But then people tend to say that about most things don’t they until they get pwned up the face.

It turns out the rather obscure SSL flaw can be used to take over user accounts from websites that use API’s and especially those utilizing 3rd party clients (Twitter being the biggest but a lot of people are accessing Facebook now using clients too).

A Turkish grad student has devised a serious, real-world attack on Twitter that targeted a recently discovered vulnerability in the secure sockets layer protocol.

The exploit by Anil Kurmus is significant because it successfully targeted the so-called SSL renegotiation bug to steal Twitter login credentials that passed through encrypted data streams. When the flaw surfaced last week, many researchers dismissed it as an esoteric curiosity with little practical effect.

For one thing, the critics said, the protocol bug was hard to exploit. And for another, they said, even when it could be targeted, it achieved extremely limited results. The skepticism was understandable: While attackers could inject a small amount of text at the beginning of an authenticated SSL session, they were unable to read encrypted data that flowed between the two parties

So even though the fella couldn’t decrypt or read the data in the session, he could manipulate it in such a way that it spat out the goodies using the Twitter API.

It’s a very neat attack if you ask me, especially if you executed it via DM (Direct Message) it’s pretty unlikely anyone would notice their account had been ‘hacked’.

Perhaps this is how the bad guys have been doing it for a while because I do see an awful lot of hijacked accounts on Twitter and the owners have no idea why (they hadn’t logged in to any dodgy sites with OAuth or their Twitter credentials).

Despite those limitations, Kurmus was able to exploit the bug to steal Twitter usernames and passwords as they passed between client applications and Twitter’s servers, even though they were encrypted. He did it by injecting text that instructed Twitter’s application protocol interface to dump the contents of the web request into a Twitter message after they had been decrypted.

“My point is I think that it’s not so hard to make it work,” said Kurmus, who lives in Zurich and recently completed his masters thesis at the Eurecom Institute. “Maybe some other people did the same thing and did not make it public, so this is why I think it’s important that people would take this bug more seriously.”

Twitter proved an ideal platform to carry out the attack for several reasons. First, every request sent over the microblogging site includes the account holder’s username and password. Second, the site’s API made it easy to post the contents of the intercepted data stream into a message that an attacker could then retrieve.

Twitter has apparently plugged the hole from their side, but as the flaw in SSL itself it seems only one vendor is near to issuing a patch (OpenSSL).

If you extrapolate a little though, this attack could work on anything with a POST/GET interface on the web running on SSL – like Gmail for example.

I hope companies get to patching and plug this hole as it can be carried out all too quietly and wreak a whole lot of havoc!

Source: The Register

Binging is a simple tool to query Bing search engine. It will use your Bing API key and fetch multiple results. This particular tool can be used for cross domain footprinting for Web 2.0 applications, site discovery, reverse lookup, host enumeration etc. One can use various different directives like site, ip etc. and run queries against the engine. On top of it tool provides filtering capabilities so you can ask for unique URLs or hosts. It is also possible to filter results by applying power of regular expression. Get your Bing API key and use this tool for your audit, assessment and research.

You can download Binging here:

Binging.zip

Or read more here.

We will creating JavaScript and Flash objects that are able to be delivered via XSS attacks. These code payloads will contain the fingerprinting information used to map out a network and the devices and software it contains.

In basic terms Yokoso! is a collection of infrastructure fingerprints. These fingerprints are useful during penetration tests to determine both what infrastructure is in use and to determine who are the admins of that infrastructure. It is built using the URIs of the web administration interfaces.

You can download Yokoso! v0.1 here:

yokoso.0.1.tar.gz

Or read more here.

Goals

1. Identify the prevalence and probability of different vulnerability classes.
2. Compare testing methodologies against what types of vulnerabilities they are likely to identify.

