When it comes to bad security advice, one of the most prominent items is that hiding what version of software you are running will provide you with protection. The reality is that in most cases hackers won’t even bother checking if you are running the software before attempting to exploit a hack. Will show you an example of that in a second, but the important take away is that if you are running software with known vulnerabilities the solution is to to update the software instead of trying to hide what version you are running because if you are running a vulnerable version you are going to get hacked no matter how hard you try to hide the version.
When people promote hiding the version in use they are actually making website less secure because it makes it harder for people to see that someone is running an outdated version that needs to updated and warn them. Google’s Webmaster Tools provides alerts when outdated software is in use, but that only works when the version information is available. We have created a web browser extension that warns when various outdated software is in use according to the meta generator on the page, but that only works if that version information hasn’t been removed from the page.
BOT for JCE
Outdated versions of the Joomla extension JCE contain a very serious security vulnerability that allows a hacker to upload files to a website. Exploitation of this vulnerability has been a common cause of the hackings among the hacked Joomla websites we have cleaned up. This would seem to due in part due to ease that someone can exploit it due to the fact that the disclosure included PHP code that handles exploiting the vulnerability. It easy to spot if that code has been used as the user agent left in the log files is “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”. Our website doesn’t even run on Joomla, but we have had numerous attempts to exploit outdated versions of the JCE extensions anyway. Some of the attempts just appear to completely untargeted (probably someone trying the exploit on every website), while a lot of others appear to be based simply on the word joomla being in a URL on the website. Our recent logs show a significant spikes in attempts after we had a post on a security vulnerability in Joomla. The log entries for one of those attempts is shown below and the important element to note is that the hacker starts out by trying to exploit the vulnerability. They make no attempt to check if a vulnerable version of JCE is in use, that JCE is in use, or that Joomla is even in use first. Any attempt to hide what version of JCE or Joomla would have no impact of the vulnerability being exploited.
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:08 -0500] “POST /index.php?option=com_jce&task=plugin&plugin=imgmanager&file=imgmanager&method=form&cid=20&6bc427c8a7981f4fe1f5ac65c1246b5f=cf6dd3cf1923c950586d0dd595c8e20b HTTP/1.1” 500 885 “-” “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:08 -0500] “POST /index.php?option=com_jce&task=plugin&plugin=imgmanager&file=imgmanager&version=1576&cid=20 HTTP/1.1” 404 5923 “-” “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:08 -0500] “POST /blog/2014/01/14/vulnerability-in-joomla-1-6-1-7-and-2-5-0-2-5-2-being-exploited-now/index.php?option=com_jce&task=plugin&plugin=imgmanager&file=imgmanager&method=form&cid=20&6bc427c8a7981f4fe1f5ac65c1246b5f=cf6dd3cf1923c950586d0dd595c8e20b HTTP/1.1” 500 885 “-” “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:08 -0500] “POST /blog/2014/01/14/vulnerability-in-joomla-1-6-1-7-and-2-5-0-2-5-2-being-exploited-now/index.php?option=com_jce&task=plugin&plugin=imgmanager&file=imgmanager&version=1576&cid=20 HTTP/1.1” 404 6290 “-” “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:10 -0500] “POST /blog/2014/01/14/vulnerability-in-joomla-1-6-1-7-and-2-5-0-2-5-2-being-exploited-now/index.php?option=com_jce&task=plugin&plugin=imgmanager&file=imgmanager&method=form&cid=20&6bc427c8a7981f4fe1f5ac65c1246b5f=cf6dd3cf1923c950586d0dd595c8e20b HTTP/1.1” 500 885 “-” “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:10 -0500] “POST /blog/2014/01/14/vulnerability-in-joomla-1-6-1-7-and-2-5-0-2-5-2-being-exploited-now/index.php?option=com_jce&task=plugin&plugin=imgmanager&file=imgmanager&version=1576&cid=20 HTTP/1.1” 404 6290 “-” “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:11 -0500] “GET /blog/2014/01/14/vulnerability-in-joomla-1-6-1-7-and-2-5-0-2-5-2-being-exploited-now/images/stories/food.php?rf HTTP/1.1” 404 6237 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:09 -0500] “POST /index.php?option=com_jce&task=plugin&plugin=imgmanager&file=imgmanager&method=form&cid=20&6bc427c8a7981f4fe1f5ac65c1246b5f=cf6dd3cf1923c950586d0dd595c8e20b HTTP/1.1” 500 885 “-” “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:19 -0500] “POST /index.php?option=com_jce&task=plugin&plugin=imgmanager&file=imgmanager&version=1576&cid=20 HTTP/1.1” 404 5923 “-” “BOT/0.1 (BOT for JCE)”
174.34.252.13 – – [03/Feb/2014:01:01:20 -0500] “GET /images/stories/food.php?rf HTTP/1.1” 404 5921 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6”