If you have been hacked or have been suspicious that someone has broken up in some of the shared web hosting servers you happent o manage you already probably have tried the server with rkhuter, chroot and unhide tools which gives a general guidance where a server has been compromised
However with the evolution of hacking tools out there and the boom of Web security XSS / CSS / Database injections and PHP scripts vulnerability catching an intruder especially spammers has been becoming more and more hard to achieve.
Just lately a mail server of mine's load avarage increased about 10 times, and the CPU's and HDD I/O load jump over the sky.
I started evaluating the situation to find out what exactly went wrong with the machine, starting with a hardware analysis tools and a physical check up whether all was fine with the hardware Disks / Ram etc. just to find out the machine's hardware was working perfect.
I've also thoroughfully investigated on Logs of Apache, MySQL, TinyProxy and Tor server and bind DNS and DJBDns which were happily living there for quite some time but didn't found anything strange.
Not on a last place I investigated TOP processes (with top command) and iostat and realized the CPU high burst lays in exessive Input / Output of Hard Drive. Checking the Qmail Mail server logs and the queue with qmail-qstat was a real surprise for me as on the queue there were about 9800 emails hanging unsent, most of which were obviously a spam, so I realized someone was heavily spamming through the server and started more thoroughfully investigating ending up to a WordPress Blog temp folder (writtable by all system users) which was existing under a Joomla directory infrastructure, so I guess someone got hacked through the Joomla and uploaded the malicious php spammer script to the WordPress blog. I've instantly stopped and first chmod 000 to stop being execuded and after examing deleted view73.php, javascript92.php and index8239.php which were full of PHP values with binary encoded values and one was full of encoded strings which after being decoding were actually the recepient's spammed emails.
BTW, the view*.php javascript*.php and index*.php files were owned by www-data (the user with which Apache was owned), so obviously someone got hacked through some vulnerable joomla or wordpress script (as joomla there was quite obscure version 1.5 – where currently Joomla is at version branch 3.5), hence my guess is the spamming script was uploaded through Joomla XSS vulnerability).
As I was unsure wheteher the scripts were not also mirrored under other subdirectories of Joomla or WP Blog I had to scan further to check whether there are no other scripts infected with malware or trojan spammer codes, webshells, rootkits etc.
And after some investigation, I've actually caught the 3 scripts being mirrored under other webside folders with other numbering on filename view34.php javascript72.php, index8123.php etc..
I've used 2 tools to scan and catch malware the trojan scripts and make sure no common rootkit is installed on the server.
1. Lynis (to check for rootkits)
2. ISPProtect (Proprietary but superb Website malware scanner with a free trial)
1. Lynis – Universal security auditing tool and rootkit scanner
Lynis is actually the well known rkhunter, I've used earlier to check servers BSD and Linux servers for rootkits.
To have up-to-date version of Lynis, I've installed it from source:
cd /tmp
wget https://cisofy.com/files/lynis-2.1.1.tar.gz
tar xvfz lynis-2.1.1.tar.gz
mv lynis /usr/local/
ln -s /usr/local/lynis/lynis /usr/local/bin/lynis
Then to scan the server for rootkits, first I had to update its malware definition database with:
lynis update info
Then to actually scan the system:
lynis audit system
Plenty of things will be scanned but you will be asked on a multiple times whether you would like to conduct different kind fo system services and log files, loadable kernel module rootkits and common places to check for installed rootkits or server placed backdoors. That's pretty annoying as you will have to press Enter on a multiple times.
Once scan is over you will get a System Scan Summary like in below screenshot:
Lynis suggests also a very good things that might be tampered to make the system more secure, so using some of its output when I have time I'll work out on hardening all servers.
To prevent further incidents and keep an eye on servers I've deployed Lynis scan via cron job once a month on all servers, I've placed under a root cronjob on every first dae of month in following command:
server:~# crontab -u root -e
0 3 1 * * /usr/local/bin/lynis –quick 2>&1 | mail -s "lynis output of my server" admin-mail@my-domain.com)
2. ISPProtect – Website malware scanner
ISPProtect is a malware scanner for web servers, I've used it to scan all installed CMS systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.
ISPProtect is great for PHP / Pyhon / Perl and other CMS based frameworks.
ISPProtect contains 3 scanning engines: a signature based malware scanner, a heuristic malware scanner, and a scanner to show the installation directories of outdated CMS systems.
Unfortunately it is not free software, but I personally used the FREE TRIAL option which can be used without registration to test it or clean an infected system.
I first webserver first locally for the infected site and then globally for all the other shared hosting websites.
As I wanted to check also rest of hosted websites, I've run ISPProtect over the all bunch of installed websites.
Pre-requirement of ISPProtect is to have a working PHP Cli and Clamav Anti-Virus installed on the server thus on RHEL (RPM) based servers make sure you have it installed if not:
server:~# yum -y install php
server:~# yum -y install clamav
Debian based Linux servers web hosting admins that doesn't have php-cli installed should run:
server:~# apt-get install php5-cli
server:~# apt-get install clamav
Installing ISPProtect from source is with:
mkdir -p /usr/local/ispprotect
chown -R root:root /usr/local/ispprotect
chmod -R 750 /usr/local/ispprotect
cd /usr/local/ispprotect
wget http://www.ispprotect.com/download/ispp_scan.tar.gz
tar xzf ispp_scan.tar.gz
rm -f ispp_scan.tar.gz
ln -s /usr/local/ispprotect/ispp_scan /usr/local/bin/ispp_scan
To initiate scan with ISPProtect just invoke it:
server:~# /usr/local/bin/ispp_scan
I've used it as a trial
Please enter scan key: trial
Please enter path to scan: /var/www
You will be shown the scan progress, be patient because on a multiple shared hosting servers with few hundred of websites.
The tool will take really, really long so you might need to leave it for 1 hr or even more depending on how many source files / CSS / Javascript etc. needs to be scanned.
Once scan is completed scan and infections found logs will be stored under /usr/local/ispprotect, under separate files for different Website Engines and CMSes:
After the scan is completed, you will find the results also in the following files:
Malware => /usr/local/ispprotect/found_malware_20161401174626.txt
Wordpress => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_wordpress_20161401174626.txt
Joomla => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_joomla_20161401174626.txt
Drupal => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_drupal_20161401174626.txt
Mediawiki => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_mediawiki_20161401174626.txt
Contao => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_contao_20161401174626.txt
Magentocommerce => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_magentocommerce_20161401174626.txt
Woltlab Burning Board => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_woltlab_burning_board_20161401174626.txt
Cms Made Simple => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_cms_made_simple_20161401174626.txt
Phpmyadmin => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_phpmyadmin_20161401174626.txt
Typo3 => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_typo3_20161401174626.txt
Roundcube => /usr/local/ispprotect/software_roundcube_20161401174626.txt
ISPProtect is really good in results is definitely the best malicious scripts / trojan / trojan / webshell / backdoor / spammer (hacking) scripts tool available so if your company could afford it you better buy a license and settle a periodic cron job scan of all your servers, like lets say:
server:~# crontab -u root -e
0 3 1 * * /usr/local/ispprotect/ispp_scan –update && /usr/local/ispprotect/ispp_scan –path=/var/www –email-results=admin-email@your-domain.com –non-interactive –scan-key=AAA-BBB-CCC-DDD
Unfortunately ispprotect is quite expensive so I guess most small and middle sized shared hosting companies will be unable to afford it.
But even for a one time run this tools worths the try and will save you an hours if not days of system investigations.
I'll be glad to hear from readers if aware of any available free software alternatives to ISPProtect. The only one I am aware is Linux Malware Detect (LMD).
I've used LMD in the past but as of time of writting this article it doesn't seems working any more so I guess the tool is currently unsupported / obsolete.
