The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: php security

If you're using the popular rConfig network configuration management utility to protect and manage your network devices, here we have an important and urgent warning for you. A cybersecurity researcher has recently published details and proof-of-concept exploits for two unpatched, critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in the rConfig utility, at least one of which could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to compromise targeted servers, and connected network devices. Written in native PHP, rConfig is a free, open source network device configuration management utility that allows network engineers to configure and take frequent configuration snapshots of their network devices. According to the project website, rConfig is being used to manage more than 3.3 million network devices, including switches, routers, firewalls, load-balancer, WAN optimizers. What's more worrisome? Both vulnerabilities affect all versions of rConfig, including the latest rConfig ver

If you're running any PHP based website on NGINX server and have PHP-FPM feature enabled for better performance, then beware of a newly disclosed vulnerability that could allow unauthorized attackers to hack your website server remotely. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11043 , affects websites with certain configurations of PHP-FPM that is reportedly not uncommon in the wild and could be exploited easily as a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw has already been released publicly. PHP-FPM is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation that offers advanced and highly-efficient processing for scripts written in PHP programming language. The main vulnerability is an "env_path_info" underflow memory corruption issue in the PHP-FPM module, and chaining it together with other issues could allow attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on vulnerable web servers. The vulnerability was spotted by Andrew Danau, a security researcher at Wallarm while hun

Maintainers of the PHP programming language recently released the latest versions of PHP to patch multiple high-severity vulnerabilities in its core and bundled libraries, the most severe of which could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code and compromise targeted servers. Hypertext Preprocessor, commonly known as PHP, is the most popular server-side web programming language that powers over 78 percent of the Internet today. The latest releases under several maintained branches include PHP version 7.3.9, 7.2.22 and 7.1.32, addressing multiple security vulnerabilities. Depending on the type, occurrence, and usage of the affected codebase in a PHP application, successful exploitation of some of the most severe vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the affected application with associated privileges. On the other hand, failed attempts at exploitation will likely result in a denial of service (DoS) condition on the affect

Hackers have been found exploiting a pair of critical security vulnerabilities in one of the popular social media sharing plugins to take control over WordPress websites that are still running a vulnerable version of the plugin. The vulnerable plugin in question is Social Warfare which is a popular and widely deployed WordPress plugin with more than 900,000 downloads. It is used to add social share buttons to a WordPress website or blog. Late last month, maintainers of Social Warfare for WordPress released an updated version 3.5.3 of their plugin to patch two security vulnerabilities—stored cross-site scripting (XSS) and remote code execution (RCE)—both tracked by a single identifier, i.e., CVE-2019-9978 . Hackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to run arbitrary PHP code and take complete control over websites and servers without authentication, and then use the compromised sites to perform digital coin mining or host malicious exploit code. However, the same day when Soc

Drupal, the popular open-source content management system, has released security updates to address multiple "moderately critical" vulnerabilities in Drupal Core that could allow remote attackers to compromise the security of hundreds of thousands of websites. According to the advisories published today by the Drupal developers, all security vulnerabilities Drupal patched this month reside in third-party libraries that are included in Drupal 8.6, Drupal 8.5 or earlier and Drupal 7. One of the security flaws is a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that resides in a third-party plugin, called JQuery, the most popular JavaScript library that is being used by millions of websites and also comes pre-integrated in Drupal Core. Last week, JQuery released its latest version jQuery 3.4.0 to patch the reported vulnerability, which has not yet assigned a CVE number, that affects all prior versions of the library to that date. "jQuery 3.4.0 includes a fix for som

Developers of phpMyAdmin, one of the most popular and widely used MySQL database management systems, today released an updated version 4.8.4 of its software to patch several important vulnerabilities that could eventually allow remote attackers to take control of the affected web servers. The phpMyAdmin project last Sunday gave an early heads-up about the latest security update through its blog, probably the first time, as an experiment to find if pre-announcements can help website admins, hosting providers and package managers better prepare for the security release. "We are inspired by the workflow of other projects (such as Mediawiki and others) which often announce any security release in advance to allow package maintainers and hosting providers to prepare. We are experimenting to see if such a workflow is suitable for our project," phpMyAdmin release manager Isaac Bennetch told The Hacker News. phpMyAdmin is a free, open-source administration tool for managing

It's time to update your Drupal websites. Drupal, the popular open-source content management system, has released a new version of its software to patch a security bypass vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to take control of the affected websites. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-14773, resides in a component of a third-party library, called Symfony HttpFoundation component , which is being used in Drupal Core and affects Drupal 8.x versions before 8.5.6. Since Symfony—a web application framework with a set of PHP components—is being used by a lot of projects, the vulnerability could potentially put many web applications at risk of hacking. Symfony Component Vulnerability According to an advisory released by Symfony, the security bypass vulnerability originates due to Symfony's support for legacy and risky HTTP headers. "Support for a (legacy) IIS header that lets users override the path in the request URL via the X-Original-URL or X-Rew

