Wednesday, 14th April 2010
apache.org incident report for 04/09/2010. An issue was posted to the Apache JIRA containing an XSS attack (disguised using TinyURL), which stole the user’s session cookie. Several admin users clicked the link, so JIRA admin credentials were compromised. The attackers then changed the JIRA attachment upload path setting to point to an executable directory, and uploaded JSPs that gave them backdoor access to the file system. They modified JIRA to collect entered passwords, then sent password reset e-mails to team members and captured the new passwords that they set through the online form. One of those passwords happened to be the same as the user’s shell account with sudo access, leading to a full root compromise of the machine.
Stack Overflow Blog: OpenID, One Year Later. Google’s support is a huge deal—61% of Stack Overflow accounts use Google. Google’s implementation of directed identity has caused problems though, since Google provide a different OpenID for each domain making it hard for Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User to correlate accounts. Their solution is to require a (verified) e-mail address from Google OpenID users using sreg and use that as a key for the accounts.