How safe are we?

[jamesphilhulk2]

i was just wondering how safe is this site from hackers, i'm only asking this question because this site has mass amounts of knowledge and if some PUNK kid wants to get onto the advanced section of the site would he/she be able to get on it easily and he may give this site a really bad rep. [/code]

[TOWCH]

I can see it happening one of two ways. They steal an account, or they hack the server and manually add themselves. The first one can only be prevented by people with access not doing anything stupid. The second one relies on the server having good security. Even if everything is as it should be, there's always the posibility of an unknown exploit. If it happened I would wager it would be the first method.

[illusion]

I would imagine that such attempts have happened before...

I'll wager the first

[hzatorsk]

phpBB is open source and subject to peer review.

...but... if you remember not too long ago... an exploit was discovered that allowed Perl code to be executed on the box. A worm was written that defaced many phpBB sites.

It had to do with input validation problems related to a form field in one of the config screens.

These types of vulnerabilities and exploits are discovered in many products frequently. It is even possible for the problem to be 'reintroduced' in a future release of the code.

z

[Minion]

This website is probably vulnerable to an SQL injection.
As long as they disallow the uploading of ANY files publicly, it's doubtful that anyone could upload a php or perl shell.

[hzatorsk]

Well... actually... What you state as 'doubtful' is exactly what happened.

Also, the uploading of files and the methodology in which the phpBB/Perl worm propogated were not related. The phpBB worm 'Santy' worked by injecting the Perl code directly in the URL of the viewtopic.php script. The other 'issue' was related to the failure to sanitize all the form variables on the an input form allowing script to be pushed into the PHP context.

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/385063

This (like all SQL Injection and buffer overflow vulnerabilities) is an input sanitizing and validation issue and a direct reflection on secure coding practices of the developer.

Today, phpBB is quite well hardened against SQL injections. At least the current version. But... EVERY new version need to be carefully scrutinized as these things tend to creep back into production code.