Malicious PhpMyAdmin Served From SourceForge Mirror 86
An anonymous reader writes with a bit of news about the compromised download of phpMyAdmin discovered on an sf.net mirror yesterday: "A malicious version of the open source Web-based MySQL database administration tool phpMyAdmin has been discovered on one of the official mirror sites of SourceForge, the popular online code repository for free and open source software. The file — phpMyAdmin-3.5.2.2-all-languages.zip — was modified to include a backdoor that allowed attackers to remotely execute PHP code on the server running the malicious version of phpMyAdmin."
The Sourceforge weblog has details. Someone compromised a mirror (since removed from rotation of course) around September 22nd. Luckily, only around 400 people grabbed the file before someone caught it.
True open sores experience (Score:1, Insightful)
Did you use open source code (Score:0, Insightful)
to save time and the virus was hidden in it?
Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who understands how security works would consider phpMyAdmin's very existence on a server to be a security hole.
Local GUI client + ssh tunnel ftw.
Which is the scary part? (Score:5, Insightful)
Scary.
One of the regional mirrors of the largested software respository containing tens of thousands of projects is either hacked or was a plant from the start.
Scarier.
The backdoor code [arstechnica.com] looks to be the work of someone who learned PHP on Monday.
Scariest.
Honestly, the only way it could have been more obvious is if the file was called backdoor.php. There was no attempt made to disguise the location or what the code was doing which is why it got caught so quickly. A complete amateur got caught with control over a chunk of Sourceforge downloads. In computer security when you find a breach you don't just close the obvious point of entry, you have to take a big step back and seriously ask 'what else was compromised'. In this case the big question is who else.
If this clown could do it and didn't get caught until an end user saw the stupidly obvious file and its stupidly obvious code (as opposed to a server log or other Sourceforge audit turning it up) what are the competent hackers up to. Real backdoors are blended into the existing code instead of being added as a seperate file. Real backdoors are designed to be hidden from casual inspection instead being completely obvious in their function and 'I don't belong here status'. Really good backdoors are designed to not look like intentionally malicious code even after they are found (ex. the wait4 backdoor attempt in the Linux kernel was pretty good, it got caught because the CVS hack used to insert it in a regional CVS mirror was flawed in several ways that raised alarms).
So, what kind of security/procedure/audit could have been in place, needs to be in place, so that something like this will raise an alarm even when the hacker isn't the most incompetent backdoor author in history? What kind of audit is needed to be sure it hasn't already happened?
Re:"weblog"? (Score:4, Insightful)