Protect Your Interwebs!
Research by Daniel Cid. Authored by Dre Armeda.
One thing you can’t take away from some of the attackers we deal with everyday is their creativity. From time to time we write about new trends we’re seeing, and this post is no different. We’re seeing a new tactic recently, and it may be affecting your pockets, even if you’re not into the latest trend of using digital currency.
This morning the Joomla development team released a new version of the Joomla platform. This is a Security release, so please be sure to update if you’re on the 2.x branch. If you’re on the 1.x branch the odds of updating seamlessly is highly unlikely so please do so only if you’re engaging a developer to assist you.
This release address 7 security issues, all of them appear to be low to moderate and revolve around Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Denial of Service (DOS) and Privilege Escalation. It also contains another 38 bug fixes.
Security Fixes include:
If you can, please be sure to update, you can get your latest releases off the Joomla website here.
Shame on us for not catching this a month ago when it was first reported, but it seems that two of the biggest caching plugins in WordPress have what we would classify a very serious vulnerability – remote code execution (RCE), a.k.a., arbitrary code execution:
…arbitrary code execution is used to describe an attacker’s ability to execute any commands of the attacker’s choice on a target machine or in a target process. – Wikipedia
It appears that a user by the name of kisscsaby first disclosed the issue a month ago via the WordPress forums. As of 5 days ago both plugin authors have pushed new versions of their plugins disabling the vulnerable functions by default. The real concern however is the seriousness of the vulnerability and the shear volume of users between both plugins.
There are a few posts, released within the past few hours that do a great job of explaining what the issue was and what was being exploited. You can find some good after action thoughts on Frank Goosens’ blog and on Acunetix’s blog as well.
Tomorrow I will be flying to my hometown (Miami) to give a Website Security presentation to a bunch of enthusiastic online professionals at an event called WordCamp. If you’re not familiar with these events, they are global events put together by the local populace to focus on a specific platform – WordPress. The event is called WordCamp Miami 2013, if you plan to be there definitely look me up.
I will be presenting at 1400 (EST), also known as 2:00 pm to most.
I will be volunteering at the Happiness Bar right after my talk at 1445 (EST), 2:45 pm.
If you’re interested, they are going to be live-streaming the event and you’re more than welcome to watch.
Our Senior Malware Engineer, Fioravante Cavallari, is at it again. I think he has made it his personal mission in life to expel all Joomla hacks, he loves them that much – true story.. 
In all seriousness, he found another gem yesterday. It’s well written; it includes comments explaining what they are doing, uses proper syntax, it was broken up and sprinkled throughout another good file generating no errors, it wasn’t obfuscated and it leverages good variable naming conventions. What more can we ask for, right?!?!?!
Don’t ask how we found it, a true gentlemen never discloses his nightly affairs.
A few months ago I wrote about Conditional Malware, we’d categorize this one into the same family. In my post it was a very simple explanation and code base, you could clearly see the IP’s being filtered and what it was doing, here we have to think a bit. Remember, you’re not likely to find it in tact like this, it’ll likely be broken and sprinkled through out your file. Here you go:
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Last night we were contacted by Adam Pickering about a security flaw discovered in Easy Digital Downloads (EDD), a free WordPress eCommerce plugin that allows you to sell digital downloads. If you use EDD and haven’t done so already, please make sure to upgrade to Version 1.4.4.2 immediately!
The plugin author, Pippin Williamson received word about the flaw within hours of it being validated, and had a patched version up on the WordPress Plugin Directory within the hour.
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New year, same tricks, mostly because they work. That’s how we’re kicking off the new year folks.
In September of 2012, Dennis, of Unmask Parasites, first wrote about rogue apache modules being injected into web servers. It has since been all the rave. It seems every week we’re handling more and more cases, from private servers to large enterprises, being impacted by the same issue. As for the vector, in a good number of instances it comes down to access and in others vulnerabilities in software, software like PLESK.
What we have started to see is an evolution in these attacks. In one such case we saw two modules injected into the server. One was legitimate and was referencing another illegitimate module. Normal tactics failed to disclose it’s location. Monitoring the traffic of the server using tools like TCPDUMP did in fact show the infection was still present. We briefly wrote about some of these evolutions in a recent post, in which we articulate some of the things we are seeing. Fortunately, a lot of this comes down to the basics of knowing what your servers are running and what they are designed to do.
It’s for this reason that we’re pleading with organizations to apply better practice when managing their web servers. These servers are sitting between you, your environment, and your followers. They are prime targets and less and less focus is being placed on them.
Things you need to be doing:
Often you hear the question, “What plugins should I use for WordPress Security?”. It’s a valid question, but I don’t think it’s the best approach if it’s the only question you’re asking, or the only action you’re taking. If you’re leaving the security of your blog to a plugin from a 3rd party alone, you’re doing it wrong!
Risk reduction is the name of the game. A collective set of actions, tools, and processes all helping lower the risk of exploitation.
It starts with you. Follow these steps and you lower your risk floor significantly (without the use of a lot of plugins!):
Not sure why more emphasis isn’t put on access, but I’ll spend some time on it today. Understand though that this emphasis is not just something pulled out of the clouds. Instead it has come from months of thought and research – courtesy of client environments, enterprise incident handling cases and our own honey pots.
For some reason, what I have gathered, is that website owners, in their minds, think they are really ingenious. We think that what we know, no one else knows; the harsh reality is that’s so far from the truth. The are also those that buy into the idea that information security is an absolute, if only it were. Website owners have to learn to set their expectations, the InfoSec domain is about risk reduction. That is the first thing to understand.
While software vulnerabilities are a real threat, without tangible evidence, I am willing to bet that access is gaining ground on software vulnerabilities more than most realize. Still working on evidence to support this. A good thing to remember is that as a product becomes more secure, and the attack vectors decrease, access only increases in importance.
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Here is a great presentation given by Tony Perez our COO in October of 2012 at WordCamp Las Vegas:
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