PHP Deprecated Warnings in the error_log File Are Not The Cause of 500 Internal Server Errors

In dealing issues with websites for clients, one thing we deal with a lot is that others are giving advice on things they don’t understand. That is an acute problem with the security of websites, but it also comes in to play in other places. Recently we had a client contact us about having their Joomla website stop functioning after changing the PHP version in use on their website to PHP 7.1 or above. They had previously contacted another of their providers about the issue, Sucuri, and were giving a claimed explanation of what was going on, which was, if you are slightly familiar with the subject, clearly wrong.

Someone at Sucuri wrote this:

We have reviewed the 500 Internal Server error and see in the cPanel error_log that the joomla files caused the issue:

What followed that were several lines from the website’s error_log file that looked like this:

[02-Apr-2021 17:12:16 UTC] PHP Deprecated: Non-static method GantryGZipper::_getOutHeader() should not be called statically in /home/[redacted]/public_html/libraries/gantry/core/gantrygzipper.class.php on line 108

For the purposes of determining what was causing the website to stop functioning, the key piece of information there was this: “PHP Deprecated”. What that tells you is that message is a warning that something has been deprecated and won’t work in a future version of PHP, but it still works now. So if you start seeing that warning when the website stops working, it couldn’t be the cause of the issue, since the message is explicitly stating what is being warned about is something that hasn’t stopped working yet.

As further confirmation of this, the relevant PHP documentation states that this issue only starts causing an error in PHP 8:

Calling non-static methods statically throws an Error.

Prior to PHP 8.0.0, calling non-static methods statically were deprecated, and generated an E_DEPRECATED warning.

The actual error that was causing the website to stop wasn’t even shown in that error_log file, which isn’t an uncommon situation.

As with so much of the poor advice that comes from security providers, though usually about security, it sounded like the person knew what they were talking about, but they didn’t.

Sucuri Claims to Know The Most Common Cause of Website Hacking Despite Not Determining How They Are Hacked

We are often brought in to re-clean hacked websites after another provider, Sucuri, has been hired to clean them, but has intentionally cut corners, leading to the website still being hacked after they have claimed to have cleaned it up. In the most recent instances we were brought in, the website was still hacked, though to a more limited extent than usual. But what stood out more that not only was the website still also insecure, but it was still insecure because of Sucuri’s parent company, GoDaddy. That is something Sucuri would have noticed if they have done one of three key components of a proper cleanup, trying to determine how the website was hacked and fixing that.

What makes the lack of doing that stand out more, is that an email sent out by Sucuri after their cleanup made this claim:

Out of date software is the most common cause of website compromise. It’s highly recommended to get that updated as soon as you can.

So clearly they believe you can determine how websites are hacked, but they don’t do that. Beyond that being a problem to get things properly cleaned, it also would it make hard for something they claim to do right at the top of their home page, namely preventing future attacks:

We fix hacks and prevent future attacks.

How do you prevent future attacks if you don’t know how previous ones were actually done? In other instances we were brought in, the website was already using Sucuri’s service when they were hacked, so clearly their prevention didn’t work, but Sucuri wasn’t interested in figuring out what went wrong.

GoDaddy’s Insecure Hosting

The remaining piece of the hack that they missed were admin accounts for the website created by a hacker or hackers. Looking in to how those got there would be part of trying to determine how the website was hacked. If you actually do that work regularly, as we do, then what you immediately notice is that the accounts don’t look like they were created through the normal process in the software being used on the website, since most of the details, like when the accounts were registered, were empty. What that usually means is the hacker had direct access to the website’s database.

If the hacker had access to the database, that most likely mean they were able to get access to the credentials for the database. A type of vulnerability that could provide them with that information is one that is widely exploited when it exists in software. We rarely see websites that have been hacked due to that type of vulnerability, because in most cases the hacker doesn’t have a way to directly connect to the database to then use the credentials.

With this website, though, we confirmed that you could remotely connect to the database. The vast majority of websites don’t need to the database to be remotely accessible and they normally are not, since it introduces a security risk with no upside for almost all websites. Fixing that would be something that Sucuri should have done, if they were doing things properly instead of cutting corners. When we went to see about doing that we found it was already supposed to be the case, as the database wasn’t supposed to be able to be connected to remotely:

It wasn’t a one off issue, as another part of the work Sucuri failed to do was to update the software on the website. When went to work on that we created an additional database to test the upgrade and it was also remotely accessible despite being set to not be.

That wasn’t the only security issue we ran across with the hosting account, as we will discuss in a future post.

What really stands out is the website is hosted by GoDaddy, which owns Sucuri. Is it any wonder that security is so bad, when not only does a security company not do the basic work they should do, not only is a web host failing on basic security, but when the two are part of the same company.

You Shouldn’t Hire Someone to Clean Up a Malware Infected Website Until They Have Confirmed There is an Issue

If you deal with malware infected websites on a regular basis, like we do, you know that with just about any issue that can occur with a website there will be someone who thinks it was caused by malware or some other hack, so what we always want to determine before taking on a cleanup of a website the owner thinks is infected, is if it is really infected. That isn’t the case with everybody, as this recent review of another company in the industry, Sucuri, which we noticed while looking at another review that a recent clients of ours (after having hired previous hire Sucuri) left about them on Trustpilot:

In December 2019, I received several urgent messages from my webhost, SiteGround, stating that Malware had been detected in 3 URLs on my website. Each alert urged me to use professional clean-up service by Sucuri and included a link to purchase Sucuri’s service. Panicked, I signed up for an annual service with Sucuri for $199.99 (the cheapest option) that included a 30-day trial period in which I could cancel. I immediately put in a ticket for Sucuri to address the urgent malware problem on my website that I’d been informed about by SiteGround. Sucuri was unable to find any evidence of malware. Meanwhile, SiteGround continued to send me malware notifications, and each time, Sucuri said there was no malware to be found. Realizing Sucuri couldn’t fix the issue and that I’d need to find another service, I immediately requested my service be cancelled as I was still well within the initial 30 day trial period. I was informed by Sucuri that they could not refund me anything because if a customer puts in even one ticket for malware removal–and EVEN IF SUCURI FAILS TO REMOVE IT–it voids the customer’s ability to cancel their service.

That Sucuri wasn’t finding something that existed, isn’t surprising considering our own experiences like what we mentioned in a previous blog post, a situation where we were brought in after they were claiming there was no issue, despite it being easy to find.

That all is out of line with how they market their service, as they make claims like this:

Our dedicated researchers monitor active malware campaigns. With a trained team of analysts, we aim to provide the best malware removal service around.

And this:

We use scripts and tools to quickly scan your website for malware. Our analysts check your site manually too. No hack is too complex for our incident response team.

Trustpilot

That review also highlights a problem when it comes to trying to find the right company to hire to do website malware removal, as that company, like others, is paying review sites, which allows them to hide negative reviews:

**I’d like to also point out that where Sucuri’s customer service team does appear to spend their time is flagging their negative reviews here on Trust Pilot. This is my 2nd time posting a review about Sucuri. Sucuri challenged my last review as not being valid, stating I wasn’t one of their customers. After I provided evidence of my customer status and my back-and-forth with Sucuri to Trust Pilot, my review was reinstated. However, Sucuri then claimed that my review violated Trust Pilot’s guidelines (for reasons that have not been disclosed to me) and they ultimately succeeded in getting my first review removed. If this is how Sucuri conducts themselves on Trust Pilot in order to get the numerous negative reviews about their services removed, then I think there’s likely little hope of their customer service and business model improving anytime soon.**

SiteGround

Also worth noting, is that like people we have dealt with after they had a bad experience with Sucuri, the web host SiteGround had promoted them. It would appear they continue to do that despite at least having some awareness of the problems with Sucuri:

After getting nowhere with Sucuri’s customer service, in February, I finally decided to address my terrible experience with Sucuri with SiteGround, my webhost, since SiteGround was the one who referred me to Sucuri–a fact that made me question whether or not I should continue using SiteGround as my webhost. SiteGround immediately contacted Sucuri on my behalf and got them to issue a refund in the full amount of $199.99. Prior to SiteGround’s involvement, I had been in contact with multiple customer service representatives at Sucuri and their only reply was basically, “Sorry you misunderstood the terms of our contract, but it is what it is and we can’t refund you.” I’m very relieved to see that at least SiteGround takes an interest in their customers and in doing the right thing in their business practice because my webdesigner recommends SiteGround to all her clients. As for Sucuri, my opinion of them remains unchanged. I have no interest in ever using their services again and I cannot in good faith recommend them to anyone.

What might explain why they continue to promote them is that they are getting paid to do that.

Hacker Using SQL Injection Vulnerability to Add “magentoupdate” Admin Account to Magento Websites

As is a common occurrence, we were recently hired to re-clean a hacked website that the security company Sucuri, which is owned by GoDaddy, had repeatedly failed to properly clean. This time it was a Magento based ecommerce website we were cleaning. As is standard issue in those situations they had missed malicious code that should have been easy to find. What we also found was that the hacker had been able to add an additional admin account, unfortunately that had occurred prior to the time period logging was still available, so we didn’t have evidence of how that had been done.

In a situation where we haven’t been able to determine how the hacker has gotten access, part of our cleanup process is to recheck things for a couple of weeks to see if the hacker tries to get back in. In this case the admin account returned a couple of days later.

For others dealing with the admin account in this situation had these details:

User Name: magentoupdate
Email: support@media.com
First Name: support
Last Name: support:

With the logging available from when this occurred we found a log entry where one of the URL parameters was this:

');insert%20into%20%60admin_user%60%20(firstname,lastname,email,username,password,created,lognum,reload_acl_flag,is_active,extra,rp_token,rp_token_created_at)%20values%20('support','support','support@media.com','magentoupdate','8df1e8abd8ce4761633042eb8958db97:rp',NOW(),0,0,1,'N;',NULL,NOW());INSERT%20INTO%20%60admin_role%60%20(parent_id,tree_level,sort_order,role_type,user_id,role_name)%20VALUES%20(1,2,0,%22U%22,(SELECT%20user_id%20FROM%20admin_user%20WHERE%20username%20=%20'magentoupdate'),'support');

That is SQL code that generates that admin user, which would be exploited through a SQL injection vulnerability. In this case it involved exploiting a SQL injection vulnerability in an extension on the website, which we then patched up.

Sucuri’s 30 Day Refund Guarantee Scam Gets Worse

Back in May of last year someone contacting us about cleaning a hacked website mentioned that Sucuri had told them that they had 30 day refund guarantee, but when we went to look into that we found that in reality Sucuri didn’t provide refunds if someone had requested a cleanup, which is what that person had contacted them about having done.

Here is how the refund guarantee was advertised on their homepage at the time:

30-Day Guarantee

You have 30 days to request a refund according to our Terms of Service.

If you looked at the terms of service it turned out there was one exception for that refund guarantee, the aforementioned limit if you had requested a clean up to be done:

You will have thirty (30) days from the Service Commencement Date or any Renewal Commencement Date to cancel the Service (the “Cancellation Period”), in which case the Company will refund your Service Subscription Fee for the applicable Service Term provided that you have not submitted a Malware Removal Request during the Cancellation Period.

They could spelled that on the homepage in less than words than it took to mention the terms of service, which seems like a good indication they are tying to hide that.

Since then the terms of service haven’t changed, but as we noticed when we went to look at something on their website recently, the marketing of the refund guarantee has gotten worse. For example at the top of the page about their website malware removals they write this:

Repair and restore hacked websites before it damages your reputation. We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee because we know we can help. You can rely on our dedicated incident response team, state-of-the-art technology, and excellent customer service.

If you actually try to get help though, they won’t provide you a refund, even if they didn’t even do anything, seeing as there is no refund if you request help.

Similar on the Immediate Help page which has its own menu section at the top of all the website’s pages, the description of the second step in the process is:

We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee because we know we can help. After completing your billing information, you’ll get access to the Sucuri Dashboard.

Why Are Experienced Security Analysts Failing To Get Websites Clean?

If you look at the rest of their information on their website malware removal page it seems like they are providing a good warning they something is amiss.

They claim that their cleanups are done by “experienced security analysts” and that that “we aim to provide the best malware removal service”:

Experienced Security Analysts

Our dedicated researchers monitor active malware campaigns. With a trained team of analysts, we aim to provide the best malware removal service around.

They also claim that “[n]o hack is too complex for our incident response team”:

Automatic and Manual Cleanups

We use scripts and tools to quickly scan your website for malware. Our analysts check your site manually too. No hack is too complex for our incident response team.

That makes another section seem rather odd, since they highlight that they provide “unlimited cleanups”, which shouldn’t be needed if they properly cleaning and securing websites (they actually do neither of those things properly):

Unlimited Cleanups

We love complex malware infections, and you’ll never pay more for them. Each plan covers your website for a year, including unlimited cleanups, pages, and databases.

