that you use different passwords on each system (especially Web sites where you aren't using any encryption!)
Nobody ever would have got anywhere had we just changed the default password though.
The good news is that it looks like {} and Nohican were good guys: the did the deed, took the credit, and went no further. Then they told us exactly how they did it so we could make sure it wouldn't happen again. Honestly, that's the best kind of hack. Two years ago we had the bad kind of hacker: he rooted the whole damn system and never told us how they gained entry. That sucked more than I can describe.
The bad news is that we have to pretend that these guys totally took over, and rebuild everything anyway. It's gonna be a long couple of days.
You can direct inquiries to me, but understand that I'm just a little busy right now, so I might not be able to reply to everyone.
[Heh, I wrote the following text for some friends about a week ago. Fits perfectly here. :) ]
How many sites, servers or systems do you log into regularly? On how
many sites, servers or systems have you registered yourself with a
user name and password? Quite some number, or what? Now; how many
different passwords did you use? Of course you've been told many
times to use different passwords everywhere. I keep wondering what
idiot invented that impossible rule; it goes without saying that you
need to reuse your passwords, unless you have a computer in your
brain.
What's my point? Let's say one of the administrators of one of those
sites is not as honest as it first seemed, and takes a peek into the
password database. Or let's say that someone cracks into that
database and gets hold of all the passwords. What could that person,
given your often used password, do on all the other sites you visit?
Would you like someone else to speak for you? To buy for you? To
sell your stocks? To use the encyclopedia you pay for? To read your
mail? Probably not. And it doesn't have to be that way if all web
developers out there obey the following, simple rule:
Never store clear text passwords.
You do not need to keep a user's password to be able authenticate her.
To repeat: Neither you, nor your web server, need to store any user's
password. The technology is ages old: You pass the initial password
through a one way hash function, and store the garbled password in
your database. Whenever the user wants to log in, you take the user
provided password, pass it through the same hashing function, and
compare the result with whatever you have in your database.
I guess some of you don't know what hash functions are, so here's a
short intro: Hash functions, or message digests, are one way functions
that take a text as input, and produce a signature based on the text.
Calling the function "one way" means that, given a signature, it is
impossible to get back to the original text. A good hash function
also makes it extremely hard to come up with a different text that
yields the same signature.
Several hash functions exist. The password file on Unix traditionally
uses a DES based hash function, known as crypt, to hide passwords.
Windows NT uses MD4 for passwords. I would suggest you use a widely
available function known as MD5. It is considered more secure than
both crypt and MD4. PHP has the string function md5, Java has the
java.security.MessageDigest class which provides MD5, Perl has an MD5
module, and I guess you'll be able to find some component for
ASP/VBscript too.
If you've ever read about password hashing, you may have run into the
term "salting". We may use salting to make sure two hashed password
are different even if they come from the same password. If you choose
"beer" as your password, and have access to the hashed passwords, we
don't want you to recognize another "beer" drinker among the users.
You may think that requiring unique passwords is a solution, but it is
not: If you register somewhere, and learn that the password you chose
is already taken, you may run thru the users and test with the
occupied password until you reach the owner. We do _not_ want unique
passwords.
A common strategy for salting is to combine the user name and password
into a new string, eg. with a line break in between, and pass that
string through the hash function. Of course you will need to redo the
combination when you verify the password.
What follows is a simple example in PHP. We provide one function for
storing the hashed password, and one for authenticating a user. Of
course you will need to implement the database functions yourself.
