Here’s why we keep getting hacked – clear and present Billabong failures

http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/07/heres-why-we-keep-getting-hacked-clear.html

by troyhunt • 14 years ago

155 47 14 years ago

This is actually a decent article but he spends far too long going on about HTTPs. Yes it is insecure but it isn't why they had a massive password compromise.

Ditto with XSS.

troyhunt3• 14 years ago

Quite right, and I did refer to that, the point was that if you can't get simple things like these right (among others referred to), is it any surprise that a major breach occurs?

dsirijus3• 14 years ago

Most of the companies I've worked with had absolutely no security considerations. They've expected it to work out of the box, with, say, RoR and Apache.

Needless to say, it didn't work. Also to be noted, there were no noticed service disruptions caused by any 3rd party. We were small fish.

Which leads me to the following - security is a scaling issue. Sure, your prototype even though ready for going live, need not really be secured in most use cases. But once you start to grow, especially rapidly, things can easily spin out of control.

You need some time to get a proper certificate, your database looks like development version on your local machine, you've handed out few ssh keys via e-mail and it's on few USB sticks lying around for root admin on deployment server (since someone has to take care of it while you sleep), you login on public networks to get company resources you need asap, etc.

What I'm really interested is - how does one scale it? What are the priorities?

danielh• 14 years ago

"Security is a scaling issue" is a dangerous assumption to make.

While a small site might not be targeted directly, you might still get hit by an automatic attack if you use any off the shelf software. It's not fun when Google marks your site as harmful because your OpenX-Ad-Server suddenly serves malicious ads.

dsirijus3• 14 years ago

Ok, so then first priority is to get secured from "automatic attacks on off-the-shelf software".

corford3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if it's unconventional or not but I'm a big believer in doing as much as possible correctly from the start i.e. having a dev -> staging -> production setup, clearly documenting everything, devising and sticking to a set of procedures and guidelines (for deployment, security, coding style etc.), not taking "bah it will work for now" shortcuts with fundamental design choices, using a proper bug tracker. And so on.

This adds a bit more up front planning pain to any project and also slightly slows down the daily dev routine BUT it pays dividends further down the line when you suddenly start getting noticed and your usage figures begin multiplying every 24 hours. In that situation there isn't time to re-work production dbms schemas, change the app code to deal with bcrypt'd password hashes, change the deployment script to make it more secure so you don't end up accidentally dropping a dev version of the site on your public servers etc. etc.

Better to pay the up front cost of getting the basics correct at the beginning of the project rather than dealing with an un-contained explosion later on just as you hit the limelight.

Also, the up-front pain of doing this diminishes with every additional project you do as a lot of the concepts, approaches and procedures are re-usable.

dsirijus3• 14 years ago

That may work for clearly defined product and very loose development timeline, but what when you need to make a social network based app with deadline 3 days from order, which may well be spiraling virally the day of the launch? Your security is then clearly post scriptum.

Disclaiming though, I clearly state to such clients that security will not be really up to challenge on those timelines. They usually don't care, even to a point that I don't really bother anyone with it, since I get blank stares when I discuss security with them.

dhyasama• 14 years ago

The idea of doing a little work up front to save yourself trouble later on is good in theory, but the reality of the early stage startup world is if you don't move fast enough you won't be around to experience that trouble later on. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. The trick is to find a happy medium that works for your situation.

Totally agree on that last part. The pain rapidly diminishes as you come up with simpler ways to do things in a reusable way. Also, the tools to do it are getting better and better as more and more people are feeling the same pain.

MichaelGG• 14 years ago

There's a massive difference between having procedure up-front (staging, etc.) and just writing correct code.

For instance, properly escaping output, parameterized queries, password hashing -- all those don't require more work (or if they do, it's so, so minimal). I mean, jeez, you're writing the code, just do it right.

That's a far cry from setting up multiple servers, certificates, etc. and having a real operations process. I can forgive, say, not having automatic builds. But there's no excuse for having a SQL injection in 2012.

freijus2• 14 years ago

I discovered a web site with XSS vulnerability. I sent them an email a year ago about this security problem. Nothing has changed yet.

What should I do now?

Last time I pointed them out to some wikipedia articles relating to their vulnerabilities.

objclxt• 14 years ago

It depends on a number of things. If you've documented your communications with them and have repeatedly tried to get in touch you may feel like disclosing publicly. A year is more than enough time to fix a XSS issue, and nobody would really judge you for going public with it.

However, this might depend on where you live. Some countries (like the UK, where I'm typing this from) make testing website for vulnerabilities illegal, no matter how serious the issue or good the intentions[1]. Very few people are actually caught by these laws, but there is always a risk that you piss off a litigious company, who then go after you.

[1] http://jeremiahgrossman.blogspot.co.uk/2006/09/is-testing-fo...

ZoFreX2• 14 years ago

Write a blog post explaining exactly what is wrong and why it is a problem, then tweet it to them and post it to their Facebook wall. If they won't fix the security issues, then maybe you can save a fraction of their users by convincing them to go elsewhere. (And by making noise publicly they are probably more likely to actually do something about it)

dhimes• 14 years ago

When you do this, at least at first, don't name the site. In your email to the site you can tell them the blog is about them.