Another claim that stands out is this:

Consider us an extension of your team. With professional security analysts available 24/7/365, you never have to worry about dealing with a hacked site.

In reality what we have hearing over and over from people coming to us after having used their service, is that they can’t get in touch with anyone at Sucuri. That doesn’t seem to be isolated issue, as numerous recent reviews of Sucuri on the website Trustpilot include the same complaint.

GoDaddy’s Idea of Security Involves Leaving Websites to Get Hacked

If it were not for seeing the great value we can provide in quickly resolving hacking situations that have gone on for weeks or months, we likely wouldn’t have anything to do with the security industry, since it is such an awful industry, which seems to be largely built around taking advantage of people. One reoccurring example of that is that those in the security industry promote leaving websites insecure as security, instead of telling people what would actually keep websites secure (which doesn’t involve the services they are selling). As yet another example of that, here is how GoDaddy sells people on a security service that they charge up to 29.99 a month for:

Complete protection for complete peace of mind.

Website Security powered by Sucuri is advanced protection made simple. There’s no software to install, daily security scans run automatically and if there’s ever an issue our auto removal tools can’t fix, our security experts will repair it manually – no matter how long it takes and at no additional cost to you.

By repairing the issue, they are talking about cleaning up a hack, which shouldn’t happen since the website is supposed to be protected.

Also of note, with the claims made in that quote, is that our experience from often being brought in to re-clean websites after their security division, Sucuri, fails to get the job done, is that sometimes they will keep doing incomplete cleanups and in other instances they won’t come back in and will falsely claim that a website is clean when it isn’t. In either case what they don’t do is attempt to properly clean up the websites in the first place, which would negate the need for even discussing repeated cleanups.

Paying a Lower Yearly Fee for an Ongoing Website Security Service When You Have a Hacked Website is Not a Deal

When people have had their website hacked the unfortunate reality is that there are lot of people out there looking to take advantage of them. A lot of that involves telling people what they want to hear while knowing that you are lying to them. Based on what people say when contacting us, what a lot of people with hacked websites are looking for is a service that will protect their website from being hacked again. The reality we tell them is that while there are plenty of services that claim to do that, they don’t work (as an example of that, we often have people coming to us asking if we offer a service like that that works after using one that didn’t prevent their website from being hacked) and in fact the providers of them don’t even present any evidence that even tries to support that they do. The additional reality is that the companies behind these services usually don’t even try to do the work that could possibly make them work.

That last element is in some ways the most important when it comes to someone that already has a hacked website, since part of the work that these service don’t do to try to protect website also is important part of cleaning up a hacked website. Just last Friday we mentioned an example of that with a company named Sucuri, which had press coverage for something that wasn’t meaningful when the real story should have been that they were publicly admitting cutting corners with hack cleanups by not even trying to determine how the website got hacked. If you don’t know how websites are being hacked, you are going to have a hard time even trying to protect them. That they admitted to that isn’t really surprising to us because we have been dealing with the after effects of their improper clean ups and their failure to protect website from being hacked in the first place for years.

Recently we had someone contact us while looking for a better deal for a website service after their web host GoDaddy was trying to sell them on a $299 a year subscription for a service provided Sucuri, which GoDaddy owns, after they claimed their website was hacked. Paying less for a service that won’t properly deal with a hack, isn’t a better deal, since at any price it isn’t going to properly resolve the situation. Instead, if your website is hacked what needs to be done is to get it properly cleaned up. Properly cleaning up a hacked website involves three key components:

Cleaning up the hack.
Getting the website secured as possible (which which usually involves getting any software on the website up date).
Trying to determine how the website was hacked and fix that.

Once that has been done, then doing the security basics is what is going to do a better job than these services to keep your website from being hacked again.

If you want your hacked website properly cleaned up your best bet is to hire us. On the other hand, if you want to get ripped off, then check out the other companies out there, since a lot of them would love to take advantage of you.

Security Journalists Should Be Focused on Sucuri Failing to Properly Clean up Hacked Websites Instead of Non-Notable Malicious Code

When it comes to the poor state of web security what is badly needed is security journalism that exposes what the many unscrupulous security companies are up to and how they take advantage of their customers, instead what we have found is they act more as the marketing department for them.