# Given a user name and a clear text password, calculate the
# salted, hashed password.
function getHashedPassword($username, $password) {
return strtoupper(md5($username . "\n" . $password));
}
# Given a user name and a clear text password, calculate the
# salted, hashed password, and store it in a database.
function storeInitialPassword($username, $password) {
$hashedPassword = getHashedPassword($username, $password);
# Save the hashed password in the database.
setHashedPasswordForUser($username, $password);
}
# Given a user name and a clear text password, calculate the
# salted, hashed password, and compare it to the one in the
# database. Return 1 if the user is successfully verified,
# 0 if verification failed (bad password).
function verifyPassword($username, $password) {
# Fetch the hashed password from the database.
$hashedPassword = getHashedPasswordForUser($username);
# Salt and hash the provided password.
$hashedProvidedPassword = getHashedPassword($username, $password);
# If the two hashed passwords are equal, everything is fine.
if ($hashedProvidedPassword == $hashedPassword)
return 1;
# The hashed passwords didn't match. Invalid password.
return 0;
}
As the example shows, storing hashed passwords is almost as simple as
storing clear text password. And it is a whole lot more safe. If you
choose to hash the passwords on the site you develop, you should
consider mentioning it on a "privacy policy" page. Advanced users
will appreciate it, and understand that you take security seriously.
The defaul login was sa. The default password was blank. I think it's about time you guys fessed up to your MSSQL addiction.
It's easy for them. Their readers know exactly how it is, and it's not like there's any data that needs to be protected. Accounts are free, no credit cards #s anywhere, etc... As long as they have backup tapes somewhere it doesn't matter what the fuck happens to the site. They can restore it.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
D'oh. Configure DNS to disallow zone transfers from anyone but the secondary. Host -l dies then.
I think I'll put that in today!
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
It was SGI's File System Navigator - a rather cool program for doing 3d visualizations of a file system. It's fun to play with, and actually suprisingly usable for normal work.
--
Instead, we have an open acknowledgment from the victims, a full story about what happened and what steps are being taken now, simple instructions for the users, and the proper amount of credit to the guys who cracked the site.
A little extra work for the /. crew, a good reminder for them to take security more seriously, but otherwise no big deal.
If only mainstream media could be this mature and accurate.
________________
________________
Private Essayist
I always thought my password was ***** anyways....
The anti-salmon
I just ping to get the ip address [64.28.67.48] then try a few variations on the last number. (http://64.28.67.47:80, etc.) Finds stuff people don't want you to find. ;-)
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Actually....i think this is a commercial site. :)
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
. . . become "FascDot Killed My Pr". They must have had a low bid on that eBay auction.
--
-- Geof F. Morris
This is nice to see. Big, front-page article saying they've been hacked, letting their users know. How many web sites do you think would do that for their users? Too few.
On the other hand, would we have been notified if the hackers hadn't put a big article on the front page? Food for though, but I'd like to think so.
Dave
'Round the firewall,
Out the modem,
Through the router,
Down the wire,
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Ah, if only the trolls had known...
--
Change my password? Um.. why?
This is a message board site, not my bank account.
Not the administrative passwords on my Windows 2000/Linux box.
Not the passwords for my personal writing folders (which have a different password than the box).
Not the password I use for my internet account.
Basically, there is nothing worthwhile to steal here, and if someone posted something under my name so what? I would then change my password.
But I don't need to now.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Make up your mind, is the team supposed to crack things open or plug them up?
Making a fake post is cute, but it is a bit childish. I can not think of any other reason why the hackers made a fake posting other than making a name for themselves or embarrassing the site operators. Was the security of Slashdot really their primary or even secondary concern? Fake posts are no better than grafitti.
Can we even be sure that they only broke into Slashdot this one time? Were the systems reinstalled with fresh code that had been secured or encrypted? How can we be certain that a backdoor hasn't been installed?
I certainly feel that the security breach should be publicized. I am glad that the problems have been fixed. And I understand the hackers desire for anonymity given our society's penchant for litigation. However, I do not think it is polite or justified to inform a site's admins of security holes through graffiti on the front page of their website at 10:30 PM. An anonymous or pseudononymous email message would have had the same end result. (Getting phone calls about urgent time sensitive problems at 10:30 PM is bad enough for most system administrators; getting phone calls for problems that could have been solved in the morning is really frustrating.)
