An Out-of-Date CMS is No Match for a Skilled Intruder
Web Attack
© Lead Image © peshkov, 123RF.com
Scary things can happen if you don't keep your CMS up to date. We'll show you how an unpatched vulnerability can lead to privilege escalation and root access.
Pause for a moment and consider all the applications that are powering today's online services, and then step back to consider the attack surface that each one of them presents. In this article, I will look at how a security bug in an online application might allow an attacker to gain full access to the underlying Linux server running it. The prize, in this case, is that the attacker will acquire root access to the server.
The journey starts with a security bug in the application itself, which is an out-of-date version of the CMS Made Simple content management system (CMS). The bug allows an attacker, via a carefully crafted URL, to take advantage of a time-based SQL Injection (SQLi), which ultimately affects the database powering the application. The exploit doesn't even need a valid login.
The next step is to brute-force access to the underlying Linux system, via SSH, before then trying to achieve the final goal: becoming the superuser root, which allows an attacker to take over the system.
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