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The Web Hacking Incidents Database
Last update:17 February 2008
List of Incidents for a Classification
Please note that classifications are a new feature and not all entries in WHID are already classified, so when you get a certain number of entries for a classification, WHID might have more records matching that classification that we did not classify yet. We hope to complete the classification process soon.
Select classification:
Attack Method, Country, Location, Origin, Outcome, Software, Vertical Select criteria for classification "Software":
Apache, Cerberus Helpdesk, Confixx, cPanel, DSL Router, IIS, Linksys WRT54GL, PHP, WordPress
List of incidents for which Software is WordPress
4 incidents listed
Reported: 19 December 2007Occurred: 17 December 2007
Classifications:
- Attack Method: Known Vulnerability
- Country: UK
- Outcome: Link Spam
- Software: WordPress
- Vertical: Media
In an incident very similar to the Al Gore Hack, the personal blog of IT journalist Tim Anderson was also hacked. Unlike Mr. Gore, Tim discusses the breach and its origins.
References:
Reported: 19 December 2007Occurred: 26 November 2007
Classifications:
- Attack Method: Known Vulnerability
- Country: USA
- Outcome: Link Spam
- Software: WordPress
- Vertical: Politics
Whether comment spam by itself is an application failure or a necessary evil for site allowing rich comments is an open question. However it is reported that in this case vulnerability in WordPress allowed the spammers to actually penetrate the site and modify pages and not just abuse comments.
References:
Reported: 19 December 2007Occurred: 27 October 2007
Classifications:
- Attack Method: Known Vulnerability
- Attack Method: Insufficient Authentication
- Attack Method: SQL Injection
- Country: UK
- Outcome: Downtime
- Software: WordPress
- Vertical: Education
This story probably represents hundreds of similar stories. Many of us have come to rely on open source software, which is useful, feature reach and free. It enables us access to tools available to a few only a couple of years ago. The downside is that this easy availability means that many use the tools without having the time, resources and expertise to protect them. Systems such as phpBB and WordPress are good
examples of very popular open source systems that require constant
attention in order to maintain secure.
I am sure that the guys at Light Blue Touchpaper have the
expertise to protect their WordPress installation, but they
don’t have the time. They made the compromise between ease of
management of their web site and its security. Actually my personal blog might be
just as vulnerable, since as I write this I am very much not paying
attention to its security.
Apart from, or actually because of the fact that the
victims are security experts, this story is noteworthy due to two
additional twists in the plot:
- Zero day exploit in the wild - the attacker penetrated twice, once using a known SQL injection vulnerability, but the second time using a yet unknown vulnerability in WordPress, which was reverse engineered and published for the first time by the people at Light Blue Touchpaper.
- The researchers found that they can use Google to retrieve the hashed password of the hacker. Google has become so big that it actually allows efficient encrypted passwords lookup.
References:
Reported: 29 March 2007Occurred: 02 March 2007
Classifications:
- Attack Method: Other
- Outcome: Planting of Malware
- Software: WordPress
Backdoor was planted in a new official release of WordPress, the most popular blogging software in the world. It was available for download for a few days before the backdoor was located.
References:
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