The folks who broke in may not have been "black hat" intruders, but it is specious to call them "white hat" hackers. Perhaps there needs to be a term like "gray hat" hackers, but "immature self-promoting" hackers seems to work just as well.
--Sam
OK, I changed my password to Pete.
I would've had them add me to the express article suggestion queue. (Which of course doesn't really exist. It wouldn't be fair to have class distinctions between SlashDot users. yeah right)
Work for Change & GET PAID!
It's not clear from the post, but it would appear that Slashdot simply stores the username / passwords in a table unmangled?
Damn...The minimum you should have done is hashed it (with either MD5 or SHA-1 - both of these are available for Perl). The next (recommended) step is to also salt the password prior to hashing to prevent dictionary and similar attacks.
Bruce Schneier is right in Secret and Lies: people just keep making the same security mistakes time and time again :((((
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
No, I think your current system of paying people to make you do unnecessary work on ridiculous topics such as "The Pre-Roman Carthaginian Patriarchy" or "Rights of the 13th Century African Immigrants" is probably right on-target.
By the time you get out, you should be perfectly suited to a lifetime of meaningless, tedious work that slowly kills you.
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
- You've never looked at the code, but you're claiming to know that it's "shit". In which case you are a punk and a faker. Fuckhead.
- You have looked at the code, but didn't spot this hole. In which case you have no moral authority to criticise Taco, so you are a punk, and a faker. Fuckhead.
- You have looked at the code and found the hole, but didn't bother to do anything about it. Guess what that makes you? It makes you a punk, a faker and a fuckhead.
And you can't even fucking flame well. I'd just loooove to meet you on a dark night on Usenet-- the most controversial site on the Web
There's no difference between failing to keep the hackers out and leaving stuff where the hackers can get to it. But more, I totally disagree with your "theory" about passwords. Slash, please keep our passwords in plaintext, or keep it as an option for users who want it.
First, think of your bank account. It's real numbers stored in a computer, numbers that other people shouldn't be able to see or change. So, these numbers need to be protected. You can't effectively encrypt them (without leaving the keys sitting there: the computer needs to get to them) so the issue is purely one of protecting them. Give a computer scientist the task of protecting some vital data and she will set about designing a secure system. It's a fun problem to solve. Well, that's all passwords are: data that needs protecting.
Yes, there are scenarios where hashed passwords allow for a neat trick: knowing the hash lets you authenticate but does not grant you access. But that trick depends on certain elements that are not necessary to guard a website. Think of it this way: if someone gains root access to a website, they don't need an insignificant user's password.
The convenience of Slashdot being able to email a password if someone forgets it is a benefit that far outweighs the difficulty of the task of protecting them.
Geez, talk about hypocrisy. I'd take DigitalConvergence's treatment of victim's over Slashdot's any day!
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
Duh!
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
Do that and I'll forward it to spamcop.
For pete's (ahem) sake, it's only a blinking password on a blinkin' website, it's been going over the 'net unencrypted plaintext for the past couple of years, and if you're using the same one as for your online banking then you're already a pillock, yeah?
And besides which you shouldn't change it until our great leader CmdrTaco proclaims it as safe as before *after* it's been fixed; until then, the same paranoia factor that makes him reinstall also makes me worry that password-changes now will be intercepted.
~Tim
--
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
And to think, Andover paid you guys over $6 million each for this site. You'd think a company willing to part with such a huge chunk of change would at least EVALUATE the site. Most companies would be all up IN your koolaid before writing such a check and their audit would have shown that this site is held together by band-aids and paperclips that are 3 years old.
... just the eyeballs it would deliver to their advertising group.
It just goes to show that Andover had no interest in the *site* and it's validity or integrity
I can't say I'm surprised one bit.
The password would not be hashed to prevent someone taking a single account on the machine; the password would be hashed because many people use the same password in a great many places.
