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Mac OS X Security Competition Ends in 30 Minutes
ninja_assault_kitten writes "ZDnet is running an article on how a Swedish Mac OS X enthusiast held a competition to prove how good security was on his new fully patched Mac Mini was. Unfortunately, 30 minutes after the competition began, a hacker known as 'gwerdna' had broken in and defaced the website, thus winning the contest.
According to gwerdna, 'Mac OS X is easy pickings for bug finders. That said, it doesn't have the market share to really interest most serious bug finders.'." It's also worth noting a piece that says all the security news is much ado about nothing, in practical terms. The security contest also allowed people to have local access via SSH, so that had a lot to do with the crack.
It's a Mac. You don't _keep_ SSH on. It's disabled by default. You have to turn it on deliberately.
What I say does not represent the views of my employers, my friends, my cats, or myself.
The problem wasn't even that he had SSH running. It was that he was giving out accounts! I don't know what this guy was trying to prove, but his blind faith in Apple got him burned.
Somewhere inside of Apple, engineers are shaking their heads at this guy and the damage he's done to the Mac's reputation.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Not saying there's anything wrong with this, Solaris, FreeBSD, et al are the same, but while SSH may need enabling on a Mac desktop, it does not appear to on a Mac server.
Of course SSH is on by default on a Mac Server--it is designed to run, and be configured from first boot, headless. That would be pretty difficult to do if you had no services. Other default services are Apple Remote Desktop, for GUI control, and the Server Admin Suite; even the Apple Server Admin Tools can be port forwarded through SSH if you prefer.
The assumption is that servers will be managed by those with a clue, whereas desktops will not usually be. Also, no Mac desktops are expected to be configured and maintained headless from first boot, whereas you have to specify a video card for an Xserver for it to be graphical at all. I don't think those are unreasonable assumptions to make.
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$tar -xvf
Um, you are talking about OSX vs OSX Server. Which *Does* ship with these services enabled by default.
:-/
Which was also not what was compromised. Kind of nice for the GP to switch topics like that.
I want to know more details about this incident.
The machine was a Mac Mini "running a default install of OS X Tiger, plus fink and some decent versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP. Software Update recently updated it to Mac OS X 10.4.5 and fixed some security issues." It's colored orange for some odd reason, and sits on a bookshelf sideways. He, "set up an LDAP server and linked it to the Macs naming and authentication services, to let people add their own account to this machine."
This is all available on his webpage.
Basically, the guy is a moron. He thinks he's proving something by making a Desktop configured machine do server-class work, and then expect it not to get rooted.
Was it a local privelage escalation flaw?
Yes. The exact hole has been withheld, but it probably doesn't matter anyway. In a contest of machine vs. hacker where the owner is doing nothing to stop the hacker (and in fact, inviting him by removing barriers!), my money is on the hacker.
Was it a remote flaw in SSH or Apache? Maybe an SSH password attack?
The guy gives out SSH accounts. There was no need to penetrate this layer of security, because he left the door wide open.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade