GhettoWebmaster.com

Friday morning I got an interesting email…

Looks like a typical phishing email, right? Sure. There were two things that got my attention though…

1. It got through Gmail’s spam filter.
2. The link went to PayPal’s real login page. WTF?

Usually, a phishing email will use the correct address as the anchor text of a spoof log-in page link. Simply mousing over such a link reveals the true link in your status bar though. So, it’s fairly easy even for a novice computer user to spot as BS.

Example:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run

Viewing the source code of the original email revealed an epic fail.

<a class="Style5 Style2"
onmouseover="window.status='https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run'; return true" onmouseout="window.status=''" target="_blank" href="http://pimpyaho.com/functions/us/"> <font size=3D"2">https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=3D_login-run</font></a> </font>

The above shows that this retard was trying the old use JavaScript to make the status bar display whatever you want trick. Too bad for this idiot, modern email clients filter JavaScript. In both Gmail and Yahoo that code ended up looking like the below.

<a href="http://pimpyaho.com/functions/us/" target="_blank"><font size="2"></font></a>
<font size="2"><a href="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run" target="_blank">https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run</a>

So, the link ended up pointing to the real PayPal login. Epic fail, indeed.

Digging further, I saw that the phishing page he intended to send people to was on a porn site. The site is part of a lucrative network owned by a guy whom I made an ad buy from in the past. His ad system requires a person to sign up as a regular member of his site before making a purchase. This explained how I ended up getting that email. His user database had obviously been compromised.

I posted some info about this mess on a forum he hangs out on to make sure he knew what was happening and to get more info.

Here’s the skinny:

1. Homeboy hired an outside company to develop a bespoke chat solution for one of the sites sitting on that server.

2. Said company was given shell access to speed up the delivery of the product, etc.

3. A shoutcast server magically began running on the server – pushing 25Mbit of bandwidth.
Side note: The files had been removed so there was no shoutcast config. Once shoutcast has been started, it doesn’t require its own files in Linux to continue to run, so they were obviously removed in an attempt to hide it.

4. “[After discovering / removing the phishing setup] the files popped back [within seconds]… I then shut down pimpyaho.com, so the site physically wasn’t running… still the files came back. This meant the user HAD to have some sort of shell access.”

5. “Have now sorted the breach and made sure it can’t happen again. I can tell you that they managed to get hold of around 16,000 email addresses, however the [other site's user] database is up around 80k, so at least they didn’t get hold of that.”

Ouchness++

I stole this blog’s title from the ending thought Alex Eckelberry (someone who understands the interweb) left on his latest blog entry. He gives a solid overview of the current retardedness being shown by law enforcement (people who don’t understand “that interweb thingy”). The last big story like this was the Julie Amero case. Just like in Julie’s case, John Nohejl is being fed to the wolves over total BS.

Kevin Poulsen (he really understands the interwebs, too) explains:
Gulf Middle School resource officer John Nohejl didn’t have porn on his MySpace profile, and he didn’t link to porn. But one of the 170-odd people on his friends list, which seems mostly populated by students at his school, had a link to a legal adult site. Now the New Port Richey Police Department and the Florida attorney general’s elite cyber crimes unit are investigating him for making adult content available to underage children.
Source: Wired.com

Shortly after this story broke, a link going to gay porn was found on the school’s website! The great thing about this is that the school has FULL control over the content of their website. John Nohejl on the other hand has zero control over the content on his friend’s MySpace pages. Who’s the screw-up now?

Alex ended his blog entry with some nice bait:
At least one thing is heartening — the good folks over at the Florida Cybercrimes unit have their own MySpace page. They may quickly see how ludicrious this whole thing is.

Well, I took the bait. After a good ten minutes of looking over the profile of this “elite” cybercrimes task force that’s actively investigating John Nohejl’s MySpace I found the following…

Being the interweb gods that they are, they used code from a third party website to pimp out (add style / graphics) to their profile. Included in that code was five troublesome links they didn’t remove. All five links are promoting two “MySpace page pimping” sites which as a whole are known to be breeding grounds for all sorts of evilness. The two in question here are actively promoting several sites known to distribute adware.

Here’s one button and two text links going to those sites:

Another banner ad:

And, another:

So… Besides having a hideously ugly MySpace page full of broken code, they are sending kids to sites that promote adware. After seeing that, I dug into their friend list to give them a taste of the exact same BS being served to John Nohejl. Here’s what I found on their friends’ pages…

Promotion of some funky head shop “legal weed”:

via this friend.

That same friend has a banner in her comments promoting a site which is known “to steal your MySpace username and password by posing as a profile tracker“. In fact, several friends of theirs have the same thing on their pages. Nice!

Another friend of theirs seems to be a lost cause. That page has links to phishing pages and all sorts of other evil stuff. Those email addresses spammed in the comments… Yeah, those will lure you to sites with boobies all over the place if you dare message them.