It's just common courtesy; hash it, and you at least have taken a step to prevent the damage from spreading just beyond your site. Normal plaintexting is just irresponsible. Think about, say, slashdot-- for each of these users they have a valid email adress and a valid password. How many people you really think are going to be using different passwords for their slashdot account and the e-mail accounts listed on slashdot..?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Now that is what proactive security is all about.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
As one former boss suggested: Fingerprint scanning. You poke your finger into a hole in the scanning box and if your fingerprint doesn't match it chops off the finger. He assumed they wouldn't try to fool it more than 10 times.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Encore! Encore! ...
/. needs an Inspired classification.
Damn, wish I could moderate, I'd push that puppy to a 5, but
It is funny, but it's also art.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And if you aren't assuming that your password at every site you visit isn't stored in plaintext, then you get what you deserve. Do you use the same password to your online bank as you do on /.? You might as well call for all of /. to be SSL so that people can't sniff your passwords when you log in.
/. has the responsibility to try and protect the site, users have the responsibility to make sure that a breakin anywhere has limited ability to cause us harm.
As so many people have pointed out here and in other security forums, security is all about managing risk. I use the same password here and on a few other sites - but if any one of those passwords is lost, all it means is that someone might be able to post as me here (who cares?) and read NYTimes articles online under my name. Oh dear!
/. should make every attempt to help protect our user information. However, while
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> after years of watching secretaries jot down passwords on 3x5 cards and post-it notes and tuck them into the pencil drawer of a desk.
Some of Digital's VT terminals had a data field that would store text, and would echo whatever that text was back to the screen whenever you typed a certain control key. (Sorry - been too long to remember the details.) Lots of lusers in the VAX shop where I worked used to put their username-tab-password in the terminal's data field, so all you had to do is type ^whatever at the terminal, and you were logged in as the terminal's owner.
It didn't bother me too much to discover that the forklift drivers were doing this. But when I found out one of the m0r0n5 with syspriv was doing it...
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Don't have to tell me that, after years of watching secretaries jot down passwords on 3x5 cards and post-it notes and tuck them into the pencil drawer of a desk.
Probably the best I ever witnessed was at some economy barn, like a Sam's club. They had the manager's password on a note taped to the front of the monitor, it had been there for some time.
Why don't I just give Anonymous Customer a refund of, oh, $500. Better make that $500.01 or the bean counter will get suspicious.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You underestimate how many fucking idiots are on the web :) The security measures I am talking about would have been almost trivial to implement (I think signal 11 provided the meat of the code right in this thread), and would protect the /. crew from (correct) accusations of lax security.
Like I said, when this type of thing happens to other major sites that don't encrypt user data, everyone is quick to say how stupid it is.
----
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Like... put a wrapper on a command to delete a random file.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
As if I care about my password. What's someone going to do, log in and post as me?
--
Communication is only possible between equals
host -a -l slashdot.org
Wow, cool! Check out http://warez.slashdot.org for cool warez downloads!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
For the systems (and users) I'm thinking of, I don't think truly random generated passwords would go down well with our user base. I was thinking of random picks from a dictionary.
Thats not to invalidate your reply though - its all valid information. The solution I'm thinking of is the MD5 URL to visit to reset your password. It could be one-time generated with the current time, the user_id and a secret. Thus impossible to guess, and again, the password doesn't get reset until the URL is visited.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Frank van Vliet, aka {}, was as well the wizard who managed to put an IIS banner on apache.org some months ago.. I'm really curious for his next hack!
Here is an interview on LinuxSecurity with him.
- Always change your default passwords (that is the easiest way to get hacked, as seen in The Cuckoo's Egg, a la Hagbard)
- Never store your passwords in plaintext. Preferably, just hash them.
- Never trust a good password to a website. I have a throw-away password I use for unencrypted web stuff; slashdot can have it, and I'm gonna keep it. If they hack my kuro5hin account, I'll survive.
- Hope for the best, expect the worst. If someone compromises your system, it doesn't matter how nice they are about it; make sure you check everything, regardless.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ahem. I rest my case.
