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Date:  Fri, 25 Jan 2008 14:11:19 -0500
From:  "Darrell D. Mobley" <dmobley (at mark) uhostme.com>
Subject:  [coba-e:11780] Cpanel reporting Javascript vulnerability...
To:  <coba-e (at mark) bluequartz.org>
Message-Id:  <005301c85f86$117fbe60$6400a8c0@HPPAVILION>
X-Mail-Count: 11780

The following advisory was circulated to cPanel sys admins today.  Could a
similar vulnerability be introduced into BlueQuartz?

 

---

cPanel announced today that it's security team has identified several key
components of a hack known as the Random JavaScript Toolkit. The systems
affected by this hack appear to be LinuxR based and are running a number of
different hosting platforms. While this compromise is not believed to be
specific to systems running cPanelR software, cPanel has worked with a
number of hosting providers and server owners to investigate this
compromise.

 

The cPanel Security Team has recognized that the vast majority of affected
systems are initially accessed using SSH with no indications of brute force
or exploitation of the underlying service. Despite non-trivial passwords,
intermediary users and nonstandard ports, the attacker is able to gain
access to the affected servers with no password failures. The cPanel
security team also recognized that a majority of the affected servers come
from a single undisclosed data-center. All affected systems have
passwordbased authentication enabled. Based upon these findings, the cPanel
security team believes that the attacker has gained access to a database of
root login credentials for a large group of Linux servers. Once an attacker
manually gains access to a system they can then perform various tasks. The
hacker can download, compile, and execute a log cleaning script in order to
hide their tracks. They 

also can download a customized root-kit based off of Boxer version 0.99 beta
3. Finally, the attacker searches for files containing credit card related
phrases such as cvc, cvv, and authorize.

 

The actual root-kit has been the subject of much speculation. The cPanel
security team asserts that the Boxer variant includes a small web-server
which is how the Javascript is distributed to unsuspecting users of any
website on the server. It is believed that the Javascript include is
injected into the HTML code after ApacheR has served the file but before it
has traveled through the TCP transport back to the user of the website. The
web-server is not loaded onto the hard drive directly but loaded directly
into memory from the infected Boxer binaries. More information about the
infected binaries can be found at:
http://www.cpanel.net/security/notes/random_js_toolkit.html.

 

The JavaScript being loaded by this web-server is directing users to another
server that scans the website user for a number of known vulnerabilities.
These vulnerabilities are then used to add the website user to a bot net.
More information about the JavaScript hacks can be found at:
http://www.finjan.com/Pressrelease.aspx?id=1820
<http://www.finjan.com/Pressrelease.aspx?id=1820&PressLan=1819&lan=3>
&PressLan=1819&lan=3.

 

Cleaning the Random JavaScript Toolkit requires the server to be booted into
single user mode and the removal of all infected binaries. More details on
how to do this can be found at:
http://www.cpanel.net/security/notes/random_js_toolkit.html.

 

The cPanel security team believes that the hacker has access to the database
of login credentials, the only way to prevent being hacked again is changing
the password and not releasing it to anyone. The preferred method however is
to move to SSH Keys and remove password authentication altogether.

 


	

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