We do keep seeing attackers "poking around" looking for enabled development features. Developers often use these features and plugins to aid in debugging web applications. But if left behind, they may provide an attacker with inside to the application. In their simplest form, these features provide detailed configuration information. More severe cases may leak credentials or even provide full remote code execution access.

Our list of "Top" ssh usernames and password is pretty static. Well known defaults, like "root" and "admin" are at the top of the list. But there are always some usernames and password in the list that are not as well known, or only showed up more recently. I will focus in this diary on these "second tier" credentials.

Demo scripts left behind after installing applications or frameworks are an ongoing problem. After installation, removing any "demo" or "example" folders is usually best. A few days ago, Ravindu Wickramasinghe noticed that the Angular-base64-upload project is leaving behind a demo folder with a script allowing arbitrary file uploads without authentication [1]. Exploitation of the vulnerability is trivial. An attacker may use the file upload script to upload a web shell, and in response, the attacker will obtain remote command execution with all the privileges granted to the web server.

Wireshark release 4.4.1 fixes 2 vulnerabilities and 27 bugs. One of these bugfixes is for the missing IP address plugin on Windows, see "Wireshark 4.4's IP Address Functions".

A few days ago, a new stealthy malware targeting Linux hosts made a lot of noise: perfctl[1]. The malware has been pretty well analyzed and I won’t repeat what has been already disclosed. I found a copy of the "httpd" binary (SHA256:22e4a57ac560ebe1eff8957906589f4dd5934ee555ebcc0f7ba613b07fad2c13)[2]. I dropped the malware in my lab to see how it detonated. I infected the lab without root privileges and detected the same behavior except files were not written to some locations due to a lack of access (not root). When executing without root privileges, the rootkit feature is unavailable and the malware runs "disclosed".

It's always tempting to install the latest releases of your preferred software and operating systems. After all, that's the message we pass to our beloved users: "Patch, patch, and patch again!". Last week, I was teaching for SANS and decided to not upgrade my MacBook to macOS 15.0 (Sequoia). Today, I had nothing critical scheduled and made the big jump. Upgrading the operating system is always stressful but everything ran smoothly. So far so good…

Over the last 9 months or so, I've been putting together some docker containers that I find useful in my day-to-day malware analysis and forensicating. I have been putting them up on hub.docker.com and decided, I might as well let others know they were there. In a couple of cases, I just found it easier to create a docker container than try to remember to switch in and out of a Python virtualenv. In a couple of other cases, it avoids issues I've had with conflicting version of installed packages. In every case, I'm tracking new releases so I can update my containers when new releases come out and I usually do so within a couple of days of the new release. The ones that I have up at the moment are the following:

One of the problems I've had since I originally wrote mac-robber.py [1][2][3] seven years ago is that because of the underlying os.stat python library we couldn't get file creation times (B-times). Since the release of GNU coreutils 8.32 (or so), the statx() call has been available on Linux to provide the B-time, but Python out of the box doesn't yet support that call. Recently, though, I did some searches and discovered that for several years there has actually bin a pip package called pystatx that exposes the statx() call and allows us to get the B-time. So, I updated the script. It now tries to import statx and if it succeeds (probably only on relatively recent Linux distros where the pip package has been installed) it can now provide B-times. I also adjusted the formatting so the script will now give microsecond instead of millisecond resolution. I will probably write a python version of mactime at some point so that we can actually take advantage of the additional resolution.

These last two days, a lot has been talked about a "Doomsday 9.9 RCE bug'" in Linux [1]. We now have some additional details from Simone Margaritelli, who discovered and reported the vulnerabilities.