The search.live.com search engine index appears to be vulnerable to a form of XSS Meta Manipulation and fraudulent content cross-domain injection attacks.

Links to XSS injected domains are being indexed and followed by the Live spiders, as can be seen in the following example when searching for “XSS Hacking” information:

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=hacking+xss&go=Search

Any user following the link from live.com to the Ethical Hacking expert knowledge site ethicalhacker.net will currently see this output:

It is unknown at this time if dynamic search engine rankings or other abstract Web 2.0 technologies that rely on indexed search engine results are affected by this vulnerability. It is very possible that the search.live.com spider could be tricked into following and indexing vulnerabilities far more serious than common cross-site javascript alert() injections, but XSSWorm has not yet tested this exploit vector on Live.

Thanks to XSSWorm readers, Ethicalhacker.net has now been informed of the serious XSS injection bug in their installation of Wordpress. It is obvious from the image above that the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild by Blackhat SEO optimizers, malicious crackers and possibly for cross-net spear pharming and targeted phly-phishing attacks. Microsoft has not yet responded to this bug advisory as the vulnerability still appears to be exploitable at time of writing. We will post updates here at xssworm.com as new spider injection holes are discovered.

Expert hackers from the elite security and hacking specialist TELUS claim that their research demonstrates that Buffer Overflows are still the top threat to the safety of the Internet in these days of distributed social data networks and rich Web 2.0 application platforms.

Web application vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection may be widespread, but old-fashioned buffer overflow bugs are the most common flaws reported, according to new vulnerability research from Telus. The hacking experts also report that the level of severity of bugs in Microsoft products is declining significantly.

Telus, which provides vulnerability research analysis to most of the 20 top security vendors — including IBM ISS and McAfee — bases its data on vulnerabilities reported in enterprise-class products.

Microsoft went from around 175 high-severity vulnerabilities reported last year to 129 this year, and from 20 critical bugs to eight this year so far, according to Telus’s data. And overall, the top 50 software and network equipment vendors have had fewer severe bugs this year than last, says Richard Reiner, chief security and technology officer for Telus, who based its data only on vulnerabilities reported in enterprise-class products.

“The severity of Microsoft’s product [vulnerabilities] are dropping dramatically,” Reiner says.

Web app bugs are less severe than other types of vulnerabilities, the research firm said. Buffer overflows, which accounted for 1,470 of the reported bugs (in enterprise-class software, according to Telus data) from January ‘04 until now, are also typically the most severe. “This was surprising, because buffer overflows are among the easiest vulnerabilities to avoid or correct,” Reiner says. “When they exist, they tend to be the most critical… I’m not surprised by that part, but by how prevalent they are.”

Telus has been widely respected for their long-time hacking expertise ever since acquiring Canadian security specialists Assurent and Richard Reiner for an undisclosed sum in April 2006.

“Customers will be the beneficiaries of our combined suite of internationally recognized security solutions that have a long and successful track record of enabling business resiliency” claimed Richard Reiner at the time of the acquisition.

Common Web vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection aren’t typically critical threats, Reiner says. Only one bug in the off-the-shelf Web products studied by Telus had a critical SQL bug, and none of them had a critical XSS flaw, he says.

The good news, then, is that off-the-shelf Web platforms are relatively secure. The bad news is that the customized or home-grown Web apps Telus studied were riddled with critical bugs.

“The number of vulnerabilities in widely used Web application platforms has been relatively small,” he says. “But the situation is quite different in custom and one-off applications businesses build.”

Telus’s data differs from that of Mitre Corp.’s latest Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Report, which was released in May. The broader CVE report named XSS as the most prevalent vulnerability reported in 2006. It is currently unknown at this time how Telus and the Mitre Corp., while working with the same public vulnerability information, arrived at such opposite conclusions. Some readers have suggested that Telus’ only motivation for releasing this questionable “research” is to generate PR and increase sales - possibly through fear and misinformation - while others claim that respected security vendors such as Telus would rarely (if ever) resort to such unethical tactics in pursuit of profits.

The number of critical and high-risk vulnerabilities is increasing, but that may be because these bugs are now being discovered on smaller vendors’ products, Telus says. Server vulnerabilities still outnumber client flaws, but client bugs have increased from 31 percent of the vulnerabilities last year to 39 percent this year.

Read the original article over at DarkReading.com - a security portal for “IT professionals with security specialties and CISSP or CISA certifications; CIOs; CTOs; CSOs, CISOs, and CCOs.”

