Posts Tagged ‘script kiddies’

How to improve Linux kernel security with GrSecurity / Maximum Linux kernel security with GrSecurity

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

In short I’ll explain here what is Grsecurity http://www.grsecurity.net/ for all those who have not used it yet and what kind of capabilities concerning enhanced kernel security it has.

Grsecurity is a combination of patches for the Linux kernel accenting at the improving kernel security.

The typical application of GrSecurity is in the field of Linux systems which are administered through SSH/Shell, e.g. (remote hosts), though you can also configure grsecurity on a normal Linux desktop system if you want a super secured Linux desktop ;).

GrSecurity is used heavily to protect server system which require a multiple users to have access to the shell.

On systems where multiple user access is required it’s a well known fact that (malicious users, crackers or dumb script kiddies) get administrator (root) privileges with a some just poped in 0 day root kernel exploit.
If you’re an administrator of a system (let’s say a web hosting) server with multiple users having access to the shell it’s also common that exploits aiming at hanging in certain daemon service is executed by some of the users.
In other occasions you have users which are trying to DoS the server with some 0 day Denial of Service exploit.
In all this cases GrSecurity having a kernel with grsecurity is priceless.

Installing grsecurity patched kernel is an easy task for Debian and Ubuntu and is explained in one of my previous articles.
This article aims to explain in short some configuration options for a GrSecurity tightened kernel, when one have to compile a new kernel from source.

I would skip the details on how to compile the kernel and simply show you some picture screens with GrSecurity configuration options which are working well and needs to be set-up before a make command is issued to compile the new kernel.

After preparing the kernel source for compilation and issuing:

linux:/usr/src/kernel-source$ make menuconfig

You will have to select options like the ones you see in the pictures below:

[nggallery id=”8″]

After completing and saving your kernel config file, continue as usual with an ordinary kernel compilation, e.g.:

linux:/usr/src/kernel-source$ make
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source$ make modules
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source$ su root
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source# make modules_install
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source# make install
linux:/usr/src/kernel-source# mkinitrd -o initrd.img-2.6.xx 2.6.xx

Also make sure the grub is properly configured to load the newly compiled and installed kernel.

After a system reboot, if all is fine you should be able to boot up the grsecurity tightened newly compiled kernel, but be careful and make sure you have a backup solution before you reboot, don’t blame me if your new grsecurity patched kernel fails to boot! You’re on your own boy 😉
This article is written thanks to based originally on his article in Bulgarian. If you’re a Bulgarian you might also checkout static’s blog

Disabling PHP system(); and exec(); functions to raise up Apache security on Debian GNU / Linux

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

Disabling PHP system(); and exec(); functions to raise up Apache security on Debian Gnu / Linux

At security critical hosts running Apache + PHP based sites it is recommended functions like:

system();
exec();shell_exec();.....

to be disabled. The reason is to mainly harden against script kiddies who might exploit your site/s and upload some shitty SK tool like PHP WebShell, PHP Shell and the probably thousands of “hacker” variations that exist nowdays.

In latest Debian stable Squeeze, suhosinadvanced protection module for php5 is being installed and enabled in Apache (by default).
Simply disabling a number of functions using suhosin, could prevent multiple of future headaches and hours of pondering on who 0wn3d your server ….

Disabling the basic PHP system(); and other similar functions which allows shell spawn is not always possible, since some websites or CMS platforms depends on them for proper runnig, anyways whether it is possible disabling ’em is a must.
There are two ways to disable system(); functions; One is through using /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/suhosin.ini and 2nd by adding a list of functions that has to be disabled directly in Website Virtualhost file or in apache2.conf (/etc/apache2/apache2.conf;
For people hosting multiple virtualhost websites on the same server using the custom domain Virtualhost method is probably better, since on a global scale the functions could be enabled if some of the websites hosted on the server requires exec(); to work OK. In any case using /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/suhosin.ini to disable system(); functions in PHP is less messy …

1. Disabling PHP system(); fuctions through /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and custom site Vhosts

Place somewhere (I prefer near the end of config);;;


php_admin_flag safe_mode on
php_admin_value disable_functions "system, exec, shell_exec, passthru , ini_alter, dl, pfsockopen, openlog, syslog, readlink, symlink, link, leak, fsockopen, popen, escapeshellcmd, apache_child_terminate apache_get_modules, apache_get_version, apache_getenv, apache_note,apache_setenv,virtual"

Disabling it for custom virtualhost is done by simply adding above Apache directvies (before the closing tag in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/custom-vhost.com

2. Disabling PHP system();, exec(); shell spawn with suhosin.ini

In /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/suhosin.ini add;;

suhosin.executor.func.blacklist =system, exec, shell_exec, passthru, ini_alter, dl,
pfsockopen, openlog, syslog, readlink, symlink, link, leak, fsockopen, popen,
escapeshellcmd, apache_child_terminate apache_get_modules, apache_get_version,
apache_getenv, apache_note,apache_setenv,virtual