The statistics was compiled from web application security assessment projects which were made by the following companies in 2008 (in alphabetic order):

• Blueinfy
• Cenzic with Hailstorm
• DNS with WebInspect
• Encription Limited
• HP Application Security Center with WebInspect
• Positive Technologies with MaxPatrol
• Veracode with Veracode Security Review
• WhiteHat Security with WhiteHat Sentinel

The statistics includes data about 12186 sites with 97554 detected vulnerabilities. The report contains Web application vulnerability statistics which was collected during penetration testing, security audits and other activities made by companies which were members of WASC in 2008. The statistics includes data about 12186 sites with 97554 detected vulnerabilities.

You can find the full study here:

Web Application Security Statistics

For those that don’t know, Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web servers for multiple items, including over 3500 potentially dangerous files/CGIs, versions on over 900 servers, and version specific problems on over 250 servers. Scan items and plugins are frequently updated and can be automatically updated (if desired).

Nikto is not designed as an overly stealthy tool. It will test a web server in the shortest timespan possible, and it’s fairly obvious in log files. However, there is support for LibWhisker’s anti-IDS methods in case you want to give it a try (or test your IDS system).

Changes

This version has gone through significant rewrites under the hood to how Nikto works, to make it more expandable and usable.

• Rewrite to the plugin engine allowing more control of the plugin structure and making it easier to add plugins
• Rewrite to the reporting engine allowing reporting plugins to cover more and also ensuring that output is written if Nikto is quit before finishing
• Large overhaul of documentation to document built-in methods and variables
• Addition of caching to reduce amount of calls made to the web servers, as well as a facility to disable smart 404 guessing.
• Addition of simple guessing for whether a system is an embedded device and to report what it is
• Plugin to use OWASPs dictionary lists to attempt to brute force directories on the remote web server (as mutate 6)
• Plugin to attempt to brute force domains (as mutate 5)
• Allow username guessing (mutate 3 and 4) to use a dictionary file as well as brute forcing
• Support for NTLM authentication
• Lots of bug fixes and new security checks

You can download Nikon 2.1.0 here:

nikto-current.tar.gz

Plugins and DB can be found here.

Or read more here.

Key Features

1. JavaScript – Websecurify Security Testing Framework is the first tool of its kind to be written entirely in JavaScript using only standard technologies adopted by the leading browsers.
2. Multiple Environments – The core technology can run in normal browsers, xulrunner, xpcshell (command line), inside Java or as part of a custom V8 (Chrome’s JavaScript Engine) build. The core is written with extensibility in mind so that more environments can be supported without changing even a single line of code.
3. Multi-platform – The tool is available and successfully runs on Windows, Mac OS, Linux and other operating systems.
4. Automatic Updates – Every single piece of the tool is subjected to automatic updates. This means that newer and more advanced versions of the tool can be shipped to your front door without you lifting your finger. This however is completely optional. The automatic update can be turned off if needed.
5. Extensions – Because the tool comes wrapped in xulrunner by default (keep in mind that we can support any other JavaScript environment) we benefit from all cool features that Firefox has, such as extensions. Extensions are easy to write and maintain and can customize every single aspect of the tool and there are already tones of resources and documentation, including books and what not, out there to teach you exactly how to do that. We will be providing documentation as well.

You can download Websecurify 0.3 here:

Windows – Websecurify 0.3.exe
Linux – Websecurify 0.3.tgz
Mac – Websecurify 0.3.dmg

Or read more here.

HP is offering SWFScan because:

• Their research shows that developers and increasingly implementing applications built on the Adobe Flash platform without the required security expertise.
• As a result, they are seeing a proliferation of insecure applications being deployed on the web.
• A vulnerable application built on the Flash platform widens your website’s attack surface creating more opportunity for malicious hackers.

How SWFScan works and what vulnerabilities it finds:

• Decompiles applications built on the Adobe Flash platform to extract the ActionScript code and statically analyzes it to identify security issues such as information disclosure.
• Identifies and reports insecure programming and deployment practices and suggests solutions.
• Enables you to audit third party applications without requiring access to the source code.

You can download SWFScan here:

SwfScan.msi

Or read more here.

For example, the lack of multiple statements in one query makes MySQL an unpopular platform for remote code execution, compared to other platforms. This tool is written to demostrate how remote code execution can be performed on a database connector that do not support stack queries.

