FTP Treasure Trove | TechSNAP 105

chris

9 years ago

A treasure trove of data was found on an open FTP site, leaving AMI BIOS users open to attack.

Plus a look at PunkSPIDER, a batch of your questions, and so much more!

On this week’s of TechSNAP.

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New distributed web application vulnerability scanner linked to search engine

HyperionGray have announced a new project, where they have connected their open source distributed PunkSCAN webapp scanner to an Apache Hadoop Cluster and set it loose on the Internet
The goal of the project is to highlight the abysmal state of security on the Internet
The scanner finds sites that are vulnerable to SQL Injection, Blind SQL Injection, and Cross-Site Scripting
This information is then stored in a database, and is searching using PunkSPIDER
You can search by keyword in the URL or Title of the site and search by vulnerability types
PunkSPIDER Search Engine
PunkSPIDER is similar to another online search engine we have discussed previously, SHODAN is an online index of banner messages and version info
Additional Coverage

How power failures can corrupt Flash SSDs

Researchers at Ohio State University have conducted extensive testing of Flash SSD drives to determine how they react to unexpected power failures
By creating a worst case scenario that involves many concurrent writes of incompressible data, and a direct loss of power (cutting power between the PSU and the SSD rather than cutting power to the PSU), the researchers were able to enumerate a number of possible failure scenarios
The possible failures they looked for were:
- Bit Corruption – Random bits in the data set incorrectly
- Flying Writes – The correct data written to the wrong block/sector
- Shorn Writes – A write is interrupted while overwriting a sector, leaving the sector with some of the new bits and some of the old bits
- Metadata Corruption – The Flash Translation Layer (FTL, the complex firmware on an SSD that makes the NAND Flash chips appear like a regular hard drive) metadata is corrupted
- Dead Device – The SSD no longer functions at all
- Unserializability – The disk is in a state where writes were completed out of order
Researchers tested 15 different SSDs and 2 regular spinning drives
They did not release the manufacturer names or model numbers
Additional Coverage
Paper
Erretum Insert
A case of a similar problem? SSD suddenly only 34kb

Source code and possibly private keys for AMI BIOS/Firmware leaked

Security researchers Brandan Wilson and Adam Caudill found some interesting things on an open FTP server in Taiwan
On the FTP site they found numerous goodies, including internal emails, system images, high resolution PCB images, and Excel sheets loaded with private data
In addition, they also found a directory named ‘code’, that contained the source code and a private key for the AMI Firmware
According to AMI, the FTP site belongs to one of its customers, and the private key that was exposed is a testing key they use for all of their images, but they instruct all of their customers to generate their own keys and not use that testing key in production
It is not clear if this is the case, one or more manufacturer making use of the AMI Firmware are using that testing key
If that key is trusted in the wild, it means someone with access to this leaked source code could make a malicious firmware update that would be considered valid, it would also mean that the entire UEFI trust system for the affected machines could be invalid
“The worst case is the creation of a persistent, Trojanized update that would allow remote access to the system at the lowest possible level,” Caudill said. “Another possibility would be the creation of an update that would render the system unbootable, requiring replacement of the mainboard.”
“This kind of leak is a dream-come-true for advanced corporate espionage or intelligence operations,” Caudill wrote. “The ability to create a nearly undetectable, permanent hole in a system’s security is an ideal scenario for covert information collection.”