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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 While most front-end software is kept up-to-date, their back-end software is grossly outdated and there appears to be no real effort nor care by DreamHost to keep OS and back-end software updated.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)

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.