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According to DreamHost’s Status and Blog, staff noticed some unusual activity on one of their databases that held user login information for shell accounts. While the passwords were mostly encrypted, hackers “hacker found a legacy pool of unencrypted FTP/shell passwords in a database table that we had not previously deleted,” according to DreamHost CEO Simon Anderson.
As a precaution, ALL shell/FTP account passwords were reset by DreamHost. While it will cause some inconvenience for users trying to access their sites over SSH/FTP, the implications are much more serious. A lot of CMS systems store their database username and passwords in plaintext on configuration files. If whoever gained access to DreamHost’s shell account database and managed to decrypt the information, then they would have unmitigated access to not only sites’ files, but they could potentially (and most likely) gain access to the back-end database driving those sites with all user data. This could be a very major breach of user data from one of the largest web hosts in the United States.
DreamHost is being unusually mum about the technical details about the hack and is angering customers over their negligence regarding out-dated server software. While most front-end software is kept up-to-date, their back-end software is grossly outdated and there appears to be no real effort nor care by DreamHost to keep OS and back-end software updated. What makes things worse is that DreamHost’s official stance on their security solution is to not disclose what technologies they use. Rather than taking a proactive and relatively transparent stance to their own security systems, the company has decided to take-up a reactive and a “security through obscurity” stance.
Related articles
- DreamHost Security Issue Prompts FTP Password Resets (sucuri.net)
- Changing Shell/FTP Passwords due to Security Issue (dreamhoststatus.com)
- Security Update (dreamhost.com)
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NetworkWorld has a very interesting writeup about a report that six German Information Security researchers published outlining very massive and highly exploitable flaws in Cloud Computing services; specifically Amazon’s EC2 and S3 as well as Eucalyptus Cloud Computing Software. Old concepts like XSS and what is referred to as XML Signature Wrapping attacks on the SOAP interfaces of the aforementioned cloud services. Very troubling and a large blow to the legitimacy of security in the cloud.
The full PDF of the German researchers’ findings can be found here.
Related articles
- Researchers Demo Cloud Security Issue With Amazon AWS Attack (pcworld.com)
- Researchers demo cloud security issue with Amazon AWS hijacking attack (infoworld.com)
- Cloud computing: Gaps in the ‘cloud’ (physorg.com)
- Researchers demo cloud security issue with Amazon AWS attack (networkworld.com)
WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg posted on WordPress.org’s News page today that several popular WordPress plugins had changes committed to them that had been determined to not be from their developers. The commits actually added back doors that would compromise potentially hundreds of thousands of WordPress installations that utilized them. As a precautionary measure, all changes were reverted for these plugins and ALL passwords to WordPress.org, BuddyPress.org, and bbPress.org reset. There aren’t many more details as of yet, but there is sure to be a witch hunt over the integrity of WordPress.org’s security as well as all code that powers the CMS.
British game developer Codemasters, who develops games for almost every platform out there, has had its site breached and has had ‘tens of thousands’ of customers’ personal data stolen. According to the BBC:
The firm described the data theft as "significant" saying names, addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth were all taken on 3 June.
The company has since taken its website offline and visitors are now directed to Codemasters’ Facebook page for the meantime. This is yet another example of companies learning the hard way that IT security infrastructure is not something that should be neglected.
Details on who was responsible for the theft and methods used to carry out the attack are as of yet unknown.
I found this gem today. Great to hear we have some guy from Microsoft running the Cybersecurity show in the USA (that was sarcasm):
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appointed former Microsoft executive Philip Reitinger as director of the National Cybersecurity Center.
In an announcement earlier this week, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano filled three positions that support cybersecurity operations at DHS. Also appointed were Greg Schaffer as assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications and Bruce McConnell as counselor tothe National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) Deputy Under Secretary.
Reitinger fills the NCSC post left vacant with the departure of Rod Beckstrom. Beckstrom resigned in March citing his frustration with cybersecurity planning between federal agencies and the lack of funding for cybersecurity issues. Reitinger will also continue to serve as Deputy Under Secretary for the NPPD, a post he was appointed to in March.
KBT Computers, Jun 2009
Read the rest over at KBT Computers’ Blog
The network security guys at T-Mobile USA probably breached their underpants after some black hat or group of black hats named “Pwnmobile” posted on seclists.org a sizeable list of internal hostnames, OSes, partial descriptions, internal IP addresses, and facilities relating to the back-end of T-Mobile’s customer management and services network.
At first, T-Mobile tried to say it was just a list pulled from a corporate document; but now the company is admitting that it was, in fact a major security breach according to a USA Today Blog and are not disclosing how much data was taken. Odds are, if whoever managed to get this far, a very sizeable amount of data was captured. The person who made the posting mentioned that they had tried to sell the information to competitors, but they were not taken seriously.
On a slightly related note, the posting related the T-Mobile hack with Check Point. Does this mean a perimeter Check Point firewall was either hacked or exploited to gain access to this network? Only further elaboration from Pwnmobile, T-Mobile, or an insider can say. There have been several recently published high-visibility Check Point exploits and perhaps they were used in the hack.