Go dig for yourself, there’s plenty of double standard to be found in them hills ;-)

Seeing these eTards go after this cop sure reminds me of someone…

I’m sure these experts are just as ninja at the interwebs as the jackass pictured above.

My buddy PaperGhost just posted this:
Myspace Fake Profile Spammers: This Is How They Do It

It gives an overview of an odd MySpace spamming app that works in conjunction with files hosted on the net. The only thing I can imagine is that we got our hands on this thing early and it’s just a beta of sorts being sold to noobs. The coder is likely working towards making it so that he can infect systems with that garbage, so a botnet (your infected systems) can do his spamming for him…

Another interesting tidbit:
Based on some other files I saw on that url, it looks like the program works in conjunction with a proxy script…

Just noticed the below internal message in my ePassporte account. Anyone have the scoop on this? It smells like BS to me. I imagine it was a processing fee issue and ePassporte felt MasterCard was getting more than their fair share. If this is a smear campaign based on something like that, ePassporte just screwed up big time. I smell a lawsuit brewing…

————-
From: Internal Notification
To: [Removed my ePassporte account name]
Received: Jan 10, 2008 2:41 PM PST
Subject: Important Notice about MasterCard Credit/Debit Load Cards

Dear Account Holder,

ePassporte currently does not accept MasterCard Credit/Debit Cards for loading funds. ePassporte does not believe MasterCard’s security procedures meet the standards required by ePassporte to ensure the security of our Account Holders.

Alternatively, you may use a Visa Credit/Debit card to load funds to your ePassporte Account. To add a Visa Card, please log into your ePassporte Account, click on “Load Money”, “Credit Card” and the “Add a New Credit Card” link.

You may also use your US checking account to transfer funds to your ePassporte Account. To add a US Bank Account, please click on “Load Money”, “US Bank Account” and enter your bank account details.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Please do not hesitate to contact us for further assistance.

Thank you for choosing ePassporte.

Best Regards,

ePassporte Account Holder Services

*This info in this blog post is dated. I no longer have my admin panel super hidden. Will likely hide everything once again when I have some time. For now, I just want an easy WordPress upgrade.*

A couple days back, I read Matt Cutts’ post: Three tips to protect your WordPress installation. His suggestions are decent, but there’s some better stuff you can do via security through obscurity.

Matt suggests protecting your wp-admin directory via .htaccess IP restricting. This is a good idea to be sure, but why let your wordpress install location be known when it’s simple as pie to hide?

Step One:
Toss your WordPress installation into a super secret directory.

Step Two:
Move your style sheet / images from your theme directory and into directories outside of your WordPress install. Change your head to reflect the change.

Step Three:
Dump that wlw reference from your head. This plugin will do the trick.

Step Four:
Move your wp-comments-post.php into your root and edit the beginning of it in the same way you did your index.php in step one. Edit your template files to reflect this. (Don’t visit my wp-comments-post.php, it’s a honeypot idea I’m in the middle of tweaking to snag some comment spammers. ;-)

Step Five:
I edited the pingback url my header sends out to go to Planet 404 since I’m a member of the Pingbacks / Trackbacks are Retarded Club. If you use them, I imagine it’d be just as easy as the wp–comments-post.php move is. You can edit that header info via /wp-includes/general-template.php – just search for “pingback” and you’ll find the line.

Step Six:
If you have any other plugins tossing info into your head or anywhere else that reveals your install location, tweak them.

If anyone knows how to get the install url in some other way(s), leave a comment with the info or email me and I’ll update this with the tweaks to prevent the info leak. In fact, I’ll cough up $20 via paypal to the first person who posts a link to my admin directory with the info on how they found it.

Matt’s second tip was to “make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file” to prevent potential plugin info leak. That’s obviously a moot point if you hide your entire install. And, as several people have already pointed out: leaving your indexes viewable is retarded and easy to change.

Matt’s third tip looks like it was just some filler for his post. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog? Your admin panel already has that feed built into the dashboard.

His bonus tip was also a bit odd. He suggests dumping the bloginfo(’version’) snippet from your template’s header.php. Doing so won’t prevent your WordPress version from being leaked out to anyone though. All a person has to do is view the source of any of your feeds to get the same info. Here’s an example from Matt’s own blog. View the source of that page and you’ll see generator=”wordpress/2.3.2″ at the top. If you really want to prevent your version from being leaked you need to edit /wp-includes/version.php. You should change it to a version in the far future to avoid having that constant “A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now” nag from invading your admin panel. I’m kicking WordPress version 6.9 up in this biotch. :P

Here’s a bonus tip from me:
Change your default database prefixes (wp_) to something else. This basic security through obscurity tweak could save your ass from possible SQL injection attacks. Here’s a nifty plugin that can do it for you.

Now, let’s see who snags that $20.

P.S. I’m in the middle of tweaking this new theme. So, excuse the mess.