Royal Navy Website Hacked, Passwords Revealed 114
An anonymous reader writes "The British Royal Navy's website has been suspended after a Romanian hacker exploited SQL injection vulnerabilities to gain access to the site.
The hacker, named 'TinKode,' accessed usernames and passwords used by the site's administrators and published them on the web. TinKode's attack is 'particularly embarrassing for the British Ministry of Defence, as just last month protecting against cyber attacks was declared in the National Security Strategy to be a "highest priority for UK national security."'"
Oops (Score:5, Funny)
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More like:
"Lieutenant and password = '*'; please report to the bridge."
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report to the bridge to see Major Dix. Oh wait, this is the Navy, not the Army.
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God, do I need a fag right now.
i bet changing the code was too much trouble (Score:4, Insightful)
we had this happen a few times and every time you go back to the developers who coded the website they always complained how it would take them too much time to change the code. even though changing the database permissions would be a snap
something for nothing (Score:2)
"it would take them too much time to change the code...unless you choose to value their extra work and pay them for it, instead of expecting to piggy-back it onto the previous job."
Fixed that for you.
Re:something for nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
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Good point :) The way GGP wrote it though, it seemed like he was talking about general web bugs rather than security. It's pretty unfathomable that you'd take "it would be too much work" as an excuse for not securing a site against providing public access to its database.
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So, you see fixing a security vulnerability as something that should be paid for by the customer?
Interesting. Personally I see it as a critical flaw that should have been caught in testing and never allowed into production - and I say that as a professional programmer working at a web agency.
Details (Score:5, Informative)
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=M2MUEdv4 [pastebin.com]
Fire up your rainbow tables :-)
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Wow, I haven't seen that ASCII art chick since the early 90s when I would hang out on questionable BBSs :)
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She's filled out nicely.
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And MD5 hashes were stored without any kind of seed (you can crack most of them at your nearest md5crack website). The admin password in one of the auth tables was ppp (it's already public in that file, don't hold me responsible for posting it...).
I hope real defense networks are not being managed by the same people...
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Re:Details (Score:4, Informative)
It was probably not ppp, but a rather unfortunate password whose md5 is the same as for "ppp". I can't believe they'd actually put in a password like that.
Since the former is statistically improbable to beyond-astronomical degrees, the latter is, unfortunately, more likely.
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I think you meant to say that the latter (unfortunate password with same hash as "ppp") is improbable so the former (password actually was chosen to be "ppp") is more likely.
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I think you meant to say that the latter (unfortunate password with same hash as "ppp") is improbable so the former (password actually was chosen to be "ppp") is more likely.
The bit I was replying to was convoluted enough that I probably shouldn't have referred to it that way. I meant the whole of "It was probably not ppp, but a rather unfortunate password whose md5 is the same as for 'ppp'." as the former and "they'd actually put in a password like that." as unfortunate but probably true.
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It probably was ppp. An unfortunate MD5 collision seems much more improbable than simple incompetence on the part of the database administrators.
In fact, I’d assume most likely it was a tribute to the point-to-point protocol [wikipedia.org] (used for dial-up internet connections and replaced by the PPPoE, point-to-point protocol over ethernet, for some broadband connections).
Ah, that brings back memories... 24.4k modems, Trumpet WinSock on Windows 3.11, and Netscape Navigator. Upgrading to 56k was a big deal. The 3.5
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MD5 is considered broken, but it's not THAT broken. If you manage to find two short* strings with the same MD5 sum, you should post that result to a security conference and get famous.
*i.e. not longer than your average password
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admin : f27f6f1c7c5cbf4e3e192e0a47b85300 | cracked: ppp
Something tells me they aren't exactly the most security conscious bunch...
Why !? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why hire dumbfucks? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why people need to deface sites just to show ... what ?
They do it just to show how ignorant are the people who are supposed to manage those sites.