Yes, this is what really costs businesses money, irrespective of whether any damage was done.
Using certificates instead of username+password also eliminates the possibility of my password being stolen when somebody on my LAN or at my ISP sniffs the cleartext HTTP traffic.
This goes back to one of my comments on the question of 'Should Slashdot charge for access?', the concept of having an enhanced account level with SSL support, and giving SSL traffic a higher priority on the WAN/LAN links to the servers.
Call it a 'subscription' and I can get my employer to pay for it.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
The reason I'm scrambling it is to so that the string people use to log in can't be used elsewhere.
This is a lot more secure then then plain text, especially if people use the same password in more then once place.
If the password database is compromised, then I would still urge people to change their passwords like Slashdot is doing, but at least people wouldn't have to worry about the actual phrase being known to others.
So the increased security is as follows:
Compromised db does not compromise password when used on other sites.
Cookie does note contain plain text password string - again, safety from other sites.
You're right, it doesn't prevent the cookie from being grabbed (which I acknowledged) or the db.
However, the use of session IDs would solve that first problem, which, like I said, I plan to implement soon.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
I'll admit, I'm fairly new to the writing of code for the web, but the first thing I did on taking over someone's site admin was change the passwords from plain text in the cookies and db to crypt() (didn't want to use md5 since a lot of different scripts and programs used the db - crypt is more common).
Even so, the way I have it currently set up is a problem. Someone could grab a copy of the local encrypted cookie, then use it to connect as the user from then on. The easiest way I can think of to solve this is to have the cookie be a combination of a timeout value and the encrypted pass, and store that value in the db as well ('till timeout) but even so, at least user passwords can't be read out of the database in my current setup.
Come on, this is just common sense. It wouldn't have taken 37737 knowledge of perl to have implemented that in the first version of Slashcode.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Now, the fact that the default password was used to get into the box is one issue.
Another issue is how the crackers managed to get root after the fact. They exploited known security holes.
Just something to reduce my karma, but since the code is open source, bugs are supposed to be found much more quickly and fixed within a few hours given the right channels. Yet, since the bugs are supposedly easier to find (looking through source code as opposed to trying various techniques to so what happens) than in closed binaries (that is one of the main arguments for open source), we have our lesson for today.
Which is:
If you use open source products, patch early and patch often. If you reinstall an old version, plan to spend a significant amount of time applying patches. Otherwise, those well known and easily-researchable bugs will come back to haunt you in sequential order.
Having been a computer instructor for a year and a half, I have found that there is good news when an authority screws up publicly. First, it shows than no one is an authority on everything. More importantly, when a mistake is made, sometimes students can learn more by finding out how to fix something than how to do it correctly in the first place. This event will have more admins thinking about security today than a dozen security articles would have.
All my programs have but one purpose. They take the contents of RAM and place those contents into a file called 'core'
Is that the encrypted string cannot be used to log in, only to try and convince it you are already logged in.
That's why using a combination of a login password and a random session id would make this completely secure, save from packet sniffing.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
They hacked in, and then they closed up the security hole; that's awfully nice of them. Let's hope that the hackers that crack the SDMI's DMAT aren't so nice (or greedy).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Taco should not be so hard on himself over that particular flaw; the real shame should be felt by the million and one fuckheads who downloaded the code and didn't even look at it before installing.
'Course, this puts the whole "security through obscurity" thing in a slightly different light ...
-- the most controversial site on the Web
If any other website had there unencrypted password database stolen, everybody here would be outraged. I can recall more than one story on /. involving such elementary security mistakes. What if I used the same username/assword on every website? Now the hacker has access to my ebay, amazon, buy.com, etc accounts, all because Rob never fixed a major, 3-year-old security glitch.
----
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
The feature I'd like to see most is a killfile.
I can block out story authors that annoy me, I wish I could do the same to posters that annoy me.
--K
MODERATORS: Flamebait or Troll. None of this Offtopic, Redundant, or Overrated crap.