One such security company that would apply to is Sucuri, which is company that we are frequently brought in to re-clean hacked websites after they have not even attempted to properly clean them. One of the things we have often found that they haven’t done is try to determine how the website has been hacked. That is a problem for the cleanup, since you need to know how the website was hacked to be insure that vulnerability has been fixed and because from what we have found is that often Sucuri is missing parts of the hack code that could have been spotted if they had done the work needed to try to determine how the website was hacked. But the larger issue with this company not doing that is that their main service is supposed to protect websites from being hacked in the first place, which, in all likelihood, is going to be difficult if you don’t know how they are being hacked.

Sucuri’s own marketing speaks to the fact that they don’t seem focused on actually protecting websites, as on their home page they tout a number of stats about the service, not one is related to effectiveness of protecting websites:

The number of cleanups might be an indication of their failure to do that, if many of those are cleanups of existing customer’s websites (assuming the stats are even true).

You don’t have to take our word that Sucuri doesn’t try to determine how websites are hacked. A recent article on security news website Threatpost, Stealthy Malware Disguises Itself as a WordPress License Key, mentions that in passing, when it should be the focus of the story. Instead the focus of the story is in itself not newsworthy, as it reports on Sucuri describing a dime a dozen situation where malicious code has been added to the functions.php file of a WordPress theme. What might be newsworthy is how that code got there, but Sucuri didn’t even attempt to determine that:

“We had no access to their logs to determine the root cause, but it’s generally caused by compromised admin accounts or downloading and using themes/plugins from untrusted sources,” Moe Obaid, security analyst at Sucuri, told Threatpost.

Getting access to the logs would have been basic part of the work of a proper cleanup and shouldn’t be difficult.

How this person would know how this type of hack generally happens if they are not doing the work to determine that seems like an obvious question to ask them, but it would appear the Threatpost wasn’t interested in digging deeper in to an employee of this company admitting to cutting corners in the work they are doing. (You also have to wonder why someone is called “security analyst” if they don’t actual do security analysis.) One explanation for the lack of critical coverage of the security industry in this instance in general by the Threatpost, it that it appears itself to be owned by a security company.

When Sucuri Doesn’t Really Protect Your Website It Shouldn’t Be Surprising Their Cleanups Cause Problems As Well

We recently had someone contact us who was looking for a service that would protect their website from being hacked and clean up the website if it did get hacked. There is what seems to be us to be an obvious issue with that, which is that cleaning up hacks wouldn’t be necessary if the website was being successfully protected from being hacked. It also seems like a bad idea to expect that if a company is providing a service where half of it doesn’t work that the other half will actually work well. When it comes to services that offer both of those things, our experience is that their providers usually are not just bad at both, but don’t even attempt to do the work that would be needed to do them properly.

As a case in point, we were contacted by someone last week that was using Sucuri’s service that provides both of those. The service failed to protect the website from getting infected with malware. Sucuri’s first clean up failed to stop it from getting infected again (or didn’t fully clean it up), which is not all surprising based on lots of previous instances we have been brought in to re-clean things after they failed to even attempt to do things properly.

After the second cleanup the website was broken. Once Sucuri fixed that issue, it was broken in another way, at which point the owner of the website contacted us.

There really isn’t any reason that anyone should be relying on Sucuri at this point (which was equally true years ago as well). They have shown they lack an even basic understanding of security and their own marketing material indicates they are not focused on providing effective protection. They fail to properly deal with hacked websites with even the most serious hacking issues or high profile websites (we were recently hired to re-clean a hacked website they failed to clean, for which the hack was being investigated by the FBI).

GoDaddy Says That Version of PHP for Which Support Ended 3 Years Ago Meets Their Stability and Security Requirements

You would think that if a web host owned a security company they would be better than other web hosts when it comes to security. With GoDaddy that isn’t the case, though that might be explained by the fact that the security company they own Sucuri, seems to be completely incompetent. As yet another example of the security issues with GoDaddy, while dealing with a support issue on a website hosted with them we found that they were making this claim about PHP 5.4 on the Programming Languages page of their control panel on the website we were working on:

PHP version 5.4 is available and meets our stability and security requirements.

Support for PHP 5.4 ended in September of 2015.

To make thing more confusing if you click the question mark icon next to radio selector to use that version of PHP on the page a message box appears that states:

Version 5.4 is no longer actively supported.

So is the first claim inaccurate or do they have really low standards for “stability and security”?