This has been the first week back at work after 3 weeks of vacation. Vacation was mostly spent playing with the kids, relaxing on the beach and building a garden fence. Then Monday morning came and reality came back, demanding a solid dose of coffee.

• Wave of phishing attacks. One of those led to a lightweight investigation finding the phishing site set up for credential capture on a hacked WordPress site (as usual). This time the hacked site was a Malaysian site set up to sell testosteron and doping products… and digging around on that site, a colleague of mine found the hackers’ uploaded webshell. A gem with lots of hacking batteries included.
• Next task: due diligence of a SaaS vendor, testing password reset. Found out they are using Base64 encoded userID’s as “random tokens” for password reset – meaning it is possible to reset the password for any user. The vendor has been notified (they are hopefully working on it).
• Surfing Facebook, there’s an ad for a productivity tool. Curious as I am I create an account, and by habit I try to set a very weak password (12345). The app accepts this. Logging in to a fancy app, I can then by forced browsing look at the data from all users. No authorization checks. And btw, there is no way to change your password, or reset it if you forget. This is a commercial product. Don’t forget to do some due diligence, people.

Phishing for credentials?

Phishing is a hacker’s workhorse, and for compromising an enterprise it is by far the most effective tool, especially if those firms are not using two-factor authentication. Phishing campaigns tend to come in bursts, and this needs to be handled by helpdesk or some other IT team. And with all the spam filters in the world, and regular awareness training, you can reduce the number of compromised accounts, but it is still going to succeed every single time. This is why the right solution to this is not to think that you can stop every malicious email or train every user to always be vigilant – the solution is primarily: multifactor authentication. Sure, it is possible to bypass many forms of it, but it is far more difficult to do than to just steal a username and a password.

Another good idea is to use a password manager. It will not offer to fill in passwords on sites that aren’t actually on the domain they pretend to be.

To secure against phishing, don’t rely on awareness training and spam filters only. Turn on 2FA and use a password manager for all passwords. #infosec

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You do have a single sign-on solution, right?

Password reset gone wrong

The password reset thing was interesting. First on this app I registered an account with a Mailinator email account and the password “passw0rd”. Promising.. Then trying the “I forgot” on login to see if the password recovery flow was broken – and it really was in a very obvious way. Password reset links are typically sent by email. Here’s how it should work:

You are sent a one-time link to recover your password. The link should contain an unguessable token and should be disabled once clicked. The link should also expire after a certain time, for example one hour.

This one sent a link, that did not expire, and that would work several times in a row. And the unguessable token? Looked something like this: “MTAxMjM0”. Hm… that’s too short to really be a random sequence worth anything at all. Trying to identify if this is a hash or something encoded, the first thing we try is to decode from Base64 – and behold – we can a 6-digit number (101234 in this case, not the userID from this app). Creating a new account, and then doing the same reveals we get the next number (like 101235). In other words, using the reset link of the type /password/iforgot/token/MTAxMjM0, we can simply Base64 encode a sequence of numbers and reset the passwords for every user.

Was this a hobbyist app made by a hobbyist developer? No, it is an enterprise app used by big firms. Does it contain personal data? Oh, yes. They have been notified, and I’m waiting for feedback from them on how soon they will have deployed a fix.

Broken access control

The case with the non-random random reset token is an example of broken authentication. But before the week is over we also need an example of broken access control. Another web app, another dumpster fire. This was a post shared on social media that looked like an interesting product. I created an account. Password this time: 12345. It worked. Of course it did…

This time there is no password reset function to test, but I suspect if there had been one it wouldn’t have been better than the one just described above.

This app had a forced browsing vulnerability. It was a project tracking app. Logging in, and creating a project, I got an URL of the following kind: /project/52/dashboard. I changed 52 to 25 – and found the project goals of somebody planning an event in Brazil. With budgets and all. The developer has been notified.

Always check the security of the apps you would like to use. And always turn on maximum security on authentication (use a password manager, use 2FA everywhere). Don’t get pwnd. #infosec

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