Drupal.org Hacked ! More Than 967,000 Registered User Details Compromised

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/03/2013 09:07:00 pm

Drupal.org Hacked ! More Than 967,000 Registered User Details Compromised 

Drupal, one of the most famous and widely used open-source content management framework have fallen victim to cyber criminals. The Drupal Security Team and Infrastructure Team has discovered unauthorized access to account information on the official Drupal website and another site called groups.drupal.org. This security breach has exposed user names, country, and email addresses along with hashed passwords of more than 967,000 registered users on the Drupal.org. But still a matter of relief is that the breach failed to infiltrate the credit card details which was stored on the same server. According to security release unauthorized access was made via third-party software installed on the Drupal.org server infrastructure, and was not the result of a vulnerability within Drupal itself. Drupal team have worked with the vendor to confirm it is a known vulnerability and has been publicly disclosed. They are still investigating and will share more detail when it is appropriate. Upon discovering the files during a security audit, the security team has already shut down the association.drupal.org website to mitigate any possible ongoing security issues related to the files. The Drupal Security Team then began forensic evaluations and discovered that user account information had been accessed via this vulnerability. The suspicious files may have exposed profile information like username, email address, hashed password, and country. In addition to resetting your password on Drupal.org, it is also recommending a number of measures (below) for further protection of your information, including, among others, changing or resetting passwords on other sites where you may use similar passwords. 

As a precautionary measure of the said security breach, Drupal Security Team has reset all Drupal.org account holder passwords and are requiring users to reset their passwords at their next login attempt. A user password can be changed at any time by taking the following steps. 
  1. Go to https://drupal.org/user/password 
  2. Enter your username or email address. 
  3. Check your email and follow the link to enter a new password. It can take up to 15 minutes for the password reset email to arrive. If you do not receive the e-mail within 15 minutes, make sure to check your spam folder as well.
Counter Measures that Drupal has Taken to avoid such mishap is something followed- as attacks on high-profile sites (regardless of the software they are running) are common, Drupal strive to continuously improve the security of all Drupal.org sites. To that end, Drupal have taken the following steps to secure the Drupal.org infrastructure:
  • Staff at the OSU Open Source Lab (where Drupal.org is hosted) and the Drupal.org infrastructure teams rebuilt production, staging, and development webheads and GRSEC secure kernels were added to most servers
  • Drupal is scanning and have not found any additional malicious or dangerous files and making scanning a routine job in their process
  • There are many subsites on Drupal.org including older sites for specific events. Drupal created static archives of those sites.

This security breach of Drupal which affected more than 967,000 users is giving us a remind of the decent history of breach where we have seen a slew of attacks against the following sites: Scribd, Guild Wars 2, Gamigo, Blizzard, Yahoo, LinkedIn, eHarmony, Formspring, Android Forums, Gamigo,  Nvidia,Blizzard, Philips, Zynga, VMWare, Adobe,  Twitter  New York Times, Apple and so on. 







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Jeremy Hammond -Key Member of Anonymous Affiliated LulzSec Pleads Guilty To Stratfor Hack

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/03/2013 09:07:00 pm

Jeremy Hammond -Key Member of Anonymous Affiliated LulzSec Pleads Guilty To Stratfor Hack, Could Face 10 Years In Prison

