Re: Multiple .edu sites reportedly victims of db theft

["Carson, Larry" <larry.carson () UBC CA>]

Given the complex organizational structures at most institutes I'm thinking it 
would be fairly likely that at least one Drupal instance would run at each 
institution.

As an example we have an enterprise level instance and separate standalone 
ones run by academic units. That's similar for WordPress and a myriad of other 
applications.


Regards,
Larry Carson
Associate Director, Information Security Management, UBC


-----Original Message-----
From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv 
[mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Joel L. Rosenblatt
Sent: February 3, 2015 11:02 AM
To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU
Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Multiple .edu sites reportedly victims of db theft

Hi,

Can I ask if the sites that are on this list are running Drupal?

Thanks,
Joel Rosenblatt


Joel Rosenblatt, Director Network & Computer Security Columbia Information 
Security Office (CISO) Columbia University, 612 W 115th Street, NY, NY 10025 / 
212 854 3033 http://www.columbia.edu/~joel Public PGP key
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x90BD740BCC7326C3


On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:36 PM, John Stauffacher 
<john () caffeinatednetworks com> wrote:
> My apologies for formatting, I generally take the daily digests -- so
> I am picking up responses out of the listserv interface.
>
> Unfortunately, right now - I know very little. I'm working with a few
> organizations here in the states to see if we can isolate traffic from
> outside of the US that is suspect and is targeting their applications.
> Having spent a good deal of time myself in Higher Ed, i understand the
> enormous pressures your under and how budgets are always tight, time
> is always tight -- but I would ask -- if you get some spare cycles
> start going through your access logs or ids logs looking for sqli attacks.
>
> I wanted to include some comments that Gary Warner from UAB sent out
> to another distro, as he went the extra mile to find even more
> background on
> this:
> - snip -
> Not sure if there is enough to go on here or not, but when I visit the
> Pastebin link by this kid, there are many examples of his URLs in his
> other Pastes.  For example, here is a list of SQL probes he did against 
> "nhs.uk".
>
> http://pastebin.com/5yxT6c8s
>
> His catalog of pastes can be accessed here:
>
> http://pastebin.com/u/abdilo
>
> Because he has also been probing the Australian government and many
> Australian educational institutions, I'm also passing this information
> to friends at ACMA and the AFP.
>
> Finding a single IP who hit several of those addresses, and then
> looking for that same IP on some of "our" .edus might be a path
> forward, but I believe it may be true that, as Greg points out, there
> is not enough information here to move an investigation forward.
>
> If there is "proof" that this is happening, I would strongly suggest
> sending a lead to our FBI friends who deal with academic breaches, but
> again, I'm not sure if we have that much information yet.
>
> Just thought you guys would be in the best position to try to
> determine what we might be able to do here.
> - end snip -
>
> I think if we are going to make a run at stopping this person, we
> would need to collaborate a bit and start sharing some information.
>
>
>
>
>
> > Is there any other information about how or what is vulnerable, or
> > what  information was extracted?  More information will be required
> > before any  organisation could do a response and begin the
> > investigation into how to  remediate.
>
> Greg
>
> On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 1:51 AM, John Stauffacher
> <john () caffeinatednetworks com> wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > I came across an individual a few days ago on twitter (@abdilo_) that
> > was bragging about breaching multiple .edu's via sqli. He claimed
> > responsibility for a breach of Metropolitan State University, and
> > this afternoon dropped this partial list of .edu sites that he
> > reportedly has breached and absconded with their databases:
> >
> > http://pastebin.com/yyhT6tzc
> > uq.edu.au
> > columbia.edu
> > usyd.edu.au
> > upf.edu
> > vcu.edu
> > williams.edu
> > monash.edu.au
> > uji.es
> > hu-berlin.de
> > exeter.ac.uk
> > mcmaster.ca
> > ubc.ca
> > waikato.ac.nz
> > uwa.edu.au
> > ohio-state.edu
> > handles.gu.se
> > iwm-kmrc.de
> > purdue.edu
> > lancs.ac.uk
> > uni-erlangen.de
> > luiss.it
> > unimib.it
> > purdue.edu
> > univ-montp1.fr
> > uw.edu.pl
> > pless.cz
> > inscripcions.org
> > uni-oldenburg.de
> > 141.89.97.231
> > idecisions.org
> > uni-mannheim.e
> >
> > If anyone on this list is a member of these organizations, or can
> > reach out to them -- it is important that they know. From the
> > communication that I have gotten from this person (all via twitter)
> > this issue seems to be systemic in some piece of software shared
> > amongst all these groups. If that is the case, then we are looking at
> > a vendor related flaw -- and the potential targets is pretty large.
> >
> > --
> >
> > John Stauffacher
> > GPG Fingerprint: 5756 3A3B ADA3 22A6 9B26 6CA8 DB8D 2AC3 7699 0BD

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