The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: MySQL

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a sustained malicious campaign dating back to May 2018 that targets Windows machines running MS-SQL servers to deploy backdoors and other kinds of malware, including multi-functional remote access tools (RATs) and cryptominers. Named " Vollgar " after the Vollar cryptocurrency it mines and its offensive "vulgar" modus operandi, researchers at Guardicore Labs said the attack employs password brute-force to breach Microsoft SQL servers with weak credentials exposed to the Internet. Researchers claim the attackers managed to successfully infect nearly 2,000-3,000 database servers daily over the past few weeks, with potential victims belonging to healthcare, aviation, IT & telecommunications, and higher education sectors across China, India, the US, South Korea, and Turkey. Thankfully for those concerned, researchers have also released a script to let sysadmins detect if any of their Windows MS-SQL servers have been

A critical security vulnerability has been reported in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL database—which could allow remote attackers to perform dangerous database operations just by tricking administrators into clicking a link. Discovered by an Indian security researcher, Ashutosh Barot , the vulnerability is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack and affects phpMyAdmin versions 4.7.x ( prior to 4.7.7 ). Cross-site request forgery vulnerability, also known as XSRF, is an attack wherein an attacker tricks an authenticated user into executing an unwanted action. According to an advisory released by phpMyAdmin, " by deceiving a user to click on a crafted URL, it is possible to perform harmful database operations such as deleting records, dropping/truncating tables, etc. " phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB and is widely used to manage the database for websites created with WordPress,

Security researchers have discovered multiple attack campaigns conducted by an established Chinese criminal group that operates worldwide, targeting database servers for mining cryptocurrencies, exfiltrating sensitive data and building a DDoS botnet. The researchers from security firm GuardiCore Labs have analyzed thousands of attacks launched in recent months and identified at least three attack variants— Hex, Hanako, and Taylor —targeting different MS SQL and MySQL servers for both Windows and Linux. The goals of all the three variants are different—Hex installs cryptocurrency miners and remote access trojans (RATs) on infected machines, Taylor installs a keylogger and a backdoor, and Hanako uses infected devices to build a DDoS botnet. So far, researchers have recorded hundreds of Hex and Hanako attacks and tens of thousands of Taylor attacks each month and found that most compromised machines are based in China, and some in Thailand, the United States, Japan and others.

Over a month ago we reported about two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in the world's 2nd most popular database management software MySQL: MySQL Remote Root Code Execution (CVE-2016-6662) Privilege Escalation (CVE-2016-6663) At that time, Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers who discovered these vulnerabilities published technical details and proof-of-concept exploit code for the first bug only and promised to release details of the second bug (CVE-2016-6663) later. On Tuesday, Golunski has released proof-of-concept (POC) exploits for two vulnerabilities: One is the previously promised critical privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2016-6663 ), and another is a new root privilege escalation bug ( CVE-2016-6664 ) that could allow an attacker to take full control over the database. Both the vulnerabilities affect MySQL version 5.5.51 and earlier, MySQL version 5.6.32 and earlier, and MySQL version 5.7.14 and earlier, as well as MySQL forks

Two critical zero-day vulnerabilities have been discovered in the world's 2nd most popular database management software MySQL that could allow an attacker to take full control over the database. Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski has discovered two zero-days, CVE-2016-6662 and CVE-2016-6663, that affect all currently supported MySQL versions as well as its forked such as MariaDB and PerconaDB. Golunski further went on to publish details and a proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2016-6662 after informing Oracle of both issues, along with vendors of MariaDB and PerconaDB. Both MariaDB and PerconaDB had fixed the vulnerabilities, but Oracle had not. The vulnerability (CVE-2016-6662) can be exploited by hackers to inject malicious settings into MySQL configuration files or create their own malicious ones. Exploitation Vector The above flaw could be exploited either via SQL Injection or by hackers with authenticated access to MySQL database (via a network conne

Researcher discovered Multiple Zero-day vulnerabilities in MySQL database software including Stack based buffer overrun, Heap Based Overrun, Privilege Elevation, Denial of Service and  Remote Preauth User Enumeration. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) assigned as : CVE-2012-5611 — MySQL (Linux) Stack based buffer overrun PoC Zeroday CVE-2012-5612 — MySQL (Linux) Heap Based Overrun PoC Zeroday CVE-2012-5613 — MySQL (Linux) Database Privilege Elevation Zeroday Exploit CVE-2012-5614 — MySQL Denial of Service Zeroday PoC CVE-2012-5615 — MySQL Remote Preauth User Enumeration Zeroday Currently, all reported bugs are under review and most of the researchers believed that some of these can be duplicate of an existing bugs. CVE-2012-5612 and CVE-2012-5614 could cause the SQL instance to crash, according to researchers. Where as another interesting bug CVE-2012-5615 allow attacker to find out that either any username exist on the Mysql server or not by repl