Hackers exploited 0-day, not 2018 bug, to mass-wipe My E book Reside gadgets

Hackers exploited 0-day, not 2018 bug, to mass-wipe My Book Live devices

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Final week’s mass-wiping of Western Digital My E book Reside storage gadgets concerned the exploitation of not only one vulnerability however a second crucial safety bug that allowed hackers to remotely carry out a manufacturing unit reset with out a password, an investigation exhibits.

The vulnerability is outstanding as a result of it made it trivial to wipe what is probably going petabytes of person information. Extra notable nonetheless was that, in response to the weak code itself, a Western Digital developer actively eliminated code that required a legitimate person password earlier than permitting manufacturing unit resets to proceed.

Accomplished and undone

The undocumented vulnerability resided in a file aptly named system_factory_restore. It comprises a PHP script that performs resets, permitting customers to revive all default configurations and wipe all information saved on the gadgets.

Usually, and for good motive, manufacturing unit resets require the individual making the request to supply a person password. This authentication ensures that gadgets uncovered to the Web can solely be reset by the respectable proprietor and never by a malicious hacker.

Because the following script exhibits, nonetheless, a Western Digital developer created 5 strains of code to password-protect the reset command. For unknown causes, the authentication test was cancelled, or in developer parlance, it was commented out as indicated by the double / character originally of every line.

perform submit($urlPath, $queryParams = null, $ouputFormat="xml") {
    // if(!authenticateAsOwner($queryParams))
    // {
    //      header("HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized");
    //      return;
    // }

“The seller commenting out the authentication within the system restore endpoint actually would not make issues look good for them,” HD Moore, a safety skilled and the CEO of community discovery platform Rumble, instructed Ars. “It’s like they deliberately enabled the bypass.”

To use the vulnerability, the attacker would have needed to know the format of the XML request that triggers the reset. That’s “not fairly as simple as hitting a random URL with a GET request, however [it’s] not that far off, both,” Moore stated.

Dude, the place’s my information?

The invention of the second exploit comes 5 days after individuals everywhere in the world reported that their My Book Live devices had been compromised after which factory-reset so that each one saved information was wiped. My E book Reside is a book-sized storage gadget that makes use of an Ethernet jack to connect with dwelling and workplace networks in order that linked computer systems have entry to the information on it. Approved customers also can entry their information and make configuration modifications over the Web. Western Digital stopped supporting the My E book Reside in 2015.

Western Digital personnel posted an advisory following the mass wiping that stated it resulted from attackers exploiting CVE-2018-18472. The distant command execution vulnerability was discovered in late 2018 by safety researchers Paulos Yibelo and Daniel Eshetu. As a result of it got here to mild three years after Western Digital stopped supporting the My E book Reside, the corporate by no means mounted it.

An evaluation carried out by Ars and Derek Abdine, CTO at safety agency Censys, discovered that the gadgets hit by final week’s mass hack had additionally been subjected to assaults that exploited the unauthorized reset vulnerability. The extra exploit is documented in log information extracted from two hacked gadgets.

One of many logs was posted within the Western Digital support forum the place the mass compromise first got here to mild. It exhibits somebody from the IP handle 94.102.49.104 efficiently restoring a tool:

rest_api.log.1:Jun 23 15:46:11 MyBookLiveDuo REST_API[9529]: 94.102.49.104 PARAMETER System_factory_restore POST : erase = none
rest_api.log.1:Jun 23 15:46:11 MyBookLiveDuo REST_API[9529]: 94.102.49.104 OUTPUT System_factory_restore POST SUCCESS

A second log file I obtained from a hacked My E book Reside gadget confirmed a unique IP handle—23.154.177.131—exploiting the identical vulnerability. Listed here are the telltale strains:

Jun 16 07:28:41 MyBookLive REST_API[28538]: 23.154.177.131 PARAMETER System_factory_restore POST : erase = format
Jun 16 07:28:42 MyBookLive REST_API[28538]: 23.154.177.131 OUTPUT System_factory_restore POST SUCCESS

After presenting these findings to Western Digital representatives, I obtained the next affirmation: “We will verify that in no less than a few of the circumstances, the attackers exploited the command injection vulnerability (CVE-2018-18472), adopted by the manufacturing unit reset vulnerability. It’s not clear why the attackers exploited each vulnerabilities. We’ll request a CVE for the manufacturing unit reset vulnerability and can replace our bulletin to incorporate this info.”