The Royal Navy used to be the defense of the UK against invaders. They were supposed to fight to the end, to resist against everyone. Yet, nowadays, some script kiddie is able to defeat the Royal Navy from his mom's basement? WTF???
The message is that the sites can be defeated very easily, that's all.
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One would hope that the whole Navy isn't defeated just because someone hacked into their "Look at my cat!" website...
But database names like "globalops" and "livechat" inspires no confidence at all. Imagine if this hacker didn't deface the site, but made a script that silently reads and forwards information out of those databases to the highest bidder...
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The point is that someone probably already has.
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But database names like "globalops" and "livechat" inspires no confidence at all. Imagine if this hacker didn't deface the site, but made a script that silently reads and forwards information out of those databases to the highest bidder...
Yep, because foreign governments would pay large sums of money for freely listed information about the deployments of the RN, accompanied with chat-logs between navy recruiters and Joe/m/15 from Liverpool asking if sailors also get guns.
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"But database names like "globalops" and "livechat" inspires no confidence at all. Imagine if this hacker didn't deface the site, but made a script that silently reads and forwards information out of those databases to the highest bidder..."
Yeah, I mean, imagine the fortunes he could amass by selling details that were publicly available on their site as part of the site's information on their current global operations:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KdouvXaAGLoJ:www.royalnavy.mod.uk/glo [googleusercontent.com]
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Sure he can defeat the Navy's website. Let's see him try and defeat the 10" guns on a battleship, pointed at his house.
Re:Why !? (Score:5, Insightful)
do you know how hard it is for somebody to even begin reporting something like that?
if you are a young adult (aged 12-24) and you find a security hole, do you know how few people will take you seriously? it's amount to telling your teacher there's a problem in every copy of a textbook: they'll just laugh at you and tell you "you just don't know any better".
Yes, I completely agree that there ARE BETTER WAYS to disclose: but by not making them easy enough for a youngster to understand: you prevent people from reporting in the first place.
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if you are a young adult (aged 12-24) and you find a security hole, do you know how few people will take you seriously?
And when they do eventually take you seriously, they will take you way to seriously by threatening you with jailtime etc.
Better avoid all risks, and anonymously hack their site via tor or an open Wifi.
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This being the UK, if you find such a hole in a government website and report it you're likelly to end up in prison accused of terrorism.
Seriously, they've used the Anti-Terrorism legislation to detain a pensioner who shouted "nonsense" at the labour party conference: do you really think they would not do whatever it took to shut somebody that found such a hole up to avoid the embarassment? The whole purpose of these without-court-order-laws is exactly to be unrestrained tools of state power ...
Nah, your're
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To be fair, they mistook "nonsense" for a request.
It's tough. Try telling Google something. (Score:2)
I've been trying to get Google to fix this phishing page [phishtank.com] for months.
Someone discovered a neat hack - they can store a phishing page in Google Storage, and link to it from Google Sites. Google's abuse system doesn't comprehend that you can leverage an attack through Google Storage, so there's no way to get that phishing page taken down.
(The basic problem is that if you offer free hosting or URL redirection, and don't validate your users, you will be used to host attacks. "TinyURL" is good at catching t
Re:Why !? (Score:5, Insightful)
By making a public display of low security standards - you impact more people.
Could he have told the ONE administrator of the site about the vulnerability, and HOPED that the Sysadmin would take the time out of the day to fix it - and not completely disregard his advice? Yeah, he COULD have done that, but that doesn't guarantee results or get the message to as many people.
Don't get me wrong, we just had to deal with the hooligans ourselves in my company, and it is a bit of a piss off to have to deal with it. However, I can say for a fact we're much better with our security standards now than we ever were before. And on top of that - anyone who finds out might think "Jeez, that kind of stuff is on the rise, maybe I should get to that update I've been sitting on".
It sucks if it happens to you - but its one of those things that seems necessary to keep things in line. I'd rather we be too secure as a society as opposed to being all willy nilly.