Three critical zero-day vulnerabilities have been discovered in PHP 7 that could allow an attacker to take complete control over 80 percent of websites which run on the latest version of the popular web programming language. The critical vulnerabilities reside in the unserialized mechanism in PHP 7 – the same mechanism that was found to be vulnerable in PHP 5 as well, allowing hackers to compromise Drupal, Joomla, Magento, vBulletin and PornHub websites and other web servers in the past years by sending maliciously crafted data in client cookies. Security researchers at Check Point's exploit research team spent several months examining the unserialized mechanism in PHP 7 and discovered "three fresh and previously unknown vulnerabilities" in the mechanism. While researchers discovered flaws in the same mechanism, the vulnerabilities in PHP 7 are different from what was found in PHP 5. Tracked as CVE-2016-7479, CVE-2016-7480, and CVE-2016-7478, the zero-day flaw

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in PHPMailer , which is one of the most popular open source PHP libraries to send emails used by more than 9 Million users worldwide. Millions of PHP websites and popular open source web applications, including WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, and Joomla comes with PHPMailer library for sending emails using a variety of methods, including SMTP to their users. Discovered by Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers , the critical vulnerability ( CVE-2016-10033 ) allows an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code in the context of the web server and compromise the target web application. "To exploit the vulnerability an attacker could target common website components such as contact/feedback forms, registration forms, password email resets and others that send out emails with the help of a vulnerable version of the PHPMailer class," Golunski writes in the advisory published today. Golunski respo

Cyber attacks get bigger, smarter, more damaging. P*rnHub launched its bug bounty program two months ago to encourage hackers and bug bounty hunters to find and responsibly report flaws in its services and get rewarded. Now, it turns out that the world's most popular p*rn*graphy site has paid its first bounty payout. But how much? US $20,000! Yes,  P*rnHub  has paid $20,000 bug bounty to a team of three researchers, who gained Remote Code Execution (RCE) capability on its servers using a zero-day vulnerability in PHP – the programming language that powers  P*rnHub 's website. The team of three researchers, Dario Weißer (@haxonaut), cutz and Ruslan Habalov (@evonide), discovered two use-after-free vulnerabilities ( CVE-2016-5771/CVE-2016-5773 ) in PHP's garbage collection algorithm when it interacts with other PHP objects. One of those is PHP's unserialize function on the website that handles data uploaded by users, like hot pictures, on multiple paths,

A new research showed that Scripting languages, in general, give birth to more security vulnerabilities in web applications, which raised concerns over potential security bugs in millions of websites. The app security firm Veracode has released its State of Software Security: Focus on Application Development report ( PDF ), analyzing more than 200,000 separate applications from October 1, 2013, through March 31, 2015. The security researchers crawled popular web scripting languages including PHP, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, .NET, C and C++, Microsoft Classic ASP, Android, iOS, and COBOL, scanning hundreds of thousands of applications over the last 18 months. Also Read:  A Step-by-Step Guide — How to Install Free SSL Certificate On Your Website Researchers found that PHP – and less popular Web development languages Classic ASP and ColdFusion – are the riskiest programming languages for the Internet, while Java and .NET are the safest. Here's the Top 10 List:

If you own a mobile version for your Wordpress website using the popular WPtouch plugin, then you may expose to a critical vulnerability that could potentially allow any non-administrative logged-in user to upload malicious PHP files or backdoors to the target server without any admin privileges. WordPress is a free and an open source blogging tool as well as a content management system (CMS) with 30,000 plugins, each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs. That is why, it is easy to setup and used by more than 73 million of websites across the world, and about 5.7 million them uses WPtouch plugin, making it one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. WPtouch is a mobile plugin that automatically enables a user friendly and elegant mobile theme for rendering your WordPress website contents on the mobile devices. User can easily customize many aspects of its appearance by the adm

A Remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability has been discovered in the comment and discussion service, Disqus plugin for the most popular Blogging Platform Wordpress . While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, about 1.3 million of them use the ' Disqus Comment System ' Plugin, making it one of the popular plugins of Wordpress for web comments and discussions. The security team at the security firm Sucuri discovered a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw while analyzing some custom JSON parser of the Disqus plugin and found that the variable parsing function could allow anyone to execute commands on the server using insecurely coded PHP eval() function. WHO ARE VULNERABLE The Remote Code Execution ( RCE ) Vulnerability could be triggered by a remote attacker, only if it is using following application versions on the server/website. PHP version 5.1.6 or earlier WordPress 3.1.4 or earlier Wordpress Plugin

Passwords are the first line of defense against cyber criminals. It is the most vital secret of every activity we do over the internet and also a final check to get into any of your user account, whether it is your bank account, email account, shopping cart account or any other account you have. We all know storing passwords in clear text in your database is ridiculous. Many desktop applications and almost every web service including, blogs, forums eventually need to store a collection of user data and the passwords, that has to be stored using a hashing algorithm. Cryptographic hash algorithms MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, SHA-3 are general purpose hash functions, designed to calculate a digest of huge amounts of data in as short a time as possible. Hashing is the greatest way for protecting passwords and considered to be pretty safe for ensuring the integrity of data or password. The benefit of hashing is that if someone steals the database with hashed passwords, they o

