[ISN] Cowboy cracker nails Apache

From: InfoSec News (isnat_private)
Date: Thu May 31 2001 - 16:37:20 PDT

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    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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