Second mass hack exposed

March 18, 2008 – 5:01 AM

Hot on the heels of a recent hack in which 10,000 sites were compromised, researchers have disclosed a new large-scale attack..

Researchers at McAfee estimated that the attack has been active for roughly one week, and in that time frame has managed to place itself on roughly 200,000 web pages.

Most of the infected pages are running the phpBB forum software, said McAfee. The compromised pages are embedded with a Javascript file that links to the site hosting the attack.

Rather than attempt to exploit browser vulnerabilities, the attack attempts to trick a user into manually launching its malicious payload.

“This contrasts [Thursday’s] attack in that the vast majority of those were active server pages (.ASP),” explained McAfee researcher Craig Schmugar on a company blog posting.

“The ASP attacks are different than the phpBB ones in that the payload and method are quite different. Various exploits are used in the ASP attacks, where the phpBB ones rely on social engineering.”

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Vista SP1 For Sale On Amazon.com Starting Wednesday

March 18, 2008 – 4:51 AM

Consumers will be able to purchase the first major update to Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system starting on Wednesday, if Internet retailer Amazon.com is to be believed. Amazon’s Web site shows that both the full and upgrade versions of Vista SP1 are currently available for pre-order and will ship on March 19th.

Microsoft recently made Vista SP1 available to some developers and commercial users as a download from its business Web site, but the software has not been widely available to date.

It’s expected that a number of retailers in addition to Amazon will start offering Vista SP1 this week. Microsoft will also likely make it available as a public download in the coming days. The download version is free to users already running a licensed copy of Vista.

Vista SP1 contains a number of features designed to enhance the operating system’s speed, performance, and stability. Among other things, it offers a patch that will allow users to run the BitLocker encryption tool on multiple hard drives. It also improves the speed at which the OS wakes up from “hibernate” mode.

SP1 will also remove from Vista the so-called Kill Switch — a feature that deactivated key components of the OS if Microsoft detected users were not running a properly licensed copy of Vista.

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Wi-Fu! Attacking the 802.11 Client

March 17, 2008 – 11:14 AM

Wi-Fu! More than just a statement, it reflects you wireless security skill set from knowledge and practical experience. This covers everything from using the tools out there to profile and attack your wireless network, to checking the security of your client devices yourself. If you feel your Wi-Foo is slipping, young Grasshopper, I’ll try to catch you up to speed (for what I feel are the 2 most important events that happened in the last 2 years). As of late, the focus has shifted from breaking your WEP/WPA keys to attacking the wireless client. With all of the news and press of hackers being caught outside of the facilities of their victims, attackers will now want to distance themselves from their targeted victims. What better than to attack the mobile workforce? You know, the wireless clients!

Wireless client authentication attacks are on the rise. Tools such as KARMA and Hotspotter are just some of the simple demonstrations of what can be achieved by focusing on the client. These tools demonstrate, on an overly simplistic explanation, attacks on wireless network client profile configurations and utilities. If I were to create a network SSID of “Linksys” and tally the number of solicitations and automatic connections made to this network, I would not be shocked to find a substantial list of connected devices. Now, automate this to create the network SSID based on clients soliciting the airwaves, offer network services and you’ve got a valuable tool for mass infection.

Unfortunately, these attacks are already on the rise. Two of the more documented locations for beginners of testing the waters of these attacks are, surprise surprise, coffee shops and airports. So, Grasshopper, are you testing your clients for these configuration vulnerabilities? Test your wireless client’s configurations for two common mistakes: allowing clients to choose their wireless networks (remove all those default/automatic network association profiles), and make sure the client is notified when connecting to a wireless network that is not trusted.

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Vista SP1 to hit Windows Update Tuesday

March 17, 2008 – 5:08 AM

Microsoft will release Windows Vista Service Pack 1 next week to a wider audience, according to information posted on Amazon.com and reports from a Web site that correctly called SP1’s ship date last month.Amazon currently lists Vista SP1 retail copies as available next Wednesday, March 19, while TechARP.com, the Malaysian Web site that nailed the update’s release to manufacturing (RTM) date several days early, said users would be able to download SP1 starting Tuesday, March 18.

Vista SP1 shipped to duplication and OEMs Feb. 4, but since then it has only been available to previous beta testers, volume licensing customers and subscribers to IT subscription services. In fact, subscribers to TechNet and Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) only got access to SP1 after raising a ruckus, with some threatening to cancel their subscriptions and others saying they would postpone Vista deployment.

Most Vista users, however, have been unable to obtain the service pack. That was a conscious decision on the part of Microsoft, which said that the delay was caused by a small number of hardware device drivers that won’t properly reinstall during the SP1 upgrade. Microsoft said it needed extra time to identify the drivers and set up blocking mechanisms that will prevent users whose PCs have those drivers from receiving SP1.

Microsoft has never identified the balky drivers or the responsible hardware manufacturers.

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Inguma 0.0.7.2 Released for Download – Penetration Testing Toolkit

March 17, 2008 – 5:04 AM

For those that don’t know, Inguma is an open source penetration testing and vulnerability research toolkit written completely in Python. The environment is mainly oriented to attack Oracle related systems but, anyway, it can be used against any other kind of systems.

It’s becoming a mature and useful package! I’m glad to see continued developing and especially that they are concentrating on fixing bugs and improving the modules rather than adding loads of new features and just making it worse.

In this version there is new modules added, new exploits, many many bug fixes and the enhancing of existing modules, such as the Oracle related stuff.

PyShellcodelib has been enhanced as well and now supports Mac OS X. But, for the moment, just BSD syscalls. Mac syscalls implementation is on the way. You will also notice that it is now object oriented as opposed to the previous versions.

Among with the aforementioned changes, there are 5 new Oracle modules: 4 modules for bugs fixed in the Critical Patch Update of
January 2008 and one skr1pT k1|>i3 like module for the Oracle PL/SQL gateway flaw. Give to the module the target’s address and port and run “oragateway”. The module will automagically guess the correct DAD and bypass technique. After it an SQL terminal will be opened.

The new modules added to the framework are the following:

• nikto: A plugin that uses Nikto based databases (Thanks you Sullo!).
• archanix: As you may imagine, it gathers information from archaic Unix services.
• brutesmtp: A brute forcer for SMTP servers.
• anticrypt: A tool to guess the encryption algorithm of a password’s hash. It saves a lot of time when auditing passwords.

They are also getting the documentation together (this is the first release) on the Wiki here:

http://inguma.wiki.sourceforge.net/

You can download Inguma 0.0.7.2 here:

Inguma 0.0.7.2

Or read more here.

Source…

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