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I don't understand why people need to deface sites just to show ... what ? their skillz ? the poor security of the website ?! This is beyond childish, and the "authors" are probably no more than script kiddiez.
As tinKode points out on his site, he wants to drive attention to security problems. In fact, if he wanted to do only that, he could privately inform the site owners about the problems he sees. He could make his own security company, and make some nice bucks out of doing this specific job he seems to enjoy.
But what he does now is no better than hooliganism, and I hope he will be tracked and serve some sentence for defacing of private property or anything similar.
So it's worse that a Romanian hacker makes this information public, than 'terrorists' using it privately?
The British Navy are using Wordpress and Livechat. This is their own damn fault, and I for one am glad that we know how bad our security services are.
I'm guessing your not a British citizen, since if this was announced privately, it'd just be covered up. At least like this, something will happen - and quickly.
Oh Noes (Score:2)
A useless PR website to a government agency was hacked! This is like when the RIAA home page gets hacked. No operations were actually effected, because no one goes there anyway. No shut down the email servers, thats something else.
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I do agree people seem to think that Navy.mil or Whitehouse.gov are high security sites. They are for the most part nothing but PR tools. Nothing wrong with PR tools but sites like those do not control the Trident launch codes or anything else major. .ht
The big worry is that some idiot used the same password for that site as for a secured system.
I swear that letting people pick their own passwords is just a bad idea.
One of the first sites I did for my company I had to write our own forum and security using
Re:Oh Noes (Score:4, Insightful)
You're assuming that no one ever puts anything else up in a hidden directory on a website, do you? Just because it's a fluff website doesn't mean there isn't anything else behind those pages. At the very least, an exploited script could be running a simple fileserver on it for dropping off warez and pr0n and other stuff. Hell, the webmaster and his friends might've put up files there on behalf of some higher up who needs a large file sent somewhere.
Wasn't there that funny anti-piracy site that was DoS'd and ended up revealing a pile of hidden files containing emails and such?
You might think that such entities would use super-secret encryption and file transfer methods, but you'd be surprised to find out most still use common FTP and HTTP.
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So, potential for even greater mischief was indeed there.
We keep a Brit here as a pet in our office. As long as we feed it bananas and apples everyda
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The air gap is gone, the bespoke OS gap is now filled by MS.
It was only a dream (Score:3, Interesting)
It's okay! This was only a simulation [slashdot.org], right?
clear text passwords? (Score:2)
Really?? I realize there are cases where it is useful and possibly even necessary, but the use of clear text passwords is just a bad idea. It amazes me that it continues to go on and on and on...
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Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Embarrassing, sure. But it's just their website, and doesn't justify spending £500m on fighting "cyber-terrorism". By the way does anyone know what the £500m will actually be spent on? It *should* be spent on researching secure systems like BitC, SELinux, stack protection and so on. I bet it isn't.
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LoB
Microsoft? Really? :-) (Score:1)
eherr@quark:~$ HEAD http://royalnavy.mod.uk/ [royalnavy.mod.uk]
200 OK
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:51:01 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "0ee7b62b67dcb1:7904"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Content-Length: 70
Content-Location: http://royalnavy.mod.uk/index.html [royalnavy.mod.uk]
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Sat, 06 Nov 2010 13:27:40 GMT
Client-Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 15:51:03 GMT
Client-Peer: 94.236.30.11:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
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Was only a matter of time, serves the right.
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Lucky they don't use it for anything critical! Oh, wait:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/windows_for_submarines_rollout/ [theregister.co.uk]
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One usb drive/download away from ???? at sea.
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I think this particular instance was more a matter of poor security practices in web development than underlying OS or web server, but it does seem a bit odd that a military branch would use Microsoft/IIS vice using a Unix or Linux platform. It appears that the U.S. Navy is also running IIS for their primary public site.
