Slashdot Mirror
70% of Sites Hackable? $1,000 Says "No Way"
netbuzz writes "Security vendor Acunetix is flogging a survey that claims 7 out 10 Web sites it checked have vulnerabilities posing a medium- to high-level risk of a breach of personal data. Network World's go-to security guy, Joel Snyder, says that percentage is 'sensationalist nonsense' — and he's willing to back that judgment with $1,000 of his own money. In fact Snyder will pay up if Acunetix can get personal data out of 3 of 10 sites chosen at random from their survey list."
I can totally believe this. Especially after some recent research that I've done into the security of one specific web hosting provider. It wasn't the users' fault, it was very poor security on the side of the provider. Of course, the provider states how good their security is on their website, but its only false security. For instfance, home directories have the permissions 711, which would make the causual unix user think that you can't view files in the person's home directory, but of course, since there is a predictable structure under that, it is trivial to get into someone's web directory which is world readable. And thus you can get access to their database passwords and so hon. And this is a very large hosting provider, over 100,000 websites are hosted with them. I can only imagine that many other hosting providers have these same types of problems.
Actually, I am wanting to release my findings publically and name the hosting providerf, but I'm worried about getting sued or being investigated. I would think that as long as I only state factual information that can be obtained in a trivial and public manner that it would be alright. I mean I'm not smashing the stack or anything to get this information, I'm talking about all I have to do is use commands like cd, cat and find. Real hackers tools, eh? With how many users and servers this place has, I'm amazed they havben't had all their user's accounts wiped out. It would be trivial to do.
I think I may start an anonymous blog to document these cases.
...seriously, this can't be? Right?
The actual hacking, not the challenge, that is.
.: Max Romantschuk
For those who didn't notice, Acunetix replied on TFA and basically claimed his challenge would be unfair to the third-party websites. They offered to attempt to hack his own website instead and demanded that he post a notice saying he had vulnerabilities, if they find and exploit any.
While I admit this is an interesting idea, it does nothing to prove or disprove their 70% claim.
I have to agree with them that hacking websites is illegal and ethically wrong for them, though. Good call on their part.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Reminds me of: "Three statisticians went out hunting, and came across a large deer. The first statistician fired, but missed, by a meter to the left. The second statistician fired, but also missed, by a meter to the right. The third statistician didn't fire, but shouted in triumph, "On the average we got it!"
"I've got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel"
Acunetix have just HACKED into Snyder's bank account and helped themselves to the $1000.
I'll put $10k on the table with Snyder.
In fact I had my site checked with Acunetix when I requested a trial.
And as a crazy geek I have coded a WebIDS for my CMS and a security system so tight that's close to, I dare say, un-hackable.
So I had them scan my site just for kicks and to see the HTTP requests they were using.
Needless to say ALL I got were false positives, well I did have an e-mail address on the site for submitions of papers, code etc and they reported it as a personal data.
I replied to them explaining that the site is perfectly safe, they checked again and I got a "We're sorry for the inconvenience." styled e-mail admitting the results were wrong.
Anw, Acunetix can find vulnerabilities, but it's not *THAT* accurate, its good enough though.
I'm sure that if they're serious about actually showing that the statistics are useful then we can find 10 random sites who are willing to be 'ethically hacked.'
... well, they could read all those posts that are on the web site. Except they wouldn't be nicely formatted, but real men write HTML with vi anyway. Maybe they could store or corrupt data with the injection, and maybe they couldn't. Maybe (and this is most likely) they could cause the script to blow up. Is that "hacking" a web site? Hell, I get script explosion errors from web sites WITHOUT hacking them.
The astonishing thing is that most people who will read this press release just don't get it, and the depths of their not getting it are even more astonishing...
I am challenging the conclusion, not the data. I believe that they think that they have found vulnerabilities. I suspect they have found a lot of lousy code. No surprise here. 70%, sure. I'll bite off on that number. I'm not arguing with that.
But there is a huge difference between turning a vulnerability into a breach. Let me give you an example. A lot of Cross-Site Scripting attacks let you steal cookies. So they probably found those. But the question is: when you have a cookie, what can you do with it? Can you steal important data? Can you turn that cookie into a breach? Good web sites that use them also tie cookies to your IP address, which means that if you steal my cookie, you got nothing but crumbs. So the point is not that there are these vulnerabilities, but that they have done nothing to show whether these vulnerabilities are truly breachable and able to get an attacker real useful data.
Same for things like directory listing. You can do that to my web site. Is that a security problem? No, in fact, I turned it on specifically. If I didn't want people to read it, I wouldn't have put it on the friggin' web server.
Is a web site that's susceptible to an SQL injection attack hackable? Depends on where you get to inject the code. I'm sure that someone who put their mind to it could take a web site like, say, slashdot, and inject some SQL. Then they might be able to
Is being able to view a script a security vulnerability? it depends. It depends on the web site. The script. The webmaster's intentions.
What percentage web sites actually have data that's worth anything?
So the point is not that they've found a lot of theoretical issues, but whether they've actually found security issues. And the only way, in my mind, to see whether they have is to see if the issues can be exploited. If they can, I'll pay up. If they can't be exploited, then all they've done is made long lists of things that don't matter from a security point of view.
Very long lists.
You should only agree an audit by totally trustworthy auditors, working for a major client, which is not the case here.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
My first thought was "whats the percentage of sites run by Nuke's, Joomla's, Mambo's and such CMS systems". I mean, when PHPBB gets hacked (again) it affects a HUGE number of sites. My employer recently had a security audit and they found out what most of us developers have been telling them for a while...they had consultants build things, decrease timelines while increasing scope creep...things got fudged and now they don't understand why our sites failed. I look at some of the stuff I inherited and just look at it and say WTF? I built a little CMS for myself, a few people downloaded it and use it, it's grown and I just experienced my first real exploit in my 10 year career in web dev. it was a REAL learning experience for me. I know all the theory of security and all that, but practicing it is another matter when people want things yesterday it makes it hard resist cutting that little corner.
dB Masters
Professional Hitman Mr Smith is flogging a survey that claims 7 out 10 people he has checked have a lack of police protection posing a medium- to high-level risk of getting them murdered. The police's go-to security guy, Mr Doe, says that percentage is 'sensationalist nonsense' -- and he's willing to back that judgment with $1,000 of his own money. In fact Mr Doe will pay up if Mr Smith can whack 3 of 10 people chosen at random from his survey list."
This is tosh.
If you are seriously claiming that you could 'hack' any host running any software to get arbitrary permissions, or a shell session, or access an arbitrary file then you are just mad. On what basis do you say this? It's connected to a network therefore it can be hacked? Whuh?
(I can't believe you were modded informative of all things. Insightful I might have laughed off, but informative?!)
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.