If you do feel the need to spill who is at fault, you can do it in the comments or in a follow-up post at a later date.

eli• 14 years ago

I encountered a problem with one of our vendor's login pages. I found that sending them a link that added a giant "YOU HAVE A PROBLEM HERE" graphic to the page and popped up an alert containing your password when you hit submit got the point across better than trying to explain it.

I probably wouldn't have done that if I didn't already have a relationship with the vendor, though. I don't want to be accused of extortion or cyberterrorism.

laserDinosaur• 14 years ago

http://serverfault.com/questions/277843/security-flaw-report...

I would say the biggest concern is that you could become a target. Say that you, in good nature, inform them that you can buy items for free due to a injection attack. 4 days later someone else buys $10,000 worth of gear using the same exploit. They now only have one suspect: You.

freijus2• 14 years ago

Well, thank you all for your advices. It's been an interesting discussion.

As it is only a small shop, I think I will email them again, but this time with a link that point to a more verbose version of the vulnerability, as someone mention.

benihana• 14 years ago

A good article on security and XSS, but the conclusion is a little disappointing. The headline makes it seem like the author knew why Billabong got hacked, so the whole time I was reading, I was waiting for the big reveal. But then when it comes down to it, his conclusion is, "I don't know, there's a long list of things wrong with the site, but it was probably SQL injection." Felt kind of like watching that M Night Shyamalan movie with the aliens.

rwmj• 14 years ago

Nonsense. The author demonstrates a range of obvious vulnerabilities in the site. The fact of which of these happened to be exploited this time is pretty irrelevant when the website as a whole is so poorly implemented.

danso• 14 years ago

Exactly...the smorgasbord of security failures was the great point of the OP. If the hack actually occurred because an employee decided to go OfficeSpace on Billabong, that would not invalidate the value of the OP in the least.

unreal37• 14 years ago

"If you had a dog when classic ASP was replaced, it’s probably no longer with you."

Well written article that strikes the right tone.

alttab4• 14 years ago

Unless you have a dauschund. Those little guys can last 15-20 years if you treat them right.

dchuk• 14 years ago

just got myself one, he's not even a year old yet. Definitely prepared for the idea of having him around even when in my 40's though.

VMG• 14 years ago

*Dachshund

rhizome• 14 years ago

Genetics play a huge role in a doxen's lifespan.

troyhunt3• 14 years ago

Yeah, but statistically even the loyal sausage dog would have a better than average chance of having moved on since the ASP launch! (10 years ago avg age would have been < 10 years)

rickmb• 14 years ago

I have a problem with the constant "blaming the tools" in this article. Blindly relying on the framework is one of the major causes of security issues. Exploits will always be one step ahead of the frameworks, blaming the tools breeds the wrong king of mindset when it comes to security.

reacweb• 14 years ago

fully agree. A lot of microsoft fanboyism. The sql injection seemed serious.

troyhunt3• 14 years ago

Actually, I think it's very clear there were just a lot of bad dev practices happening across the different technologies. Classic ASP on Impact Data, PHP on the main Billabong site and current day .NET on the store. Clearly bad things were done on all.

However, some of those basic injection flaws in classic ASP would not have been possible on a more modern technology stack be that from Microsoft or other. A 5 year old version of PHP also isn't going to do you any favours. Newer frameworks are simply better at saving you from yourself - but that doesn't excuse the sloppy practices.

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

The guy's a Microsoft MVP. It was more a Microsoft oriented article in my opinion.

davidandgoliath2• 14 years ago

This post is irrelevant, the author can reduce it to: https://billabong.com:8443/

(Plesk.)

spiffytech• 14 years ago

For those who don't know, Plesk has been a recent vector to compromise a large number of websites: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/07/plesk-0day-for-sale-as-th...

davidandgoliath2• 14 years ago

Apologies! Should have expanded on that a bit. Overall gist: billabong.com has plesk publicly available for login. Plesk allows root (full system access) logins from a remote source and has all kinds of exploits available for purchase and abuse.

This kind of stuff happens, but in essence Billabong's sysadmin needs to start surfing exploit mailing lists more than he's surfing other places :)

vampirechicken4• 14 years ago

While people expect/desire that form to be served via SSL, what matters is the URI to which the form submits, and whether it submits over SSL.

You could apparently serve the author a form over SSL, have it post to a malicious server, and he'd be none the wiser because he's focused on whether the empty form was sent over an encrypted socket.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 14 years ago

Every link in the chain should be over TLS. Otherwise, you can change the unencrypted part to point somewhere else. Both the form, the site linking to it, and the URI it submits to should be over TLS.

vampirechicken4• 14 years ago

I can use LWP, Curl, Wget, etc. to submit a form over https to any HTTP server.

I am unaware of any protocol semantics that allow an HTTP server to determine how the submitted data was marshaled.

Here’s why we keep getting hacked – clear and present Billabong failures

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