200 OK
Cache-Control: max-age=334
Connection: close
Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2010 16:56:47 GMT
ETag: "8094fdaf44cc81:287"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Content-Location: http://www.navy.mil/usnhome.html [navy.mil]
Cont
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Actually, no, the server hacked was RHEL:
Server : Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat) DAV/2 PHP/4.4.9 Machine : i686
System User : amax_navy@192.168.10.17
OS : redhat-linux-gnu
IP : 94.236.30.85
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Ah. My bad. I just read the exploit summary.
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That is a common tactic to mitigate attacks: let them try to attack software that you aren't running. It's an Apache config option.
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Yeah. I had not read the exploit. It was apparently a Linux box that was compromised.
From TFA (Score:3, Interesting)
Giving anyone free reign to embed said trojans into the site is only marginally better. Assuming of course that it could be done with the exposed admin logins. Now they're forced to go through pretty much everything to make sure no such traps were placed or if information was stolen.
The mischevious option would have been to remain only parts of the passwords, or otherwise proving it and not leaking anything sensitive.
Not to worry however, I'm sure he'll get 60 years in jail without parole for embarrassing the wrong people.
Not sure what is more embarrassing (Score:3, Interesting)
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And that's not even all of it. Given how much fail they managed to cram into three lines of HTML, it's no wonder there are SQL injection holes.
Still, at least it'll cost less to fix this than to fix Astute... or at least you'd think so. I'm sure someone's on the phone to EDS offering them half a billion quid to do the job, even as I type.
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Even worse is their "font colour='grey'" tag
that's not technically embarrassing (Score:5, Informative)
it's an unimportant website
now THIS is technically embarrassing
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-11605365 [bbc.co.uk]
this is a nuclear powered brand new stealth submarine, giving away its secret propulsion system as the tide lowers, because someone drove it into the beach. stealth beach? (slaps forehead)
But it is stealthy (Score:2)
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Rather like this picture [guardian.co.uk]?
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Unless (Score:2)
That would be steam powered (Score:2)
Moderate this funny not informative.
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this is a nuclear powered brand new stealth submarine, giving away its secret propulsion system as the tide lowers
Shit. Thanks to this incident, the whole world knows that the UK uses propellers. May as well just scrap the whole navy now.
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Who wants to have... (Score:1)
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smallest web page I've seen recently (Score:2)
{html}
{centre}{img src="navysitedown.gif" alt=""/}{/centre}
{?html}
and even a ? instead of a / , they were obviously in quite a hurry to take it down... I'm also surprised it takes "centre"... silly brits and their proprietary english!
(you'd think by now slashdot wouldn't blow a gasket trying to use a less than or greater than symbol in the text of their post...)
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Have you ever heard of entities?
< generates a < less than symbol quite nicely.
Similarly, > generates a > greater than.
And if you need an ampersand (&), & does the trick.
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And if you need an ampersand (&), & does the trick.
So does an ampersand (&) (unless it happens to be followed by lt; or some other HTML entity).
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If you type > you can get a >
Care time? (Score:2, Interesting)
But, it doesn't, so I DON'T.
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In this case I am willing to bet they are NOT administered by the same group and since most of the UIDs DON'T look like anything other than test id's the risk is minimal, but the risk would be even less had the site not had the vulnerability.
More importantly, the real story ISN'T about how there was a massive military security lapse and now we are all going t
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I like you're IDEA of randomly bolding things.
If you think the bolding is random then you need to re-read the comment.
don't store passwords (Score:1)
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Which FA did you read? The one I read had only hashes.
So... (Score:2)
the Queen's not getting on Facebook then, hugh?
If they are anything like the US (Score:4, Informative)
But You Must Trust (Score:2)
My God... They've Finally Done It. (Score:2)
How deliciously accurate. They've admitted biofuel are a desperate, unsupportable hail mary to the Gods.
Oops... (Score:2)
Further Statement. (Score:1)