hackademix.net

An email I received yesterday night:

Hi,

I’ve been using NoScript with Firefox for a while (recommended by SANS), and today it paid off bigtime.
I got to work, started Firefox, and went to our homepage.
NoScript complained and I checked out the complaint at the bottom of the page. Our webpage had a link on it to sdo.1000mg.cn.
I started looking and found that we had the SQL injection attack currently featured at SANS:

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4844

NoScript found it first! You are a hero! Thanks.

Jeff E.
[Anonymized US Educational Site]

Then a quote from Ryan Naraine’s Talking Firefox security with Mozilla’s Window Snyder:

There are discussions happening internally at Mozilla around adding NoScript functionality into the core browser.
“It’s a conversation we’re having. I’d love to see it in there.”

Oh Window, why didn’t you tell me these sweet words when we were face to face in the romantic and adventurous land of Whistler?
I guess it’s destiny, even Steve Ballmer had been too shy to declare his love ;)

The mass SQL injection attacks we talked about in in several posts, being mainly targeted to ASP sites running on Microsoft IIS and backed by Microsoft SQL Server, gathered lots of (quite undeserved) bad press to Microsoft.
Therefore the Microsoft Security Response Center felt the need to do something more than saying “blame developers for their poor coding practice”, and asked the HP Web Security Research Group (formerly SPI Labs) to create a tool helping site owners to identify their SQL injection holes.
So now, after one month of development, HP is announcing Scrawlr, the “SQL Injector and Crawler”.

Scrawlr will crawl a website while simultaneously analyzing the parameters of each individual web page for SQL Injection vulnerabilities. […] It can even provide proof positive results by displaying the type of backend database in use and a list of available table names. There is no denying you have SQL Injection when I can show you table names!

Scrawl can be thought as a free version of the professional scanners in HP’s products portfolio, with some limitations making it suitable for self-diagnosis of your site in the specific context of this kind of non-targeted massive attacks, which usually inject URL query parameters from links, rather than POST requests from forms. In facts, it

• Will only crawl up to 1500 pages
• Does not support sites requiring authentication
• Does not perform Blind SQL injection
• Cannot retrieve database contents
• Does not support JavaScript or flash parsing
• Will not test forms for SQL Injection (POST Parameters)

Scrawl can be dowloaded here.
Of course, once you’ve found your site is vulnerable (and if you’re in doubt, it’s 99% likely to be) you still need to plug your holes.
If you’ve got the budget for a professional code review and cleanup service, just ask :)

What is Database Connectivity for JavaScript?

IBM® Database Connectivity for JavaScript™ is middleware that enables Web clients to directly access server-side relational data without compromising enterprise security.

“Directly access” without compromising “enterprise security”, yeah…

On the client, IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript consists of a JavaScript API and library that can be used by Web applications without special browser plug-ins. On the server, the IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript gateway, written in PHP, is an adaptor layer that mediates between IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript and relational databases and provides functions such as operation forwarding and security. Web 2.0 applications can thus use IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript to access relational data as a first-class construct instead of through ad hoc protocols.

Before you start wondering (like I did) what “operation forwarding” and “security” mean in this context, I’ll tell you since I bothered to read the source code: it’s just a thin layer with a JDBC-like API which allows JavaScript code to compose and submit SQL statements from the client side!
Security, if any, needs to be enforced at the database level, and access credentials are sent from the client side as well.

IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript supports the trend for Web applications to be dynamically composed in a Web browser — so-called “Web 2.0″ applications — instead of being completely composed on the server (”Web 1.0″).

First “enterprise”, now “Web 2.0″…

IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript is specifically geared toward enabling the potential Web 2.0 benefits of increased application responsiveness and the ability to flexibly combine information from various sources on the client. Web 2.0 access to server-side data, however, is currently characterized by Representational State Transfer (REST)-like APIs, which are typically application specific.

Bah, those old-fashioned resource mappings which (try to) expose only the data subsets relevant to the application front-end…
But now we can unleash the full power of SQL: free queries to all our databases for everyone in the fantastic world of Web 2.0!

ODBC is powerful — allowing any SQL statement to be executed — and simple, in the sense that developers are required to understand only a few abstractions. IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript can be thought of as an “ODBC for Web clients,” enabling Web developers to benefit from a general-purpose API for accessing relational data.

Great work IBM! Now please convince some of your many banking customers to deploy this fantastic technology on their Internet-facing web servers, and we’ll be happy to “benefit from a general purpose API for accessing relational data” directly from Firebug, thanks!

Some minutes after I published my post about the Flash unpatched vulnerability being exploited through mass SQL injections, popups of this kind started flying all over my notebook’s desktop:

Since the “virus” was reported to be in my Firefox cache, and since Firefox has not the bad habit of randomly open cached files for execution, I guessed this “threat” was relatively harmless and AVG was just over-reacting to the mere “open for reading” action.
In facts, all my attempts to inspect the offending file using an hexadecimal editor were frustrated with “Access Denied” errors, and AVG on its side refused to give me any argumented detail about this alert.

Hence I typed about:cache in my awesome bar and quickly found a file matching the size of the “menace”: it was http://www.0x000000.com/rss.php, i.e. the RSS feed of Ronald van den Heetkamp’s “Hacker Webzine”…

So, was just a mere van den Heetkamp stink enough to scare the hell out of my cute (and frankly, absolutely virginal) anti-virus?
Actually the most likely culprit is Ronald’s latest article about the hot topic of the day: since he likes to feature generous portions of source code extracted from infected sites, a signature-based engine like AVG have no choice but going wild.

Dear anti-virus vendors, can we have a “Relax, I use Firefox + NoScript” Ronald-friendly option, please?

The Register columns are getting better and better at web security related content.
In one single article, Dan Goodin managed to:

1. Report an XSS hole in PayPal “safe” area (the wet dream of all XSS kiddies), enabling all sort of profitable scams from credential stealing to automated transactions riding the session of an authenticated user.
2. Make a very valid point about extended validation SSL certificates being overrated, if not just an expensive joke, because the green bar is more than happy of “certifying” XSS compromised pages as legitimate (obviously): in other words, the perfect phishing works even better if you’ve got a modern, secure browser supporting EV SSL :)
3. Deride McAfee’s Hacker Safe one more time for its ridiculous stance on XSS vulnerabilities — OK, that’s just beating a dead horse…

Just a little addition of mine: despite PayPal’s safe browser nonsense, the browser which can save you from XSS exploitation is only one.

In other news, Remond - The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community, formerly known as the Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine, joined the party of the ASP/MS SQL Server sites SQL Injected to serve JavaScript malware.
Considering the wide coverage this epidemics enjoyed in the past week, I wonder what a “Certified Professional” usually reads aside Microsoft EULAs…