Cowboy cracker nails Apache

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/8/19350.html

By John Leyden
Posted: 31/05/2001 at 17:59 GMT

The cracker who broke into the Web servers of open source development
site SourceForge has broken cover to boast of his exploits, and brag
he also compromised the systems of the Apache project.

Fluffy Bunny defaced a Web site (themes.org) to list the accounts he
had managed to compromise and to brag that his actions had gone
unnoticed by SourceForge administrators for five months (against the
week SourceForge has publicly admitted). The defacement has since been
removed but can still be seen (thankfully minus confidential account
information) on defacement archive Alldas.de here

According to the posting, Fluffy Bunny obtained passwords and user
names for SourceForge accounts after successfully placing a Trojan
horse program on a Secure Shell (SSH) server. Apparently this was
possible because Fluffy Bunny had already compromised the servers run
by an ISP.

Gaining control of this SSH server, which provides a Unix command line
interface for remote administration of Web servers, allowed Fluffy
Bunny (in his words) to "sniff my way onto apache.org and SourceForge
Web server and leave all sorts of goodies in the code".

Brian Behlendorf, president of the Apache Software Foundation, has
sent a posting to developers admitting that its servers have been
compromised but also downplaying fears that source code had been
modified. He makes a pretty convincing argument here that attempts to
do serious damage were successfully thwarted.

What remains unclear are the motives of Fluffy Bunny (other than pure
mischief) for mounting the attacks in the first place.

Fluffy Bunny signed off his defacement by saying: "I'd like to thank
Valinux [which runs SourceForge], Apache, Akamai and of course Exodus.
Without their poor security and refusal to make security breaches
known to the public I wouldn't be sitting atop a mountain of roots and
oodles of proprietary software."

This statement together with Fluffy Bunny's logo - Tux the Linux
penguin (complete with rabbit ears) masturbating a disproportionately
large pink penis - probably mean he is no friend of the open source
community...



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