Zero Day Vulnerability in OpenX Source 2.8.11 and Revive Adserver 3.0.1

If you are using OpenX or the new Revive Adserver (fork of OpenX), you need to update it ASAP. Florian Sander discovered a serious SQL injection vulnerability that affects all versions of OpenX and all versions of the Revive Adserver. From the Revive advisory:

An SQL-injection vulnerability was recently discovered and reported to the Revive Adserver team by Florian Sander.

The vulnerability is known to be already exploited to gain unauthorized access to the application using brute force mechanisms, however other kind of attacks might be possible and/or already in use. The risk is rated to be critical as the most common end goal of the attackers is to spread malware to the visitors of all the websites and ad networks that the ad server is being used on.

The vulnerability is also present and exploitable in OpenX Source 2.8.11 and earlier versions, potentially back to phpAdsNew 2.0.x.

The XML-RPC delivery invocation script was failing to escape its input parameters in the same way the other delivery methods do, allowing attackers to inject arbitrary SQL code via the “what” parameter of the delivery XML-RPC methods. Also, the escaping technique used to handle such parameter in the delivery scripts was based on the addslashes PHP function and has now been upgraded to use the dedicated escaping functions for the database in use.

We highly recommend anyone using OpenX to upgrade to the latest Revive version, or as a temporary fix, remove the file “www/delivery/axmlrpc.php” from your installation.

Clients using our CloudProxy Website Firewall are already protected against it. If you want to protect your OpenX / Revive install, you can sign up for CloudProxy here.