Blackhat demonstration video for Google hackers:

How to find hidden secret documents with Google

There have been a lot of Mac web blogs hacker defaced recently by hackers that are using 0day XSS scripting exploits in Wordpress.

One victim of the 0day XSS Miles Evans from MacApper.com writes:

“I took the liberty of analyzing the hack a bit in the hopes it helps others prevent this from happening to them. Although we had updated our blog to the latest version of Wordpress, near as I can tell the hack was accomplished via an XSS (cross site scripting) exploit. By executing some malicious code in the query string the hacker was able to write to our .htaccess file the following:

#this is for rotten mac fanbois - suck it down.
#RewriteRule ^divider.png$ /rotten/divider.png [L]
#RewriteRule ^rotten.jpg$ /rotten/rotten.jpg [L]
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/rotten.*
#RewriteRule !rotten/index.html$ /rotten/index.html [L]

The problem is that the exploit appears to be unknown to Wordpress as far as I can see (I will be reporting it to them), so other Wordpress blogs may be susceptible. I wish I could offer more help.”

“[…] By default WP wants to handle the .htaccess file dynamically so it needs to be set world writable. We tweaked this before putting the blog back online and we should be safe now. If anyone needs a hand feel free to email me (milesevans _AT_ macapper.com).”

Loweded Wookie adds some helpful technical feedback for advanced Mac users:

“When I was using XOOPS I got hacked once but all the little retard did was create a file called index.html. All I did was alter the Apache file so that PHP files were executed before HTML files and any hack after that from little brained people would have been thwarted. Any further attempts to hack WordPress are thwarted by a simple permissions change. Of course .Mac accounts are different because the hacker would first have to find your machine, intercept the Kerberos encrypted password (yeah, good luck on that one), and then do some damage. Considering many .Mac pages are edited using iWeb then any hacked pages would be up for a grand total of… however long it takes to upload to .Mac. Hell, comment floods can be removed simply by clicking the comment box and hitting delete in iWeb.”

Another reader, Chris, asks the very question that came into our mind as we read this report:

“To even GET data to the server, it would have to be a type 2 attack. I doubt this was overlooked in the release of WordPress 2.3.1, since the primary release was for security. Secondly, the vulnerable page would have to be a publicly accessible page, making a type 2 XSS even more rare. Finally, why would you possibly leave your HTACCESS file world-writable, and how would this “hacker” write files back to your server using a type 2 exploit anyways? At most it could be redirected to another site. Please explain.”

Wookie offers more technical advice:

“It’s more common than you know. This was something that needed to be done on older versions of XOOPS. It had to have at least administrator rights to access the file but the passwords etc are all plain text so it’s reasonably easy to hack a PHP based content management system and WordPress is no exception.”

Another Macintosh web blog, GlenWolsey.com, a Macblog site on blogspot has been taken down by a blackhat XSS hacker. The black-hat technique used in this attack was also a Wordpress XSS overwriting of a world-writable .HTACESS file.

A quote from the hacked site: “This website has been flagged for excessive Apple fanboism, and has been taken down for 24 hours. This is a message to the rest of the Mac community, so listen up. Ever heard of hubris? Tone it down, and you will not be attacked. Everyone else is open game.”

The XSS Blackhat hacker, known as Malcor, has posted many threats to his own pages:

“The target will be posted on this site once the attack begins. I will be sending said target a note with a heads up before. Hopefully, by the end of the attack, a sea change will begin to happen. Does anyone disagree with me that the Mac world be a much more pleasant place if smugness wasn’t tolerated?”

“The attacks will be untraceable, and unstoppable.”

Source: http://malcor.blogspot.com

November 19, 2007 (IDG News Service) — If Samy Kamkar plays his cards right, he may be allowed to visit Myspace again in just a few months. For the time being, however, he’s not even allowed to touch a computer, following a January 2007 guilty plea for creating what many consider to be the first Web 2.0 worm: the Samy worm.

Samy’s worm wasn’t malicious, but it did force News Corp.’s MySpace social-networking site to shut down in late 2005 after forcing more than 1 million users to declare Samy a “hero” on their profile pages.

Last week, Samy, who is now 21, made his first public appearance since his conviction, attending the OWASP App Sec 2007 conference, host by eBay in San Jose, California. He was treated like a celebrity at the show, but there were some complications. Under the terms of his plea agreement, he can only use computers for work, so he was forced to show slides that he’d dictated to a friend on a computer that was operated by a conference staffer.