The Encyclopedia giant WIKIPEDIA has been found vulnerable to remote code execution because of a critical flaw in the MediaWiki software . Wikipedia is a name which has become a major source of information for all of us. It has webpages on almost every topic you need to search. This giant is powered by an open source wiki software called MediaWiki. MediaWiki not only empowers Wikipedia, but also a number of other wiki websites. This software is a product of the Wikimedia Foundation and is coded in PHP with a database as backend. Cyber Point Software Technologies found a remote code execution vulnerability in MediaWiki, " This vulnerability affects all versions of MediaWiki from 1.8 onwards. " The vulnerability assigned with ID CVE-2014-1610 allows an attacker to execute shell code remotely via an incorrectly sanitized parameter on the MediaWiki application server. "Shell meta characters can be passed in the page parameter to the thumb.php." Bug 60339

Cyber Security Expert and Penetration tester, Ebrahim Hegazy has found a serious vulnerability in Yahoo's website that allows an attacker to remotely execute any commands on the server i.e. Remote Command Execution vulnerability. According to Ebrahim blog post , the vulnerability resides in a Chinese subdomin of Yahoo website i.e. https://tw.user.mall.yahoo.com/rating/list?sid= $Vulnerability Any remote user can manipulate the input to the sid parameter in the above URL, that passes the parameter value to an eval() PHP function on the server end. If an attacker is able to inject a PHP code into this web application, it forces the server to execute it, but this method only limited by what PHP is capable of. In a POC Video he has successfully demonstrated few Payloads: Example-1: https://tw.user.mall.yahoo.com/rating/list?sid= ${@print(system("dir"))} Example-2: https://tw.user.mall.yahoo.com/rating/list?sid= ${@print(system("ps"))} Last week, He

A German Security researcher has demonstrated a critical  vulnerability on Ebay website, world's biggest eStore. According to David Vieira-Kurz  discovered Remote code execution flaw " due to a type-cast issue in combination with complex curly syntax ", that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the EBay's web server. In a demo video, he exploited this RCE flaw on EBay website, and managed to display output of phpinfo()  PHP function on the web page, just by modifying the URL and injecting code in that. According to an explanation on his blog , he noticed a legitimate URL on EBay: https://sea.ebay.com/search/?q=david&catidd=1  . . and modified the URL to pass any array values including a payload: https://sea.ebay.com/search/?q[0]=david&q[1]=sec{${ phpinfo() }}&catidd=1 Video Demonstration: But it is not clear at this moment that where the flaw resides on Ebay server, because how a static GET parameter can be converted to accept like an array

Security expert Ebrahim Hegazy , Cyber Security Analyst Consultant at Q-CERT, has found a serious vulnerability in Twitter that allows an attacker to upload files of any extension including PHP. When an application does not validate or improperly validates file types before uploading files to the system, called Unrestricted File upload vulnerability . Such flaws allow an attacker to upload and execute arbitrary code on the target system which could result in execution of arbitrary HTML and script code or system compromise. According to Ebrahim, when a developer creates a new application for Twitter  i.e. dev.twitter.com - they have an option to upload an image for that application. While uploading the image, the Twitter server will check for the uploaded files to accept certain image extensions only, like PNG, JPG and other extensions won't get uploaded. But in a Video Proof of Concept he demonstrated  that, a vulnerability allowed him to bypass this security validation

If you are today trying to visit the php.net website, an official website of the PHP scripting language, you will likely see the above shown result, instead of the original website. Chrome and Firefox is currently flagging the site as " suspicious " and contains malware that can harm your computer. According to Google's Webmaster Tools, the script at https://static.php.net/www.php.net/userprefs.js  was included as suspicious, and Google's Safe Browsing diagnostics  for php.net do suggest that malware has been present on the site in the last 90 days: " Of the 1513 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 4 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. " " Malicious software includes 4 trojan(s). Malicious software is hosted on 4 domain(s), including cobbcountybankruptcylawyer.com/, stephaniemari.com/, northgadui.com/ . 3 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for

OpenX, a leading provider of digital and mobile advertising technology has accordingly served backdoors that are injected into the Code and allows hackers to control over your Web server. German tech site the Heise notified Germany's computer emergency response team (CERT) this week about the OpenX Ad Server (2.8.10) backdoor, allowing an attacker to execute any PHP code via the "eval" function  and could have provided attackers full access to their web sites. The OpenX team has confirmed the breach  and OpenX senior application security engineer Nick Soracco said that two files in the binary distribution of 2.8.10 had been replaced with modified files that contained a remote code execution vulnerability . The attack code is written in PHP but is hidden in a JavaScript file that is part of a video player plugin ( vastServeVideoPlayer ) in the OpenX distribution. This vulnerability only applies to the free downloadable open source product, OpenX Source.