The Bitrix open redirect vulnerability: a lesson in the absurd

I try to limit my heckling to McYouKnowWho, but I just stumbled across an issue I couldn't leave alone.
If you've been keeping up on recent articles I've published, you know open redirect vulnerabilities really bother me; thus Open redirect vulnerabilities: definition and prevention in (IN)SECURE Issue 17.
Sidebar: I recently spotted a great academic paper on the same issue by Shue, Kalafut, and Gupta at Indian University. Definitive, to say the least.
Back to the issue at hand. It should have occurred to me to check for this earlier; write it off to being busy. Allow me to spell it out simply.

1) On May 2nd, 2008, I published a open redirect vulnerability in Bitrix Site Manager 6.5, specifically CVE-2008-2052.

2) The vulnerability is a simple one to reproduce, easily exploited by phishers and malware propagators. The issue is still unresolved by the vendor, so here's an example, still available, from their site:
http://www.bitrixsoft.com/bitrix/redirect.php?event1=demo_out&event2=
sm_demo&event3=pdemo&goto=http://www.xssed.com/news/29/
The_dangers_of_Redirect_vulnerabilities/
Obviously, the fact that I can send you to XSSed.com's fine explanation of the issue, in the context of the vendor's site, is a no-no in Web App Sec 101. In May, the vendor responded, saying they'd fix it, but I've not received the promised communication that they have. Their own site certainly hasn't been mitigated, so we'll see.

3) One of the sites I found exhibiting this vulnerability while researching the issue via Googledork is http://en.securitylab.ru.

4) The same day, en.securitylab.ru posts their version of the CVE vulnerability advisory for the Bitrix vulnerability.

5) As a reference, en.securitylab.ru links to my original advisory USING THE EXACT SAME VULNERABLE REDIRECT SCRIPT!
http://en.securitylab.ru/bitrix/redirect.php?event3=352513&
goto=http://holisticinfosec.org/content/view/62/45/

To this day, neither the vendor's site, nor Security Lab's site have been mitigated.
A malicious attacker could send a "security advisory" in a phishing email, supposedly from Security Lab, and redirect the victim to another web site, likely also somewhere in Russia, and laden with malware.
This could be a candidate for Pwnie Award 2009. ;-)

Common, people...fix it!

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McAfee's Hacker Safe nominated for a Pwnie

Updated 7/22/08: The Pwnies have added Cresta Pillsbury's gem: "We go in like a super hacker." Bless McAfee | Scan Alert for lameness like this, it'd be hard to make this stuff up.
Mondays don't usually include such glorious highlights but I'll gladly pass on this exception. The Pwnie Awards 2008 nominations are out, and under Lamest Vendor Response we find McAfee's Hacker Safe, specifically Joesph Pierini's response to the findings XSSed.com and I gave to Thomas Claburn for publication in Information Week this past January.
Joseph Pierini, director of enterprise services for the "Hacker Safe" program, stepped in it when he said that XSS vulnerabilities can't be used to hack a server:
Cross-site scripting can't be used to hack a server. You may be able to do other things with it. You may be able to do things that affect the end-user or the client. But the customer data protected with the server, in the database, isn't going to be compromised by a cross-site scripting attack, not directly.
As you can imagine, this one gets my vote.
Winners will be announced at the BlackHat USA reception at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008.
Should you wish further reading on the McAfee Secure / Hacker Safe fiasco, you need only utilize this query or refer to all of Nate's coverage on Zero Day.
I must admit, I'm curious who McAfee will have at Black Hat to receive this prestigious award should they win. I'm torn between suggesting Brett Oliphant or Pierini himself. ;-)
Cheers.

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OSF DATA LOSS db a valuable resource

As a longtime reader of the The Data Breach Blog, I was pleased to learn that care and feeding of Attrition.org's Data Loss Database has been assumed by the Open Security Foundation. Check out the DATA LOSS db at your earliest convenience, join, and support.
From the site, the OSF Data Loss database is a "research project aimed at documenting known and reported data loss incidents world-wide. The effort is now a community one, with the move to OSF, and relies on the contributions of users like you to grow and prune the database."
Do your best not to find yourself an entry in this database. ;-)

Visualized Storm fireworks for your 4th of July

As expected, the Storm botnet maestros have queued up some pwnage for your 4th of July.
See the SANS diary for all the details.
Upon receipt of my first fireworks.exe sample this evening, I went through the standard routine and ran it through the analysis mill. Like the ISC said, not much new here, but if you'd like the nitty-gritty, I've put the analysis report here, the peers config list here, and the pcap here.
However, what I was really inspired to do this evening was visualize the pcap with Raffael Marty's AfterGlow. His new book, Applied Security Visualization, is coming out next month, so we can turn old Storm news into a celebration of the 4th and the pending release of Applied Security Visualization. By the way, Raffael's visualization workshop slides from the 20th Annual FIRST Conference in Vancouver, B.C. last week are here, and mine regarding Malcode Analysis for Incident Handlers are here.
So, a little AfterGlow magic,
tcpdump -vttttnnelr /home/rmcree/pcap/fireworks.pcap | ./tcpdump2csv.pl "sip dip ttl" | perl ../graph/afterglow.pl -c /home/rmcree/afterglow/src/perl/graph/color.properties -p 2 | neato -Tgif -o fireworks.gif, and the results look just like the fireworks we hoped they would.
Happy 4th of July everyone!
Except you Storm a$$hat$. ;-)



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