Lulz Security widely known as LulzSec, the most dangerous hacker collective group who set their devastating hacking rampage for fifty days in which they have successfully penetrated almost all the so called top secure fields; has suddenly stopped their sail. But stopping crime never means that the criminal will be overlooked, the pending punishment will surely take place. And this applied from LulzSec also. Lat year we have seen leader of LulzSec and also also leader of infamous hacker collective group Anonymous code-named "Sabu," whose real name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, turned traitor to his community and became FBI informer and provided all the information on fellow hackers. The arrest of Sabu subsequently helped law-enforcement officials to infiltrate Lulzsec, an offshoot of Anonymous, the loose hacking collective that has supported an ever-shifting variety of causes. The information provided by Sabu lead FBI to arrest all the key members of LulzSec including Ryan Cleary, Jake Davis, Raynaldo Rivera, Cody Kretsinger and so on. Among them there was Jeremy Hammond widely known as "Anarchaos" who was arrested by the federal authorities and been charged for the  breach of the security analysis company Stratfor. In December last year the bail application of Hammond was also been rejected by the the Court. So after several hearings finally the accused of security breach against global intelligence firm Stratfor,  Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court to one count of computer fraud and abuse in response to charges that he hacked into the network of the privacy intelligence firm Stratfor, stealing millions of emails that eventually were given to WikiLeaks and published over the course of 2012. The plea agreement could carry a sentence of as much as 10 years in prison, as well as millions of dollars in restitution payments, though Hammond’s official sentence won’t be handed down until September. Hammond also told Judge Loretta A. Preska of Federal District Court in Manhattan that in 2011 and 2012 he had gained unauthorized access to Stratfor’s computer systems and several other groups, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Virtual Academy, the public safety department in Arizona, and Vanguard Defense Industries, which makes drones. 
"Now that I have pleaded guilty, it is a relief to be able to say that I did work with Anonymous to hack Stratfor, among other websites," Hammond said in a statement on last Tuesday. 
A petition posted to Change.org by Hammond’s brother Jason Hammond asks the judge in Hammond’s case, Loretta Preska, to sentence him to time served, given that he’s already spent 15 months in lockup. “Jeremy did nothing for personal gain and everything in hopes of making the world a better place,” reads Hammond’s brother’s petition. “Jeremy is facing a maximum sentence of ten years, but the minimum is zero. He has been in jail since March 2012 awaiting trial and now sentencing. It’s time for him to come home.”


-Source (Forbes & Huffington Post)





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Hackers Exploiting Old Ruby on Rails Vulnerability To Compromise Web Servers & Create Botnet

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 6/03/2013 09:06:00 pm

Hackers Exploiting Old Ruby on Rails Vulnerability (CVE-2013-0156) To Compromise Web Servers & Create IRC Botnet
A critical vulnerability on Ruby on Rails spotted in January this year which was deemed “critical” at the same time yet again found in the wild. The vulnerability known as CVE-2013-0156 that affected versions 3.0.20 and 2.3.16 again rises it's hand. Though a security patch was released by the Rails developers. But as we all know that many server administrator used to be unaware of these events have not patched their systems. As a result hackers and cyber criminals are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Ruby on Rails Web application development framework in order to compromise Web servers and create a dangerous botnet. This major security issue was first discovered by a security consultant Mr. Jeff Jarmoc of research firm Matasano Security. In his blog Jarmoc said "It’s pretty surprising that it’s taken this long to surface in the wild, but less surprising that people are still running vulnerable installations of Rails. It also appears to be affecting some web hosts." According to his blog post -the exploit that's currently being used by attackers adds a custom cron job -- a scheduled task on Linux machines that executes a sequence of commands. Those commands download a malicious C source file from a remote server, compile it locally and execute it. The resulting malware is a bot that connects to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and joins a predefined channel where it waits for commands from the attackers. A pre-compiled version of the malware is also downloaded in case the compilation procedure fails on the compromised systems.
"Functionality is limited, but includes the ability to download and execute files as commanded, as well as changing servers," Jarmoc said. "There's no authentication performed, so an enterprising individual could hijack these bots fairly easily by joining the IRC server and issuing the appropriate commands." But the matter of relief is that Jarmoc concluded while saying "this is a pretty straightforward skiddy exploit of a vulnerability that has been publicly known, and warned about, for months."

But still administrators who have not yet patched their Rails version should immediately should update the Ruby on Rails installations on their servers to at least versions 3.2.11, 3.1.10, 3.0.19 or 2.3.15 which contain the patch for this vulnerability. However, the best course of action is probably to update to the latest available Rails versions, depending on the branch used, since other critical vulnerabilities have been addressed since then. 

Brief About RoR:- Ruby on Rails is a popular framework for developing Web applications based on the Ruby programming language and is used by major websites including Hulu, GroupOn, GitHub and Scribd.







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Debian Linux 7.0 Code Named 'Wheezy' Released & Available For Download

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 5/09/2013 04:30:00 pm

Debian Linux 7.0 Code Named 'Wheezy' Released & Added  Multiarch Support, Several Specific Tools

Once it was one of the most popular Linux distribution which have drawn the maximum attention, yes you are right I am talking about none other than Debian Linux. Now a days the craze of this flavor has became little fade but as the foundation for other, more popular Linux distributions, such as Mint, Ubuntu and few Pen Testing Distro, still the value of Debian exist. So the up-gradation and new release of this Linux flavor is  still very much important. And today I will talk about the new release of Debian Linux version 7.0 code named 'Wheezy'. After many months of constant development, the developers at Debian project proudly announced the general availability of the next version of this major Linux which is Debian 7.0 aka 'Wheezy'. According to the release note - This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer, and a complete set of multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories. Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for Wheezy, will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically. The installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages, and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too. In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for Secure Boot yet. 

