Pierluigi Paganini
October 07, 2014
The Security researcher Jonathan Hall, president of IT consulting firm Future South Technologies, said that a gang of Romanian hackers exploited the Shellshock vulnerability to gain access to Yahoo servers, and Yahoo! has confirmed the violation of some of its systems.
During the weekend, Hall noticed that bad actors were running attacks on Yahoo servers and allegedly other networks operated by Lycos and WinZip. Hall explained in a blog post the tactic used by the cyber criminals to track down the hacked Yahoo servers, the expert used the Google search engine to find vulnerable servers. It seems that that hackers exploited the Shellshock flaw to compromise the Yahoo servers and use them to build a botnet. In time I’m writing there are no evidence of data breach.
Hall discovered that the WinZip.com domain was being used by hackers find other servers that could be affected by the Bash Bug flaw, Hall tried to warn WinZip, but the company didn’t respond to his email alerting.
Hall found evidence the Romanian hackers had gained access to Yahoo’s servers, and were exploring the company network in search of the popular Yahoo! Games servers. Game servers are a privileged target for cyber criminals, they usually contain sensitive data of million of players, a precious commodity in the underground market.
“Some of my observations indicate that him [the alleged hacker] and his little Romanian cohort in there are also working towards another goal on Yahoo!’s network: the Yahoo! Games servers,” Hall wrote. “One might wonder why they would bother going for that… Well, those games are visited by MILLIONS of people per a day, and they’re also Java based. Think about it and you tell me why someone would want to compromise those.”
The expert revealed that at least two of Yahoo’s servers had been breached by hackers:
“The following two servers have been 100% rooted successfully and confirmed by monitoring the groups actions: dip4.gq1.yahoo.com and api118.sports.gq1.yahoo.com” said Hall.
In an email to Bloomerg Businesseek, Yahoo representatives confirmed that three of its servers had been hacked using the Shellshock vulnerability.
“As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began patching our systems and have been closely monitoring our network, we isolated a handful of our impacted servers and at this time we have no evidence of a compromise to user data.” said Yahoo spokesperson Elisa Shyu.
“As soon as we became aware of the issue, we began patching our systems and have been closely monitoring our network,” a Yahoo! spokesperson told The Register in an emailed statement. “Last night, we isolated a handful of our impacted servers and at this time we have no evidence of a compromise to user data. We’re focused on providing the most secure experience possible for our users worldwide and are continuously working to protect our users’ data.”
While Yahoo! confirmed that the problem has now been solved, Hall alerted law enforcement that many other vulnerable servers could be already under attack.
Let’s patch those servers before hackers will breach them!
(Security Affairs – Yahoo, Bash Bug)
