DoD offering admin privileges on .mil Web sites

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/29026.html

By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 24/01/2003 at 21:22 GMT

Care to register a .mil Web site of your own for free? The DoD has
gone out of its way to make it a snap. An unbelievably badly-protected
admin interface welcomes you to register whatever domain you please
(http://Rotten.mil anyone?), or edit anything they've already got. The
interface is so ludicrously unprotected that it's been cached by
Google and fails to mention that you must be authorized to muck about
with it. Incredibly, default passwords are cheerfully provided on the
page.

Following an anonymous tip from an observant Reg reader, we've
encountered the page in question in the Google cache, and after a bit
of our own poking about have also discovered an equally unprotected
(and Google-cached) admin interface encouraging us to add a new user,
like ourselves, say, which requires no authentication.

All you have to do is find that page and you can set yourself up with
a user account, manage your new .mil Web site, fiddle about with other
people's .mil Web sites, and generally make an incredible nuisance of
yourself. We are, of course, straining against every natural,
journalistic impulse in our beings by neglecting to mention any useful
search strings with which to find it.

Another unprotected and cached page, this one discovered by our
tipster, lists traffic to a major DoD Web site by URL/IP address. This
worries us because it may list .mil sites and networked DoD machines
that are not public, not hotlinked anywhere, and which might contain
(or be networked with other machines that contain) sensitive data.  
Merely knowing that all those URLs and IP addys are valid and owned by
DoD would give a significant advantage to attackers by narrowing their
target area dramatically.

We have e-mailed the person who manages these sites - twice in fact -
but so far have not been graced with a reply. We were hoping that they
might be inclined to fix this mess quickly so that we could safely
include the details in our report. Unfortunately we have to withhold
them until we're confident that these security snafus are under
control.

Ironically, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently ordered DoD
to purge military Web sites of information that might benefit
evildoers. That's all well and good, but it might behoove the DoD to
stop offering them admin privileges first.



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