Web Hosts — One-Stop-Shops For Mass Hacking?

jjp9999 writes "More than 70,000 websites were compromised in a recent breach of InMotion. Thousands of websites were defaced and others had alterations made to give users a hard time accessing their accounts and fixing the damage. A similar attack hit JustHost back in June, and in a breach of Australian Web host DistributeIT just prior to that, hackers completely deleted more than 4,800 websites that the company was unable to recover. The incidents raise concern that hacker groups are bypassing single targets and hitting Web hosts directly, giving them access to tens of thousands of websites, rather than single targets. While the attacks have caused damage, they weren't as malicious as they could have been. Rather than defacing and deleting, hackers could have quietly planted malware in the sites or stolen customer data. Web hosting companies could be one of the largest holes in non-government cybersecurity, since malicious hackers can gain access through openings left by the Web host, regardless of the security of a given site."

Comments

unable to recover?

[joshuac]

completely deleted more than 4,800 websites that the company was unable to recover

They host (at least) 4,800 websites yet they don't have a working backup system in place? Amazing.

Server Execution is the Issue

[zx2c4]

Most quality web hosting provides customers with shell access to the web server, or when cases where they don't, usually something like PHP is installed that usually allows for arbitrary execution.

On a web server that hosts a few thousand sites, using the Bing IP Search, you can find a list of all the domains. Usually there will be a lowest hanging fruit that's easy enough to pluck. Or, if you can't get shell access through a front-facing attack, you can always just sign up for an account with the hosting company yourself.

So once you have shell, then it's a matter of being a few steps ahead of the web host's kernel patching cycle. Most shared web hosting services don't utilize expensive services like ksplice and don't want to reboot their systems too often due to downtime concerns. So usually it's possible to pwn the kernel and get root with some script-kiddie-friendly exploit off exploit-db. And if not, no doubt some hacker collectives have repositories of unpatched 0-day properly weaponized exploits for most kernels. And even if they do keep their kernel up to date and strip out unused modules and the like, maybe they've failed to keep some [custom] userland suid executables up to date. Or perhaps their suid executables are fine, but their dynamic linker suffers from a flaw like the one Tavis found in 2010. And the list goes on and on -- "local privilege escalation" is a fun and well-known art that hackers have been at for years.

So the rest of the story should be pretty obvious... you get root and defeat selinux or whatever protections they probably don't even have running, and then you have access to their nfs shares of mounted websites, and you run some idiotic defacing script while brute-forcing their /etc/shadow yada yada yada.

The moral of the story is -- if you let strangers execute code on your box, be it via a proper shell or just via php's system() or passthru() or whatever, sooner or later if you're not at the very tip top of your game, you're going to get pwn'd.