http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,134943-c,onlinesecurity/article.html
By Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service
July 23, 2007
Security analysts spotted a gaping security hole in Fox News Network
LLC's Web site on Monday, revealing file directories and sensitive
content, although it appears the problem has been fixed.
Several directories were visible on a server for Fox News [1] that
should normally not be accessible by a Web browser over the Internet.
A systems administrator may have forgotten that the directories were
viewable over the Internet or erroneously changed the permissions needed
to view the directories, said Ronald van den Heetkamp, who runs the blog
"The Hacker Webzine." [2] The Fox News site runs on the Apache Web
server software on Ubuntu Linux.
"This isn't a very clever idea," wrote van den Heetkamp, in an e-mail to
IDG News Service. The security problem is "huge enough, and a few
sensitive files have been found."
Also exposed was an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) connection to
ziffdavis.com, plus a username and a password in a bash file, which is a
Linux shell script used in this case to automatically login into an FTP
server and grab news headlines, van den Heetkamp said.
It would be hard to directly exploit the Web server, but being able to
see how the Web site is structured could open other ideas for an attack
in the future, van den Heetkamp said.
"They will have tons of people downloading their data right now as we
speak, which is bad in any case," he said.
Fox officials were not immediately available for comment.
[1] http://www.foxnews.com/index.html
[2] http://www.0x000000.com/index.php?
Received on Tue Jul 24 00:06:15 2007