This Release Includes Numerous Updated Software Packages, Such as:-
  • Apache 2.2.22
  • Asterisk 1.8.13.1
  • GIMP 2.8.2
  • An updated version of the GNOME desktop environment 3.4
  • GNU Compiler Collection 4.7.2
  • Icedove 10 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Thunderbird)
  • Iceweasel 10 (an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox)
  • KDE Plasma Workspaces and KDE Applications 4.8.4
  • kFreeBSD kernel 8.3 and 9.0
  • LibreOffice 3.5.4
  • Linux 3.2
  • MySQL 5.5.30
  • Nagios 3.4.1
  • OpenJDK 6b27 and 7u3
  • Perl 5.14.2
  • PHP 5.4.4
  • PostgreSQL 9.1
  • Python 2.7.3 and 3.2.3
  • Samba 3.6.6
  • Tomcat 6.0.35 and 7.0.28
  • Xen Hypervisor 4.1.4
  • The Xfce 4.8 desktop environment
  • X.Org 7.7

Along with these more than other 36,000 ready-to-use software packages, built from nearly 17,500 source packages also included in Debian Linux 7.0. So after reading all those cool features, what you are waiting for lets download the installation image via bittorrent (the recommended method), jigdo, or HTTP. 




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E!Online Official Twitter Account Hijacked By Syrian Electronic Army (#twithackery)

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 5/09/2013 04:29:00 pm

E!Online Official Twitter Account Hijacked By Syrian Electronic Army (#twithackery) Fake Tweet Claimed Justin Bieber is Gay

The massive ongoing twitter hijacking also known as twithackery carried by carried by the infamous pro-Assad group of hackers known as the Syrian Electronic Army targeted another high profile twitter account. After the successful hijack of three high profile twitter account of CBS news followed by the hack of BBC and the Associated Press twitter account, now Syrian Electronic Army aka SEA have caught another big fish  that is E! Online -one of the leading resource of entertainment and celebrity gossip news. The official twitter account of E!Online that has over five million followers fallen victim to these dangerous hacker collective group. As per several legitimate sources this high valued twitter account was hacked on Saturday afternoon and subsequently posted several false tweets about a few celebrities, most specifically Justin Bieber. After the successful hijack, exactly like earlier the hacker group started tweeting false message. Among those One tweet read, “Exclusive: Justin Bieber to E!Online: I’m a gay,” followed by a shortlink.  Another read, “Exclusive: Selena Gomez tells E! she will fully supporting Justin in his coming out” [sic], also followed by a shortlink.  (Selena Gomez was Bieber’s girlfriend up until recently).  And another made reference to Angelina Jolie blaming Jordan for “the Syrian refugees’ atrocious conditions.” Here is screen capture of those fake tweets:- 

After this mishap security experts have figured out that many of those links associated with the above fake tweets redirecting users to malicious webpages. So users were urged not to click on the links. Not only the official twitter account, but also the hacking group also managed to infiltrate the E!’s text messaging system, sending hundreds of thousands of subscribers similar messages including an obscene message relating to President Barack Obama. 

While talking about twitter hacking, widely known as #twithackery; we would like to remind you the following names, WWE champion John Cena, Star Rita Ora, Justin Bieber, Teyana Taylor,American pop singer Kesha, NBC News, Fox News Politics, USAToday, Lady Gaga’s Twitter Account, Anders Breivik, Mahesh Bhatt, Huffington Post & CBS; these are the famous names who have fallen victim to twithackery before E!Online. In the wake of all the recent cyberattacks on news organizations, Twitter has warned media accounts that they will continue to be targets of hackers, and has advised them to take all appropriate steps to further secure their Twitter accounts. 




