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Mass Website Hack Compromises 200,000 Sites
Stony Stevenson writes "Hot on the heels of a recent hack in which 10,000 sites were compromised, researchers have disclosed a new large-scale attack. Researchers at McAfee estimated that the attack has been active for roughly one week, and in that time frame has managed to place itself on roughly 200,000 web pages. Most of the infected pages are running the phpBB forum software, said McAfee. The compromised pages are embedded with a Javascript file that links to the site hosting the attack."
Yeah, I installed it way back in the days and forgot it was on my website. I have now gotten several emails from my domain host stating attacks on it using an exploit in phpBB.
Back in the later months of 2001 we experienced a gradual realization that there was something quite amiss about our government's response to terrorist threats which resulted in the disaster of September of that year. It turns out that not only did we know that there would be a terrorist attack, but we had credible leads indicating who and how it would be carried out. But the lack of information sharing led to disaster.
Here too, we have a threat which is already running wild. Thousands of websites are being attacked. Unfortunately, this article, like many which abound in the security theatre online media, is long on consequences and short on details. Someone knows how the attack spreads, but they aren't sharing the means of stopping the attack.
This article and its lack of content does as much to spread fear and chaos among computer users as the actual attack. These are technical problems which can be fixed. By not being clear about the threat, the article turns hackers into bogeymen that can't be stopped. Give some better info, tell us how to close the hole, and let us get back to work.
We don't run phpBB. Is it just me, or is phpBB almost always the target of these kinds of attacks? I mean, there are probably hundreds of CMS systems out there, but almost every mass site hijacking/defacement I can remember has involved phpBB.
Am I completely off-base here?
Why can't I mod "-1 Idiot"?
My old phpBB forum got hacked. Wanna know why? Cuz I used the auto-installing plugin that my host provided. It was about 20 versions behind and they NEVER updated it. So it had a gaping security hole in it. And guess what else! I couldn't patch it because it was considered some sort of embedded plugin that I couldn't tocuh the system files of. I had to install a fresh, updated version and phpBB and then copy the database over AND alter the database manually to reflect all the changes between between versions, which was a major pain in the ass. Needless to say I was pissed. Oh and I tried to sue/have arrested those Zone-H assholes that posted it like it was some sort of trophy case but apparently they're not hosted in the US so I dropped it. I would be willing to guess that every single hack was because of outdated phpBB quick installs like ipowerweb makes available on their servers.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
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Table-ized A.I.
Does a light bulb dim in the minds of some computer users at the prospect of free pornography? It is the easiest thing in the world to get free porn online, why is installing something on your computer from a porn website all of a sudden appealing when a pop up window seduces you into it? I have a new term for this, it is called getting "FreePwned."
For the longest time phpBB did not even have the option to force users to authenticate their email address let alone use any captcha on the registration page. For this reason many existing phpBB forums are flooded with fake accounts, and possible these were used in order to post the links or malware.
200,000 web pages is not the same thing as 200,000 web sites.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
yes, I was wondering the same. suppose one had a site with phpbb installed and wanted to check if their site was one of those compromised. how would one go about that? tfa doesn't mention. it seems somehow half-assed to publish that several tens of thousands of sites have been compromised, yet not provide any useful information regarding detection, cleaning and prevention.
The title (which appears to be the only part the submitter actually "authored") is incorrect and conflicts with the text it quotes. An estimated 200,000 pages (most likely individual posts in phpBB forums) are out there, not sites.
According to this video, the pages are being inserted via SQL injection attacks. The 200k pages is based on a google search (he does not reveal what criteria he is searching for) which came back with 150k hits. So it is not clear how many actual sites are compromised. One could assume that once a phpBB site is compromised, every page of every thread, which is analogous to individual web pages, would redirect to the worm download site. A popular forum could easily have several thousand thread-pages. In fact, every single page would probably be redirecting, which would include each user's summary page (which would be in the thousands for even a small site). So a small number of cites could be accounting for all the 200k pages.
Also, in the video it is clear from the url that it is a phpBB2 site that is compromised. phpBB is currently at a major version of 3.
Better known as 318230.
But I've made some modifications to my install. I replaced the registration and profile pages with a web form that posts to an Email parser. There was a lot of activity the last few days, spam registrations out the yang.
It's funny because to them it looks like the registration page and they keep running scripts against it. I block the IP ranges of the spam registrations at the boundary but they just keep block hopping.
They'll still get a script reg through sometimes, so there's something I'm missing. I could just install the security updates but it's so much more fun to try and tweak it myself.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And nothing of value was lost.
Tell him to set up power saving correctly. Although my computer needs to stay connected to the mains for suspend to ram to work. It's to most intensive purposes "turned off". Takes 7 seconds (at most) to go to sleep and a few seconds wake up and I never have a problem.