---
Try doings a 'host -l slashdot.org' and you'll see that the DNS servers are setup to allow zone transfer to anywhere...
How will I ever remember a new one?
Speaking strictly for myself, good luck, CmdrTaco & all the crew...
Bugs are hard to avoid -- thankfully, you were dealing with "white hats" this time. By the way, isn't it funny this information is already available on other sites... ?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.
The last thing we need is for some troll to hack Slashdot and turn it into a goatse.cx mirror (a dream I'm sure has crossed the mind of many a middle-school, immature techno-jerk).
Honestly, though, what other features can we expect to see in Slashcode2? Story moderation (or changes to the overall mod structure)? Perhaps user-definable themes (OK, I know I'm going out on a limb there)? Removal of the suid requirement on the script? Just throwing out some honest questions...
----------
No, they aren't. My ~/.netscape/cookies file just has my userid in it. Check yours.
As a matter of fact, there are no passwords in my cookies file at all.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
So, the code looks like this in getUser:
if($uid > 0) { # Authenticate
$I{U} = sqlSelectHashref('*', 'users',
' uid = ' . $I{dbh}->quote($uid) .
' AND passwd = ' . $I{dbh}->quote($passwd)
);
}
So I think you want to change the definition of passwd to be a char(32) and change "passwd = $I{dbh}->quote($passwd)" to "passwd = MD5->hexhash($I{dbh}->quote{$passwd})".
You would, of course, have to change the code for adding users and changing passwords, but you get the basic idea. This is easy stuff. The only thing that it does not allow for is mailing a user their password. How to solve for this?
Well, I would add a two-step process where a users says "I forget my password". You then invent a temporary password which you mail to their email address. This password is sent with a link to a special "verify that you forgot your password" page. If it's an attacker, the primary account password has not changed, and the user gets annoyed by an email message (as they would now). If it is the real user, they authenticate themselves via this temporary token and THEN you email them a new primary password which they are required or at least asked to change immediately. In fact if you want to make it really easy add the temporary token to the URL for the verification page (e.g. http://sd.org/verify?user=ajs&token=3485839828).
All the security of the current system plus encrypted passwords in the database.
For coming up with the new primary password, I would use the trick of using a random dictionary word followed by a random digit and a random noise character. This works out to be around 2^21 easily remembered passwords (about 5e4 words with a good list of 4-6 letter words, 10 digits, 32 noise characters = 16x10^6 = ~2^21). An easily cracked space woefully, but decent for throwaway passwords, especially if they're required to change them.
Say that again after somebody posts something in your name that results in a lawsuit. Yes, we've already seen companies such as Microsoft applying legal pressure to have things removed. One of these days, somebody is going to post something libelous (sp?), or something else illegal, that will result in legal action from the injured party. You maintain the copyright on all articles posted. You will have to prove your innocence, which is more hassle than I'm prepared to put up with.
;)
Please correct me if I'm wrong or barking up the wrong tree
You know, that site full of smart ass, 20-20 hindsight kids getting cracked. "We told you all that long haired pinko commie type hippie fag freeware was in secure!", market-troids will cheerfully chirp, "You need to grow up and get yourself a real commerical OS." The New York Times has been making references to SlashDot (not always flattering). Even Scientific American made a snide comment or two this month about the "propeller head crowd on Slashdot." ZDNet will burst, and the clueless will be able to stick their heads in the sand again.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"The password to the Air Shield is 1 2 3 4 5 sir."
"Brilliant! That's the same password I have on my luggage."
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
If you have a piece of data that can be used as-is to authenticate, then you have what we usually call "plain text passwords". At least, what you're storing is plaintext. Scrambling it a little to confuse people and not letting people use that password on a web form doesn't really buy you much security. Of course, these days, crypt() and lousy passwords doesn't get you very good security, either...
IOW, your solution doesn't help any. If they get the password db, they can log in. Okay, okay, maybe brain-dead script kiddies can't.