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GFI LanGuard 2012 One Solution For vulnerability Scanning, Patch Management, Network & Software Audit

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 5/09/2013 04:28:00 pm

GFI LanGuard 2012 One Solution For Vulnerability Scanning, Patch Management, Network & Software Auditing 

Earlier we have talked about GFI LanGuard, but while looking at the rising cyber threats, security researcher  continue to identify new, sophisticated malware threats, vulnerability and patch management are more critical than ever as a key component of a layered security approach. To get rid of all those security challenges, GFI Software announced the availability of GFI LanGuard 2012, in which the manufacturer claimed to provide network and system administrators with the ability to manage 100 percent of their patching needs through a single, intuitive and easy-to-use interface, without the need for other update tools. So lets take a roam of this fine product of GFI Software-

Enhanced Features of GFI LanGuard 2012 include:
  • Comprehensive Patch Management – Administrators can now manage 100 percent of their patching needs – both security and non-security updates – from a centralized console. No other update tools are necessary.
  • Strong Vulnerability Assessment for Network Devices – Network devices such as printers, routers and switches from manufacturers such as HP and Cisco, can now be detected and scanned for vulnerabilities. GFI LanGuard 2012 performs over 50,000 checks against operating systems, installed applications and device firmware for security flaws and misconfigurations. It also runs network audits that now detect mobile devices running iOS and Android operating systems.
  • Improved Scan and Remediation Performance – New Relay Agents receive patches and definition files directly from the GFI LanGuard server and distribute as appropriate – helping IT resources save time, manage network bandwidth and increase the number of devices that can be accommodated. This is particularly effective in multi-site and large networks.
GFI LanGuard 2012 combines vulnerability scanning, patch management, and network and software auditing into one solution that enables IT professionals to scan, detect, assess and correct potential security risks on their networks with minimal administrative effort. GFI LanGuard also enables administrators to inventory devices attached to their networks; receive change alerts, such as notification when a new application is installed; ensure antivirus applications are current and enabled; and strengthen compliance with industry regulations through automated patch management that defends against potential network vulnerabilities. With GFI LanGuard, IT administrators can manage more than 2,500 machines from a single console, it integrates with more than 1,500 security applications and includes keyword search functionality.

After going through the above brief description, many of you must be excited about this new product. For the kind information of our readers, yes indeed GFI LanGuard 2012 is one of the finest tool ever released in this domain. Detailed information LanGuard 2012 can be found here. Also a 30 day trail pack of GFI LanGuard 2012 has been made available for download. 





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Linux/Cdorked.A: One of The Most Sophisticated Apache Backdoor Targets Millions of Websites

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 5/05/2013 03:11:00 pm

Linux/Cdorked.A: One of The Most Sophisticated Apache Backdoor Targets Millions of Websites to Serve Blackhole Exploit

ESET one of the world renowned security firm headquartered in Bratislava have figured out what it called a malicious cyber rampage targeting millions of cPanel-based servers. Since last few months security experts have been tracking server level compromises that have been utilizing malicious Apache modules to inject malware into websites and  redirecting some of its requests to the infamous Blackhole Exploit packs. On cPanel-based servers, instead of adding modules or modifying the Apache configuration, the attackers started to replace the Apache binary (httpd) with a malicious one. This new backdoor is very sophisticated and this new malware has been dubbed "Linux/Cdorked.A." Several analysis reveals that it is a sophisticated and stealthy backdoor meant to drive traffic to malicious websites. According to the official blog post of ESET - Linux/Cdorked.A is one of the most sophisticated Apache backdoor's we have seen so far. The backdoor leaves no traces of compromised hosts on the hard drive other than its modified httpd binary, thereby complicating forensics analysis. All of the information related to the backdoor is stored in shared memory. The configuration is pushed by the attacker through obfuscated HTTP requests that aren't logged in normal Apache logs. This means that no command and control information is stored anywhere on the system.
This malicious cyber rampage was first detected by another security firm named 'Sucuri' and later ESET published a detailed analysis of the issue. But still there are thoughtful matter as already thousands of websites get infected. The attack is particularly dangerous as Apache web servers are among the most well-known and widely-used in the world and are used by numerous companies. This means that a successful security breach can affect numerous different businesses across a diverse range of industries.
As this malware also known as Linux/Cdorked.A has already been spotted in the wild, so on behalf of cyber media, we urge all the concern system administrator, security analyst to take care of the above issue while to checking their servers and verify that they are not affected by this threat. Detailed instructions to perform this check are provided in the ESET blog.





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