Key Features

• SQL Injection detection using time based injection method
• Database fingerprint
• Web server directory fingerprint
• Payload creation and execution

MySqloit is currently only tested on Linux. This is a new tool though so we should expect more development soon, I hope some of you guys can test it out and let the author know what you think.

You can download MySqloit v0.1 here:

MySqloitv0.1.tar

Or read more here.

It’s suspected some of the recent high profile breaches have come from Wordpress exploits.

The latest one to become public is a simple but effective flaw, it doesn’t enable take-over but it does allow a prankster to lock an admin out of their blog by resetting the password.

Developers of the widely used WordPress blogging software have released an update that fixes a vulnerability that let attackers take over accounts by resetting the administrator password.

The bug in version 2.8.3 is trivial to exploit remotely using nothing more than a web browser and a specially manipulated link. Typically, requests to reset a password are handled using a registered email address. Using the special URL, the old password is removed and a new one generated in its place with no confirmation required, according to this alert published on the Full-Disclosure mailing list.

The flaw lurks in some of the PHP code that fails to properly scrutinize user input when the password reset feature is invoked. Exploiting it is as easy is directing a web browser to a link that looks something like:

I actually saw the alert as it was published on Full-Disclosure, obviously anything to do with Wordpress catches my attention.

The exploit can be executed by running the following code on a Wordpress 2.8.3 blog:

http://www.domain.com/wp-login.php?action=rp&key[]=

Simple but effective.

According to WordPress documentation here, the bug has been fixed by changing a single line of code so the program checks to make sure the input supplied for the new password isn’t an array. If it is, the user gets an error message and must try again.

That would appear to be the end of it, but security researchers Rafal Los and Mike Bailey wonder aloud here whether it would have made more sense to check instead whether the input is a string.

“Hasty coding?” he asks. “Why take the blacklist vs. whitelist approach?”

The bigger point he and other observers seem to make is that PHP is the coding equivalent of an everyman’s jet pack. It allows him to quickly soar into the sky with a minimal amount of training but doesn’t necessarily provide the means to check for buildings, planes or other hazards that may greet the user once he gets there.

Wordpress 2.8.4 has already been released so if you’re running Wordpress do update ASAP to ensure you are safe from this bug.

With the core updates now available on auto-update there’s no excuse for not updating (no more download, extract, upload via FTP).

Of course with its history, this doesn’t mean you are safe from any of the other exploits that haven’t been made public.

Source: The Register

For those not familiar with the tool, sqlmap is an open source command-line automatic SQL injection tool. Its goal is to detect and take advantage of SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications.

Once it detects one or more SQL injections on the target host, the user can choose among a variety of options to perform an extensive back-end database management system fingerprint, retrieve DBMS session user and database, enumerate users, password hashes, privileges, databases, dump entire or user’s specified DBMS tables/columns, run his own SQL statement, read or write either text or binary files on the file system, execute arbitrary commands on the operating system, establish an out-of-band stateful connection between the attacker box and the database server via Metasploit payload stager, database stored procedure buffer overflow exploitation or SMB relay attack and more.

Recent Changes

Along all the takeover features introduced in sqlmap 0.7 release candidate 1, some of the new features include:

• Adapted Metasploit wrapping functions to work with latest 3.3 development version too.
• Adjusted code to make sqlmap 0.7 to work again on Mac OSX too.
• Reset takeover OOB features (if any of –os-pwn, –os-smbrelay or –os-bof is selected) when running under Windows because msfconsole and msfcli are not supported on the native Windows Ruby interpreter.
• This make sqlmap 0.7 to work again on Windows too.
• Minor improvement so that sqlmap tests also all parameters with no value (eg. par=).
• HTTPS requests over HTTP proxy now work on either Python 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6+.

For a complete list of changes view the ChangeLog.

The manual is available here – README.pdf [PDF]

You can download sqlmap 0.7 here:

Linux Source: sqlmap-0.7.tar.gz
Windows Portable: sqlmap-0.7_exe.zip

Or read more here.