Just wondering, is {} pronounced
"O-pen-brak-et-klozd-brak-et"
Or is there a Dutch pronunciation???
I thought the passwords were stored as hashes. This sure is one helluva breach of confidence...
--
The shareholder is always right.
You mean root to the box that hosts /.?
I thought they just pulled CmdrTaco's password and logged in to admin.pl and posted the story. Wasn't that the extent of their intrusion?
Signal 11's karma exceeded an unsigned BIGINT and triggered a buffer overflow leading to an exploit. Slash code operators are encouraged to kick Signal 11 in the nuts until the problem goes away.
Damn, I can't believe I've been reading slashdot for that long!
I seem to recall consensus at the time was that the attacker probably got in through a hole in BIND 4.9.6, which was distributed with the version of RedHat (5.0? 5.1?) slashdot was running.
--
I must agree. I've been running Crack for both Unix (Solaris and GNU/Linux) and Windows NT where I work, and it's amazing how many passwords were found just in a few minutes. Crack is an extremely cool program.
c 50-faq.html
http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~crypto/download/
I don't remember where I found the NT port of Crack. Sorry.
Is there anyone else out there who hears warning bells when reading the words, "Change your password immediately here." with a link? Has nobody ever heard of social engineering? I know that I'm not the only person on Slashdot with a mild case of paranoia.
[dsplat ducks under his desk to avoid being spotted by the black helicopters]
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
Doesn't everyone just use 'slashdot' for their password?
kc.
kc.
"You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel." - Homer J. Simpson
I'm glad somebody else has the dream of customizing the colours of Slashdot .. the white/teal look, while is nice and pleasing to the eye, is getting a little old :/
.. I know, it's white on teal. Cut me some slack here!) would be a nice change of pace!
Now, colour schemes like Enlightenment's (with the nice graphics
------------
CitizenC
I'm wondering here
the sample story? You know, the one that tells you to login as God/Pete
and also suggests that the first thing you should do is change the password?
<nelson>Ha Ha!</nelson>
Why bother changing your password? It just means that you'll have another unencrypted plain-text password laying around... Besides who really cares if your /. account gets hacked? What are they going to do? Kill your Karma?
Bah! Wait until they get the Slashcode 2.0 up and can affirm that encrypted passwords are being used.
Remember those clever chaps in Milwaukee, the 414's who broke into several DEC systems years ago? Then tried to capitalize on it, by selling their story to Hollywood?
Their big secret was in knowing the default password to the system account [1,2] was SYSTEM, pretty smart of DEC, pretty dumb of users not to change this immediately.
The less we study history, the more we are doomed to relive it.
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
dnnrly
dnnrly
2 years ago we had the bad kind of hacker: he rooted the whole damn system and never told us how they gained entry.
maybe the old hacker should sue nohican and {} for violating his intellectual property
Slashot had a story about 3 weeks ago stating that Western Union got cracked and recommended to their customers to changes passwords and even cancel their credit cards.
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
--weenie NT4 user: bite me!
"Computers are nothing but a perfect illusion of order" -- Iggy Pop
You mean we're supposed to have a password? :>
Too much of linux and opensource have this idea that boxes should be "locked down" and "hardened" after installation. Really smart people say that, but it's totally wrong. Boxes should start out without known ways of getting in. Any access should be "opened" or "unlocked" or even "softened" if that's what you want to say.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/zd/20000928/tc/mitnic k_to_it_managers_everybody_is_suspect__1 .html is a story about Kevin Mitnick's warning that people are always the weakest link in security. Here we have slashdot admins making a simple password mistake. Just imagine what the average user on a corporate network (with read access to the rest of that network) could do.
I would have made it a link, but either netscape or slashdot kept putting spaces in it because it was so long. Sorry.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
For crying out loud, this got moderated *up*? The guy wrote the stuff 3 years ago, when Slashdot users could hardly have been referred to as customers. Heck, even now, I don't know that you can hold them to "Customer focus." Last I checked they weren't charging us anything to use slashdot, and weren't selling our data to anyone for profit. If you want to call loading a banner ad being a customer, then I guess...
