
Ubuntu forums hacked - reinhardt
http://ubuntuforums.org/
======
GuiA
>The passwords are not stored in plain text. However, if you were using the
same password as your Ubuntu Forums one on another service (such as email),
you are strongly encouraged to change the password on the other service ASAP.

Translation: the passwords were stored using dumb MD5/SHA1. Seriously, it's
2013, why can't 99% of the web get their act together when it comes to
password hashing?

~~~
lwf
Ubuntuforums used vBulletin, which as of 2006 used MD5 + salt:
[http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=178091](http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=178091)

Not sure what vB is using today.

~~~
GuiA
Eep. Even salted, MD5 is never the greatest idea.

[http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/19906/is-
md5-con...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/19906/is-
md5-considered-insecure)

~~~
krapp
I know developers who will to this day insist that salted md5 is practically
invulnerable and more than adequate as long as the salt is big enough.

~~~
ReidZB
That's quite unfortunate. The size of the salt doesn't really matter much, so
long as it can't be pre-computed before the DB leak. Once the DB is leaked,
the salt could be a hundred characters and it wouldn't help much more than a
ten character one.

~~~
Stratoscope
That is very interesting, but at this late hour I'm having trouble
understanding how the DB leak affects the effective salt length.

With apologies for asking, is there an ELIM (Explain Like It's Midnight)
version?

(I did read the security.stackexchange.com question linked in the GP - is the
answer in there and I missed it?)

Thanks!

~~~
StavrosK
Sure: You can try a few billion passwords per second on modern hardware. The
salt gets prepended on every try, so it doesn't count towards the complexity,
it only helps with not precomputimg lists of hashed passwords and just
comparing. Therefore, no matter how long the salt is, you still can try the
same billion passwords a second, and a seven-character password will still
only take 26^7 to be brute-forced.

Also, the salts are stored unencrypted in the database, right next to the
hashes.

~~~
Stratoscope
Thanks! Between your explanation and ReidZB's, that really clarifies the
issues involved. Much appreciated.

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spindritf
It's an opportunity to finally kill it off and stop polluting google results.

~~~
jebblue
It's an opportunity to kill what off?

~~~
arthurcolle
ubuntuforums.org, presumably.

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elchief
This is how much effort it takes to have a BCrypt (strong, slow, salted hash)
database user system in Spring (not that they used Spring):

    
    
      <http auto-config='true'>
        <intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />
      </http>
    
      <beans:bean class="org.springframework.security.crypto.bcrypt.BCryptPasswordEncoder" id="passwordEncoder" />
    
      <authentication-manager>
        <authentication-provider>
            <jdbc-user-service data-source-ref="dataSource" />
            <password-encoder ref="passwordEncoder" />
        </authentication-provider>
      </authentication-manager>
    

StackExchange's AskUbuntu.com is pretty good, as you can use OpenId, and if
someone (illegally) hacks Google we are all fucked anways.

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nnwa
That'd be the admin panel on their vbulletin installation which has been
publicly facing for more than a year.

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wldlyinaccurate
vBulletin is (and always has been) terribly insecure. Only way to beef up
security is to lock down admin panels, e.g. IP-restrict them.

~~~
rlu
Can you expand on how it's terribly insecure? Curious.

~~~
wldlyinaccurate
Sorry for the late reply. There's no single reason for it being so insecure,
but you don't need to search for long to find vulnerabilities.

I think the main problem comes from the fact that much of the code still
resembles the spaghetti that was written over 10 years ago. Even recent
versions have problems with basic input sanitization, which makes injection
attacks really easy. Social engineering is also a massive problem: if you can
phish an admin login, you can essentially take over the entire web server
because the admin panel is just _too powerful_.

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amccloud
So far they are handling this better than Apple.

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keithpeter
ubuntuforums.org timing out as of now but are we sure this is a malicious
attack and not simply downtime?

If it is an attack, it just means a time bandit for the admins I suppose...

~~~
jlgaddis
Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/15u3X7V.png](http://i.imgur.com/15u3X7V.png)

HTML source:
[http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=7JXk5s1F](http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=7JXk5s1F)

~~~
eksith
That's awfully well laid out for a defacement page.

~~~
krapp
Elegant, minimalist, nice logo, nice typography. If I get owned, I want it to
be by these guys.

~~~
keithpeter
Thanks to grandparent for posting. For a split second, I considered setting
this as wallpaper on my laptop.

Then I remembered how much work this kind of prank generates for the system
administrators.

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orblivion
So are they going to email their user base to warn them to change their
passwords? I thought I had an account at some point and I didn't get an email.

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lvs
aren't ubuntu forums based on [http://moinmo.in](http://moinmo.in)?

~~~
popey
No, our wiki is moin based. The forums are vbulletin.

~~~
lvs
Ah, thanks.

