Admin Password Reset Vulnerability in Joomla 1.5
Aug 12 2008 - Tagged in: release , Joomla Sites , joomla 1.5 , compassdesigns.net
Its recently surfaced that there is a small hole in the password reset process for Joomla 1.5. Recently for me as this site was hacked late this afternoon and I spent an amusing hour or so tussling with the would be hacker and me in the backend of the site. He was busy deleting articles, I was busy deleting his user.
The j.org team have released a fix already. Its a critical security patch and part of 1.5.6. You should update your site ASAP if you are running Joomla 1.5.
A flaw in the reset token validation mechanism allows for non-validating tokens to be forged. This will allow an unauthenticated, unauthorized user to reset the password of the first enabled user (lowest id). Typically, this is an administrator user. Note, that changing the first users username may lessen the impact of this exploit (since the person who changed the password does not know the login associated with the new password). However, the only way to completely rectify the issue is to upgrade to 1.5.6 (or patch the /components/com_user/models/reset.php file).
On a related issue, this has made me think of how I set up Joomla sites in the future. You might want to follow these steps:
- Install Joomla et al
- Create a few users
- Create a new super admin with a user name other than "admin"
- Delete the original "admin" user created on installation
I claim no security expertise... but taking these steps might slow them down a little!
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Comments (12)
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Ron Hammer
said:
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... Hi Barrie: Any word on whether the joomla.org site has been hacked. It seems to be down. Do you know of any alternate locations to download the patch and the instructions. When I go to joomla.org I get a password request. -Ron |
Ron Hammer
said:
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... Replying to my own post: If anyone is having trouble on joomla.org, you can find instructions for patching the reset.php file Here: http://developer.joomla.org/se...ality.html -Ron |
hanh
said:
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... Barrie, thank you for the email blast in regard to all users of Joomla 1.5 to IMMEDIATELY upgrade to 1.5.6. Alan migrated our Investers Lounge Onlineto J 1.5.6. Thanks again for keeping us in touch with Joomla developments. |
Jason Boyette
said:
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... My site was also hacked on Wednesday morning. I am thankful for two things: 1. I have another user (in addition to admin) set up as Super Administrator. 2. I use an extension called SubmitMailer from JoomlaPraise.com. It notified me that "admin" had edited an article, and that's when I started investigating. I used to backup daily, now I do it much more frequently. |
john
said:
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... I just ran into this problem earlier today. I got the email from Barrie here about the security issue but ignored it. Mistake. Luckily the guy that got me didn't delete anything. Just changed my login info and put up an image saying "this site was hacked by White Sultan" Fixed the image thing but he put it back a few minutes later. Eventually decided to do a full delete/re-install of Joomla. Joomla docs has info on resetting your password if anyone needs to know how to do it http://docs.joomla.org/Adminis...assword.3F |
shanique
said:
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... You talk about "small hole in the password reset process" and then about a fix that is a "critical security patch". mmmm.... |
Acorn Car Leasing
said:
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... I had a charity site I look after get hacked with some garbage html on the home page. Couldn't log in with admin password so I logged into phpMyAdmin through my hosting control panel and edited the user table. I created a basic registered user with a lower id than admin, and changed the main admin login name to something else. I had to run a MD5 hash to encrypt the new passwords I wanted and inserted them directly into the user table. Then upgraded to version 1.5.7. Fortunately no articles had been deleted and all they had done was replace the main index.php file in the root of the public folder with their own. Uploaded the new one with the upgrade and everything is now well! I noticed I had another Turkish visitor the next day arriving directly but they only looked at the home page and left. Found out from the last available stat on Google Analytics that the attack seemed to originate from Ankara in Turkey (tt adsl-ttnet alc dynamic_ulus), though it could have been spoofed. They had searched Google for "intitle:me inurl:com_user" Went onto pages: /index.php?option=com_user&view=remind, /index.php?option=com_user&view=login, /index.php?option=com_user&view=reset&layout=confirm, /index.php?option=com_user&view=reset&layout=complete I'm now going to run through the logs on the server to see if I can find an IP address, though I doubt I can do much about it! Hope this can help somebody. I didn't need this on a lazy Sunday morning!!! |
AnonXXX
said:
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... I'd check the other files as well (especially *.pl). The person who hacked my Joomla site left a perl script somewhere deep inside the directory structure that can be used to execute DOS attacks. |
fares001
said:
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... ... I'd check the other files as well (especially *.pl). The person who hacked my Joomla site left a perl script somewhere deep inside the directory structure that can be used to execute DOS attacks. |
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