But still, that's no reason for the demeaning tone of this post. I just love the way we geeks all tend to rip each other to shreds when we make stupid mistakes, and when we do so, the tone we take is almost always one of "I know everything -- I do no wrong." This should have been moderated as "Flamebait."
You had no moral obligation to inform the readers of anything. Slashdot folks are a pretty educated crew -- we're fully capable of drawing our own conclusions, thank you.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
host -a -l slashdot.org (:
the database was hosted on just one box, never touched the webservers
True enough, but do remember that the weakest link defines how strong the chain is.
So what if you encrypt passwords on the server, passwords are stored in cookies on your home machine, as well as sent plaintext over miles upon miles of internet cabling before reaching slashdot.org.
If someone really wanted everyone's slashdot passwords, all they'd have to do is sniff some connection along the way.
Hackers will always hack in. There's no such thing as an invincible system. It's just a matter of time and determination (as we've seen time and time again).
"Darn, my winmodem won't work with Linux? I'll have to recompile it... with my blowtorch."
/. does have a short memory span, doesn't it?
Don't you remember what happened to K5?
Bleh.
--
Peter
There's no little piece of trojan code that's going to record my password and send it off to somewhere else, is there? No, probably not...
So, how do we know CmdrTaco wrote this article himself if some cracker/hacker gained god access? Well, it probably was the real CmdrTaco.
Probably.
:-)
It's 11pm, do you know what your deamons are up to?
I just find it ironic that there have been a couple stories on Slashdot over the last month about security holes resulting from unchanged default passwords (i.e. Microsoft SQL), and now Slashdot falls to the same issue.
damn i dont exist?
The person that left the default password on a publically accessible server should be canned.
At any job I've worked, something like this would get the preson responsible auto-canned for not making reasonable efforts to protect company data.
This is a special case, becasue the person who decided to implement a 'default password' in slashcode also works in the company where it is used. CmdrTaco also needs a good butt-kickin. Did feature lust could your judgement?
Also, the idea of storing the user database in clear text on a publically accessible server is also insane. Store nothing on publically accessible webservers.
I totally cringed when CmdrTaco decided to proclaim "No one would ever have gotten in if it wasn't for the default password".
OH MY GOD
I hope he takes a good look at his bliefs surrounding security. That's a very cocky and naive thing to say. I'd submit that someone who believes that enough to say that will most certainly get 'cracked' again. Have a nice day :)
Apologies to Sam Cooke (and Art Garfunkel)
// beldon@scamail.com
"Don't know much about TCP
Even less ICMP
Don't know how to make a subnet class
Even script kiddies would kick my ass
But if an OS that can be bought
Will install securely by default
What a wonderful thing that would be
Don't know much about LAND attack
Don't know how to spoof an IP stack
Don't know much about the port I'm on
Can't decide to leave a daemon on
If I install OpenBSD
And it does most of my work for me
What a wonderful thing that will be
Now I don't claim to be a sys admin
But now broadband's in my town
And I have to put something between me
And the people who know how to bring me down
Don't know much about DDoS
And my shell programming is a mess
Don't know how to build a firewall
Don't know much about nothin' at all
But if I can shield my root account
Without emptying my bank account
What a wonderful thing that would be."
-- Beldon
It's archived here.
---
Despite his attempts to use the ESR-friendly term "cracker" in this story, we see at the end that not even Taco really thinks that cracker is the correct terminology:
"Honestly, thats the best kind of hack. 2 years ago we had the bad kind of hacker: he rooted the whole damn system and never told us how they gained entry."
So next time Taco posts an article where he whinges about the difference between "hacker" and "cracker", it's pure pandering to the unwashed masses on /.
Is this what happens when you put PERLs before Swine?