This is the kind of thing that really upsets me. I mean, if someone has the 1337z sk1llz to do this sort of thing, why aren't they using those skills to make a fortune, instead of using them to fsck up other peoples' websites? that sort of behavior ain't cool. in fact, it's decidedly uncool and people who act that way should be banished to a big island for criminals, like Australia.
When this news broke last night (my local time), my heart skipped a beat because one of my phpBB instances isn't totally up to date, so I did a quick bit of research to see if I could fill in the massive blanks left by this report. Yes, it does look like an SQL injection attack: the attack appends a SCRIPT tag to the forum's main title, which is inserted into various locations on every page from a database field. Due to one thing and another this results in some hideously malformed HTML, but it has the desired effect (of executing the Javascript) in the major browsers. I suspect that the search in question is a Google "intitle:" search which keys off the domain name of the site carrying the exploit code, since this becomes a visible part of the title.
I have no idea exactly how the SQL injection is being effected, but my phpBB forum was not impacted. This may be because my version is not too old, because I lack a vulnerable add-on module, or because my custom anti-bot mechanisms deflected the attack. I couldn't see anything in the past few days of log activity which contained key strings used in the exploit, but I didn't search very hard once I determined that my instance was unaffected.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Granted PHPBB was hacked because it's poorly written and these sites were likely not kept up to date, but... these kinds of success large scale attacks really don't do much to show how much more secure open source software is - even very popular FOSS like this!
Yeah yeah, I know I'll be marked as troll/flamebait or whatever... but I don't see any upmodded discussion of this, it's a serious issue, if only for the perception it fosters in the industry.
And then, you read the top of the report and discover that all this is old news, that you've been only reading spam for the last two years.
For a second, you think that humanity may not be the mass of morons you thought. That patching the bug will let you access the real, intelligent, acute comments of human forums.
Then, as the patch starts to work, you see those comments; the beauty of human forums brings a tear to your eye. As you start posting, you feel unable to write, your keyboard doesn't seem to work.
You then understand you were just another spam generator, and the patch is killing you.
Fade to black.
Ok, what?
First, I'm not sure if your talking ASP or ASP.Net, but either way the vast majority of your comment can be shortened to:
There are lots of PHP packages out there. People think they are safe because they are not MS. PHP packages should be re-written in ASP. PHP breaks due to updates but ASP updates better, therefore ASP is a better choice. PHP isn't inherently insecure, it's the packages.
Your entire statement boils down to this logic:
1) There are a lot of insecure Packages in PHP
3) It's not an insecurity in PHP, it's an insecurity in the packages
2) ASP updates better than PHP
Your comparing apples (ASP) to oranges (PHP Packages). I have no experience how well or poorly the security of packages in PHP perform against the security of packages in ASP.Net, we would have to pick a large pool of them to find out. And just because Windows Updates makes updates available for ASP.Net does not mean that people actually are that willing to reboot their web farms for every update that appears. Your saying the problem is bad coding and that ASP solves it, I would beg to differ.
And here is my anecdotal comment:
I have answered thousands of ASP questions (ASP used to be my primary web 'language') as well as written/re-written many sites and over time I have seen a lot of site examples and snippets that would leave a page wide open or in a position to break on regular occasions (or just plain didn't work). On the other hand I have worked with several PHP packages that were solidly put together and worked against a range of PHP versions. PHP must be better because I haven't personally seen anywhere near as many errors in coding as I have in ASP. None of the first several thousand ASP posts would work at all against the next version of the language (ASP 3 => ASP.Net) and needed to be rewritten from scratch, but most or all of the packages I used with PHP 4 worked just fine with PHP 5.
Whee signature.
No, that's why you're not supposed to use software which is so full of holes that the only way to keep it safe is to continuously upgrade as the problems are discovered one after another.
Looking through my 404 logs I get a bunch of kiddie auto scripts either looking to BB spam or hack in, here are some items which I figure are popular entry routes:
///include/print_category.php
/forum/index.php
/bbs/include/print_category.php
/functions.php
/board/index.php
/forums/index.php
/phpbb2/index.php
//calendar//tools/send_reminders.php
//skin/zero_vote/error.php (lots of these)
/skin/zero_vote/ask_password.php
//support/mailling/maillist/inc/initdb.php (a few of these)
/function.main
/comments.php
/MSOffice/cltreq.asp
/cgi-bin/bbs/read.cgi
//include/write.php
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The Fully Modded phpBB website is down, but it is basically a fork or extension of the base phpBB code, which remains secure.
I know I've labored the point about phpBB not being vulnerable to this kind of attack, but it really is built from the ground up for security. This exploit does not affect phpBB, just the heavily modified for "Fully Modded phpBB".
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.