This vulnerability has been password-protected

The invention raises a vexing query: if the hackers had already obtained full root entry by exploiting CVE-2018-18472, what want did they’ve for this second safety flaw? There’s no clear reply, however based mostly on the proof out there, Abdine has provide you with a believable principle—that one hacker first exploited CVE-2018-18472 and a rival hacker later exploited the opposite vulnerability in an try and wrest management of these already compromised gadgets.

The attacker who exploited CVE-2018-18472 used the code execution functionality it supplied to switch a file within the My E book Reside stack named language_configuration.php, which is the place the vulnerability is positioned. In keeping with a recovered file, the modification added the next strains:

perform put($urlPath, $queryParams=null, $ouputFormat="xml"){

    parse_str(file_get_contents("php://enter"), $modifications);

    $langConfigObj = new LanguageConfiguration();
    if(!isset($modifications["submit"]) || sha1($modifications["submit"]) != "56f650e16801d38f47bb0eeac39e21a8142d7da1")
    {
    die();
    }

The change prevented anybody from exploiting the vulnerability with out the password that corresponds to the cryptographic SHA1 hash 56f650e16801d38f47bb0eeac39e21a8142d7da1. It seems that the password for this hash is p$EFx3tQWoUbFcpercentBpercentR$ok@. The plaintext seems within the recovered log file here.

A separate modified language_configuration.php file recovered from a hacked gadget used a unique password that corresponds to the hash 05951edd7f05318019c4cfafab8e567afe7936d4. The hackers used a 3rd hash—b18c3795fd377b51b7925b2b68ff818cc9115a47—to password-protect a separate file named accessDenied.php. It was doubtless accomplished as an insurance coverage coverage within the occasion that Western Digital launched an replace that patched language_configuration.

Thus far, makes an attempt to crack these two different hashes haven’t succeeded.

In keeping with Western Digital’s advisory linked above, a few of the My E book Reside gadgets hacked utilizing CVE-2021-18472 had been contaminated with malware known as .nttpd,1-ppc-be-t1-z, which was written to run on the PowerPC {hardware} utilized by My E book Reside gadgets. One person within the help discussion board reported a hacked My E book Reside receiving this malware, which makes devices part of a botnet known as Linux.Ngioweb.

A principle emerges

So why would somebody who efficiently wrangled so many My E book Reside gadgets right into a botnet flip round and wipe and reset them? And why would somebody use an undocumented authentication bypass once they have already got root entry?

The most probably reply is that the mass wipe and reset was carried out by a unique attacker, very presumably a rival who both tried to take management of the rival’s botnet or just wished to sabotage it.

“As for motive for POSTing to this [system_factory_restore] endpoint on a mass scale, it’s unknown, however it might be an try at a rival botnet operator to take over these gadgets or render them ineffective, or somebody who wished to in any other case disrupt the botnet which has doubtless been round for a while, since these points have existed since 2015,” Abdine wrote in a recent blog post.

The invention of this second vulnerability implies that My E book Reside gadgets are much more insecure than most individuals thought. It provides authority to Western Digital’s advice to all customers to disconnect their gadgets from the Web. Anybody utilizing considered one of these gadgets ought to heed the decision instantly.

For a lot of hacked customers who misplaced years’ or many years’ value of knowledge, the considered shopping for one other Western Digital storage gadget might be out of the query. Abdine, nonetheless, says that My Cloud Reside gadgets, which changed Western Digital’s My E book Reside merchandise, have a unique codebase that doesn’t comprise both of the vulnerabilities exploited within the current mass wiping.

“I took a have a look at the My Cloud firmware, too,” he instructed me. “It is rewritten and bears some, however largely little, resemblance to My E book Reside code. So it would not share the identical points.”

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