More Info on Debian.org Security Breach

mbanck writes "James Troup (part of the Debian System administration team) has published more information on the recent compromise of four debian.org machines. The attack vector seemed to be a sniffed password of an unprivileged account, from which the attacker somehow managed to gain root and install the suckit rootkit and crack the other machines. As the machines were fairly uptodate with respect to security, an as-of-yet unknown local root exploit might be in the wild, so keep an eye on your boxen.Note that the main ftp archive running on a sparc machine was not compromised, so the exploit might not yet be ported to non-i386 architectures."

Comments

Password was *sniffed*

[enosys]

Apparently the password was sniffed . This generally implies that it was obtained through monitoring network traffic and seeing it trasmitted in cleartext. A strong password wouldn't help here; only a good protocol would.

This was both user and admin stupidity I guess. Admins who care about security shouldn't permit access through cleartext passwords and users shouldn't send their password in cleartext if they care about their account. Unfortunately many users don't know about this risk.

Re:Password was *sniffed*

[radargeek]

Ah, but the SucKIT rootkit is particularly useful as it captures all tty i/o at the kernel level: all interaction with sshd is captured in a "sniffer" file. No decryption or packet sniffing needed- the attacker owns the system completely if they have installed SucKIT. If you don't trust a computer that you have ssh'd into, never ssh or scp from the untrusted computer back into your trusted systems. If the untrusted computer has been compromised, any login sessions that you have from the untrusted computer will expose the passwords if a SucKIT rootkit has been installed.

SuckIt Exploit

[Elik]

I have dealt with this rootkit for nearly 4 months when it first appeared. The fairly safe methods for avoiding this is by 3 steps which I have used and it works well since then.

Move the /tmp to it own partition and set it as noexec, nosuid and give it plenty of space, around 200 to 500 megs for it.

Patch the kernel with either Grsecurity or Openwall Patch on 2.4.22 kernel and set it as mononthlic kernel, not modular with no open hooks for adding additional modules.

Then I installed the suphp module for PHP to run scripts as users instead of nobody, especially when people trying to exploit it. I get it at www.suphp.org and it works extremely well. Since the changes, I haven't seen any rootkits being successfully implemented on the servers I admin. And note the fact that I manages over 260 servers for various clients points to the track records.