Security News > 2000 > October > Hacker warns Nasdaq.com of security holes

http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/10/03/nashaq.idg/index.html October 3, 2000 Web posted at: 10:09 a.m. EDT (1409 GMT) by Joris Evers (IDG) -- Web sites with financial news have become vital for investors. Imagine the disarray that could occur if a hacker took over such a site. A Dutch hacker claims he could have altered Nasdaq.com and three sites run by MarketWatch.com. He didn't, however. Instead he warned the administrators at Nasdaq.com, CBS.MarketWatch.com, BigCharts.com, and FTMarketWatch.com. Now the security holes have been patched up and the hacker is disclosing his discoveries. Gerrie Mansur, one of the leaders of Dutch hacking group Hit2000, gained access to the global.asa file from the Web servers of the news sites. This file regulates who gets access to what applications on the server. The file also defines what the applications can do and contains the global settings for the applications, as well as start-up and shutdown routines. Nasdaq's global.asa file contains the password to the site's main database, Mansur said. The news sites run on IIS (Internet Information Server) software from Microsoft. "Mansur took advantage of known security holes," said Marco van Berkum, a security specialist at Dutch IT security company Obit. Van Berkum guessed that the hacker used a well-known security hole called the Source Fragment Disclosure Vulnerability. "Often the global.asa file will contain database passwords," Van Berkum said. "It looks like that was the case with Nasdaq." Details of this particular vulnerability, or security hole, were published on the BugTraq mailing list on July 17. By adding "+.htr" to a request for a known .asa (or .asp, .ini, etc.) file, Microsoft IIS 4.0 and 5.0 can be made to disclose fragments of source code that should otherwise be inaccessible. (A description of the vulnerability can be found via the link below.) Mansur, however, denied having used this method to hack into the servers. "I did not use the Source Fragment Disclosure Vulnerability, but used an exploit I wrote myself," he said. The exploit is software tool that Mansur developed and then used to gain access to the servers. "I will not publish the exploit," Mansur said. "People will start using it, and that's just too dangerous. I was able to log in as service administrator and get full access to the server. I could even kick the administrator." The hacker warned all the involved Webmasters by e-mail. Dan Schindler, director of technical client service at CBSMarketWatch.com, responded, "Many thanks for bringing this to our attention. We have installed a patch and deployed it to all our data centers. We appreciate your honesty and willingness to send this notification to us," Schindler said in his e-mail. -- *==============================================================* "Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ================================================================ C4I.org - Computer Security, & Intelligence - http://www.c4i.org *==============================================================* ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email LISTSERV () SecurityFocus com with a message body of "SIGNOFF ISN".

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http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/10/03/nashaq.idg/index.html