Re: Hacked web server

From: John Pugh <JPugh(at)novell.com>
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 21:38:26 EST

Very good points indeed.

Consider that we do not know what we do not know. For instance, the aforementioned person below "thought" that everything was up to date. Even applying manual updates or allowing someone to "automatically" apply updates still leaves the question...am I really secure? With the hundreds...yes literally hundreds of security issues with one unmentioned product, there is no reasonable way of imagining your computer/network is secure because you do not know what you do not know.

When using technology that has a bad reputation, you have to expect the unexpected. Therefore if you expect to be secure you must employ many methods of detecting the unexpected. Case in point is NIMDA. I still see NIMDA or NIMDA like hits proving that even though this is a widely known problem, there are many infected hosts that continue to run.

Unless we all discontinue using products that have a high security risk, we will have to employ many methods to detect those who do not consider security to be a priority.

JP

>>> Ryan Yagatich <ryany@pantek.com> 1/17/03 11:53:05 AM >>>
Hi all,

        As the answer to this has already been mentioned (iis unicode), I
will skip the details behind it. My question is actually related to a more
broader topic.

        This is a case where a party utilizes their firewall to keep their
network secure, as well as applying Microsoft Service Packs to their systems behind it. The problem that I see with this is that many NT administrators that I come across all have the same notion in mind that as
long as they apply the latest service pack to their systems, whether it be
immediately after it comes out, or a day or so after, they believe that

the system is declared secure.

        As many people know, and many do not, Microsoft releases security
bulletins regularly which patch vulnerabilities and the such. If the administrator is using Microsoft Windows 2000, XP (or maybe others by now)
Microsoft has created the 'auto update' scheduler which runs regularly

'behind the scenes' that the administrator can use to have it automatically apply these patches.

        How is it that with services like this available that people are

still not aware of them? Or, could it be that they are well aware of them
but are falling victim to the notion that there really is no need for security in general, and that they are not at risk?

        Then we have the firewall. Again, many people believe that a firewall alone protects their network. In some scenarios you have firewalls that are performing (e|in)gres filtering, and some that are just
machines with NAT on them being called a firewall. What about the other

elements of a firewall? What about proxying, IDS's, monitoring, and integrity? What about protecting the firewall itself?

        So we have basically a world of technology where security is not

really a big concern to many, which then introduces the fact that they are
either uneducated or have insufficient funds to keep their systems secure.
(yes there are more, but I'm just covering the basics here). So the next
question is, how does the security community 'bridge the gap' between the
people who are either uneducated enough or educated and not able to afford
the security with that of a company/individual who is willing to 'make the
sacrifice'?

        From my experience, the only real time when someone is interested
in the security, at least interested being willing to move forward, is if
their systems are compromised either once or many times over. The other

side of this is persistence, I worked with a company at one point where

they swore up and down that their systems were secure, exactly by the method as the email snippet from below. Over time, I continued to persist
and state that services packs and firewalls are not the only elements of
security. What wound up happening? Eventually they gave in and said 'here,
go ahead and try to prove us wrong', and sure enough 15 minutes later their primary web server was found to be vulnerable to several different
vulnerabilities.

        So, we have 2 scenarios where we can broadcast this information

out, but since the world contains so many information systems that contain
only the 'latest service pack', its almost overwhelming as to what to do
to alert these people of the problems.

        My final question now, is, how are we to really communicate with

the rest of the world with information like what is mentioned above? There
are many companies out there which have been trying to advertise this information out to the world, but they usually get the typical responses
declining the services.

        I am interested in hearing from both sides of this, from the sides
of the people whom have had experience in dealing with this common scenario as well as those whom decline security services like IDSs and the
such.

Thanks,

,_____________________________________________________,
\ Ryan Yagatich                     support@pantek.com \
/ Pantek Incorporated                  (877) LINUX-FIX /
\ 
http://www.pantek.com/security        (440) 519-1802 \
/       Are your networks secure? Are you certain?     /

\___1E3695185FDAB9800641B94CC170FB8267C18DF695784F22___\ On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, Rogelio Vidaurri Courcelle wrote:

>Hi... my web server (NT 4.0 SP6a) was hacked last friday, it has only
>one NIC with a public IP
>we have an OpenBSD Firewall (PF) that filters both incoming and
>outcoming traffic.... this firewall has no ip addresses.....
>external users have access to our web server only by port 80... 
>we had a popup window in our default page.... i dont know if that's

why
>he could hack our server.... i'm not an expert in these.. i'm a >begineer.....
<SNIP>....

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This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service. For more information on this free incident handling, management and tracking system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com Received on Thu Jan 23 12:02:56 2003