Slashdot Mirror
PHP.net Compromised
An anonymous reader writes "The open source PHP project site was compromised earlier today. The site appears to have been compromised and had some of its Javascript altered to exploit vulnerable systems visiting the website. Google's stop-badware system caught this as well and flagged php.net as distributing malware, warning users whose browsers support it not to visit the site. The comment by a Google employee over at the hacker news thread (official Google webmaster forum thread) seems to suggest that php.net wasn't incorrectly flagged."
PHP does not have very good performance. node.js has very good performance, so does .NET.
PHP uses massive amounts of memory and security is a problem on I'd guess 99% of all shared hosts due to the difficulty in running the process as different users without using up all the RAM on the server. I've been working with PHP since 2006. No more, it's days are over.
Add to that the still broken implementation of Unicode. Embarassing is the Word for PHP.
I'm concerned about this initial response. It is definitely wrong, unless they INTENDED to link to malicious code. The article in the header has an actual PCAP of an actual successful infection, including the data from the injected iframe, the malicious SWF files, and the PE payload they fetched. There's no doubt about this. I can confirm the payload is live.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6604251
I'm more than idly curious if we can reach PHP.net via some other medium than their site which we surmise has been compromised, or if this is some form of coerced or deliberate backdoor.
However, what I think has happened is that this is the product of an Apache module: it's only serving the bad code once to any IP, and the access logs of course won't show it. You cannot trust the logs produced by a potentially-rooted computer.
This appears to be targeted watering-hole attack. This is certainly not a mere false positive. And there seems to be an awful lot of people trying hard to dismiss it. That said, this payload doesn't quite match any exploit kit I recognise.
And then I think who is high-profile, has a botnet that looks rather like this one, has what you could describe as a PR department, and could coerce PHP or Google into lying... and well, a certain agency comes to mind. Has someone taken Genie over, or is it still under the same C&C? Have they, or it, gone rogue as part of Turbine? Are they actually launching? I don't know, because the C&C just went dead...
I can predict there will be a lot of posts by developers of other languages laughing at PHP while ignoring their own languages massive security failures in the often not so distant past.
You know, I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.
I'm not saying that other languages are perfect, far from it. But the PHP world, by and large, is inhabited by people who don't really understand security. I've worked in it for a long time, and in every single application and library written in PHP that I encounter, I find results that show signs of knowing of, for instance, the existance of concepts called "SQL injection" and "XSS attack" but no understanding of what those things actually mean beyond taking some boilerplate kinda-solution in most but not all relevant locations.
By contrast, the libraries that Java and Python and Ruby provide, both out of the box and in third-party packages, tend to have been designed to make those kinds of attacks difficult to open yourself up to. The documentation for those packages emphasizes the security risks and concerns, the developer communities do everything they can to reduce those risks, and the result is that there are fewer minefields.
And that is why, in this paper, a whopping 80% of SQL injection and a disproportionately high number of XSS vulnerabilities are from projects that were written in PHP. It's possible to do the right thing in that language, but the evidence is fairly strong that developers focused primarily on PHP don't.
I am officially gone from