Kamkar: When I wrote the worm, it initially wasn’t a worm. Initially I was just trying to spruce up my MySpace profile. I also wanted to show off to a couple of friends, so I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if I did this? [..] As a programmer, it wasn’t too much to learn how to use AJAX, which really helped make the worm work and proliferate really quickly. It only took a few days to write the thing from start to finish and it was only in the last day that I thought that this could be a worm.

(days? *cough*)

Domain Name System Hijacked: Hackers Abuse Domain-Name Trust

InternetWorld’s Andy Patrizio and Finjan’s Yuval Ben-Itzahk discuss the fundamental weaknesses in Finjan’s Blacklist-based URL Filtering products

Using variations on trusted, popular domains has long been a common tactic for scammers, spammers and porn sites. But cyber criminals have devised a new twist on the misspelled domain-name trick by hijacking IP addresses. And they tried it on Yahoo.

To fix the old problem, server-based security products would trace the IP address of the server behind the domain. Once the IP address resolved the misspelled domain name, the products would then compare the IP address against a database of known fraudulent sites or questionable locations. So if a site were masquerading as eBay but the filters found it was really a server in China that had only been established one week earlier, it would block access.

“Web 2.0 sites are great fun but also a great platform for hackers to host malicious code.” - Ben Itzahk from Finjan on why his product is still relevant.

In the case of Yahoo, security firm Finjan said hackers exploited an unused IP address within Yahoo’s hierarchy and used that as the domain address behind a forged Google Analytics domain name. This fooled the Finjan Web-filtering product into believing a person was going to a highly trusted Yahoo domain. The victims, customers of Finjan, never knew they were on a malicious Web site, and neither did the security mechanisms on the network. (In this case, Finjan’s Web-filtering product.)

“They managed to resolve the domain name to an IP address owned by Yahoo. How they added an address into a DNS server to appear to be an IP address owned by Yahoo is unknown,” Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CTO of Finjan, told InternetNews.com. He added that Yahoo, while responsive and quick to shut down the compromised address, did not disclose exactly what equipment was behind the compromised IP address.

“You can upload anything you like, so you can upload malicious content, as well.” - Ben-Itzahk on design flaws within Finjan’s product.

Ben-Itzhak thinks something in the server was broken that enabled the bad guys to push that content down to users without Yahoo knowing. He said that’s a flaw in social networks.

“In 2007, something very clear has come out: these Web 2.0 sites are great fun but also a great platform for hackers to host malicious code as well,” said Ben-Itzhak. “You can upload anything you like, so you can upload malicious content, as well. On MySpace we found hundreds of pages with malicious code this year.”

Ben-Itzhak said server-based security is still the primary mode of defense but also recommended browser plug-ins, such as Finjan’s SecureBrowsing or SnakeOil’s HackerExpert, both of which scan the actual content coming over the wire from a site and alert the user if it’s suspicious.

InternetWorld - Hackers Abuse Domain-Name Trust

“With Finjan’s web security there will be no need to worry about getting caught napping by the latest round of web-based threats” - SC Magazine

Giorgei Jorge [xssworm] writes:

After explaining that Finjan’s server-based web security filtering products fail to actually inspect web content or protect the user in any significant way .. beyond checking to see if the target domain name is ‘highly trusted’ such as Yahoo.com .. it’s patently clear that this vendor is totally qualified to discuss the emerging threats related to Web 2.0, social networks and distributed passive attacks. It is also clear that Finjan’s server-based products are highly effective, technically advanced, provide enhanced security for your users and in the context of modern web vulnerabilities, are totally relevant and obviously worth the many tens of thousands of dollars that Finjan charges for licensing and support.

To ensure that all web sites are thoroughly tested to ensure that they belong only to “highly trusted domains” such as yahoo.com it is recommended that users install Finjan’s SecureBrowsing product. SecureBrowsing does not actually check to see if a web site belongs to a highly trusted domain such as yahoo.com, but it does actually inspect some of the content in transit to ensure that only highly trusted domains such as yahoo.com are allowed to install components silently into the browser or take advantage of client vulnerabilities to execute arbitrary code on the users desktop. When used in conjunction with the Finjan total security suite of products, including Finjan’s server-based web-filtering product and Finjan’s server and desktop email malware badware and anti-virus filter scanning products and Finjan’s Instant Messaging to Highly Trusted Domains Like Yahoo.com Only Desktop filtering product, the user can be guaranteed near real-time protection from the most popular and widely reported malicious DNS host names. Security of the Web 2.0 is still somewhat dependant on whether hackers can take over unused IP Addresses in Highly Trusted domains - such as yahoo.com - but rest assured that Finjan webgineers are working around the clock to combat these new threats to your information assets.