Ubuntu Forums has been pwned! (Part 2)

Ubuntu Forums resumed finally. Congrats! The forum admin, Elfy, posted a message about the attack. I quote here for your reference.

"As announced previously, there was a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums. What follows is a detailed post mortem of the breach and corrective actions taken by the Canonical IS team. In summary, the root cause was a combination of a compromised individual account and the configuration settings in vBulletin, the Forums application software. There was no compromise of Ubuntu itself, or any other Canonical or Ubuntu services. We have repaired and hardened the Ubuntu Forums, and as the problematic settings are the default behaviour in vBulletin, we are working with vBulletin staff to change and/or better document these settings.

== What happened ==

At 16:58 UTC on 14 July 2013, the attacker was able to log in to a moderator account owned by a member of the Ubuntu Community.

This moderator account had permissions to post announcements to the Forums. Announcements in vBulletin, the Forums software, may be allowed to contain unfiltered HTML and do so by default.

The attacker posted an announcement and then sent private messages to three Forum administrators (also members of the Ubuntu community) claiming that there was a server error on the announcement page and asking the Forum administrators to take a look.

One of the Forum administrators quickly looked at the announcement page, saw nothing wrong and replied to the private message from the attacker saying so. 31 seconds after the Forum administrator looked at the announcement page (and before the administrator even had time to reply to the private message), the attacker logged in as that Forum administrator.

Based on the above and conversations with the vBulletin support staff, we believe the attacker added an XSS attack in the announcement they posted which sent the cookies of any visitor to the page to the attacker.

Once the attacker gained administrator access in the Forums they were able to add a hook through the administrator control panel. Hooks in vBulletin are arbitrary PHP code which can be made to run on every page load. The attacker installed a hook allowing them to execute arbitrary PHP passed in a query string argument. They used this mechanism to explore the environment and also to upload and install two widely available PHP shell kits. The attacker used these shell kits to upload and run some custom PHP code to dump the 'user' table to a file on disk which they then downloaded.

The attacker returned on 20 July to upload the defacement page.

== What the attacker could access ==

The attacker had full access to the vBulletin environment as an administrator and shell access as the 'www-data' user on the Forums app servers.

Having administrator access to the vBulletin environment means they were able to read and write to any table in the Forums database.

They used this access to download the 'user' table which contained user names, email addresses and salted and hashed (using MD5) passwords for 1.82 million users.

== What the attacker could not access ==

We believe the attacker was NOT able to escalate past the 'www-data' user (i.e. gain root) access on the Forums app servers.

We believe the attacker was NOT able to escalate past remote SQL access to the Forums database on the Forums database servers.

We believe the attacker did NOT gain any access at all to the Forums front end servers.

We believe the attacker was NOT able to gain any access to any other Canonical or Ubuntu services.

We know the attacker was NOT able to gain access to any Ubuntu code repository or update mechanism.

== What we don't know ==

We don't know how the attacker gained access to the moderator account used to start the attack.

The announcement the attacker posted was deleted by one of the Forum administrators so we don't know exactly what XSS attack was used.

== What we've done ==

Before bringing the Forums back online, we implemented a series of changes both designed to clean up after this attack and also to defend against and mitigate the fallout from possible attacks in the future.

=== Clean up ===

* We sent individual mails to all Forums users informing them of the breach and that they should consider their Forum password compromised. We advised them to change this password on any other systems where they may have re-used it.

* We backed up the servers running vBulletin, and then wiped them clean and rebuilt them from the ground up.

* We randomised all user passwords in the Forums.

* We reset all system and database passwords.

* We manually imported data into a fresh database after sanity checking each table.

=== Hardening ===

* We've removed the ability to modify or add new hooks except via root access to the database

* We've disabled all potential HTML posting avenues in the Forums for everyone but administrators.

* We've switched the Forums to use Ubuntu SSO for user authentication.

* We've implemented automated expiry of inactive moderator and administrator accounts.

* We've confined vBulletin with an AppArmor profile.

* We've reviewed and further hardened the firewalling around the Forums servers.

* We've reviewed and further hardened the PHP config on the server to close off some vectors used by the attacker.

* We've switched to forcing HTTPS for the administrator and moderator control panels and made it optionally available everywhere else

* We've improved escalation procedures for the Ubuntu Community members who graciously volunteer their time to administer and moderate the Forums.

* We will continue to work with vBulletin staff to discuss changes to the default settings which could help others avoid similar scenarios as this. The vBulletin support staff have been helpful and cooperative throughout this incident.

Finally, we'd like once again to apologize for the security breach, the data leak and downtime"

**************

After reading the above message, I think that the Ubuntu Forums is still under a high risk. Why?

It seems that they find out the cause of the attack and the way how the attacker attack. However, it is not.

They still do not know how the attacker gains access to one of the moderator accounts. Attacker gains access by SQLi? Or, by phishing? Who knows! Since the forums has changed the logic for OpenID login when it is upgraded in the early of this year, may be one of the attack vectors is there.

The login method is changed to Ubuntu One SSO. It seems okay. But, what if the Ubuntu One SSO login logic has vulnerability? Or, the attack is not via the login vulnerability?

They limited the HTML code in the forums and it seems good. However, the filters can be spoofed very easily for a skilled attacker. How about the attacker issue javascript?

If the forums still has vulnerability, the attacker can attack the forum admin or moderator accounts directly without escalation of any account.

The implementation of Apparmor is a good idea. However, the forums still can be defaced if the attacker gains the rights as the Apparmor will not block this kind of activities. Attacker can also access the database servers even it is remote.

Altering the PHP config file and enhance the firewall will not do much improvement. Since firewall is handling or controlling the Network Layer but the attack may be targeted to Layer 7 - Application Layer. Meanwhile, PHP config enhancement will not prevent from being attack or gain access to the web application.

In my opinion, I suggest the forum admins consider to do penetration testing on the vBulletin although there is no exploit for vBulletin 4.2.1 in the wild so far. However, who knows there will be some unknown exploits for vBulletin 4.2.1?

As far as I know, most forum admins are still in old school security mindset. They need to learn more and new. Otherwise, the next attack is awaiting. Clients (customers) always losers in the cyber attack.

That's all! See you.