To do it directly via shell issue;;;

server: conf.d/# cd /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/
server: conf.d# echo 'suhosin.executor.func.blacklist =system, exec, shell_exec, passthru, ini_alter, dl,' >> suhosin.ini
server: conf.d# echo 'pfsockopen, openlog, syslog, readlink, symlink, link, leak, fsockopen, popen,' >> suhosin.ini
server: conf.d# echo escapeshellcmd, apache_child_terminate apache_get_modules, apache_get_version,' >> suhosin.ini
server: conf.d# echo 'apache_getenv, apache_note,apache_setenv,virtual' >> suhosin.ini

Then to re-load the memory loaded Apache libphp library an Apache restart is necessary;

server: conf.d# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Restarting web server: apache2 ... waiting .
server: conf.d#

Tadam, this should be quite a good security against annoying automated script attacks. Cheers 😉

How to find and kill Abusers on OpenVZ Linux hosted Virtual Machines (Few bash scripts to protect OpenVZ CentOS server from script kiddies and easify the daily admin job)

Friday, July 22nd, 2011

OpenVZ Logo - Anti Denial Of Service shell scripts

These days, I’m managing a number of OpenVZ Virtual Machine host servers. Therefore constantly I’m facing a lot of problems with users who run shit scripts inside their Linux Virtual Machines.

Commonly user Virtual Servers are used as a launchpad to attack hosts do illegal hacking activities or simply DDoS a host..
The virtual machines users (which by the way run on top of the CentOS OpenVZ Linux) are used to launch a Denial service scripts like kaiten.pl, trinoo, shaft, tfn etc.

As a consequence of their malicious activities, oftenly the Data Centers which colocates the servers are either null routing our server IPs until we suspend the Abusive users, or the servers go simply down because of a server overload or a kernel bug hit as a result of the heavy TCP/IP network traffic or CPU/mem overhead.

Therefore to mitigate this abusive attacks, I’ve written few bash shell scripts which, saves us a lot of manual check ups and prevents in most cases abusers to run the common DoS and “hacking” script shits which are now in the wild.

The first script I’ve written is kill_abusers.sh , what the script does is to automatically look up for a number of listed processes and kills them while logging in /var/log/abusers.log about the abusive VM user procs names killed.

I’ve set this script to run 4 times an hour and it currently saves us a lot of nerves and useless ticket communication with Data Centers (DCs), not to mention that reboot requests (about hanged up servers) has reduced significantly.
Therefore though the scripts simplicity it in general makes the servers run a way more stable than before.

Here is OpenVZ kill/suspend Abusers procs script kill_abusers.sh ready for download

Another script which later on, I’ve written is doing something similar and still different, it does scan the server hard disk using locate and find commands and tries to identify users which has script kiddies programs in their Virtual machines and therefore are most probably crackers.
The scripts looks up for abusive network scanners, DoS scripts, metasploit framework, ircds etc.

After it registers through scanning the server hdd, it lists only files which are preliminary set in the script to be dangerous, and therefore there execution inside the user VM should not be.

search_for_abusers.sh then logs in a files it’s activity as well as the OpenVZ virtual machines user IDs who owns hack related files. Right after it uses nail mailing command to send email to a specified admin email and reports the possible abusers whose VM accounts might need to either be deleted or suspended.

search_for_abusers can be download here

Honestly I truly liked my search_for_abusers.sh script as it became quite nice and I coded it quite quickly.
I’m intending now to put the Search for abusers script on a cronjob on the servers to check periodically and report the IDs of OpenVZ VM Users which are trying illegal activities on the servers.

I guess now our beloved Virtual Machine user script kiddies are in a real trouble ;P
 

How to suspend Cpanel user through ssh / Cpanel shell command to suspend users

Friday, August 5th, 2011

One of the servers running Cpanel has been suspended today and the Data Center decided to completely bring down our server and gave us access to it only through rescue mode running linux livecd.

Thus I had no way to access the Cpanel web interface to suspend the “hacker” who by the way was running a number of instances of this old Romanian script kiddies brute force ssh scanner called sshscan .

Thanksfully Cpanel is equipped with a number of handy scripts for emergency situations in /scripts directory. These shell management scripts are awesome for situations like this one, where no web access is not avaiable.

To suspend the abuser / (abusive user ) I had to issue the command:

root@rescue [/]# /scripts/suspendacct abuse_user
Changing Shell to /bin/false...chsh: Unknown user context is not authorized to change the shell of abuse_user
Done
Locking Password...Locking password for user abuse_user.
passwd: Success
Done
Suspending mysql users
warn [suspendmysqlusers] abuse_user has no databases.
Notification => reports@santrex.net via EMAIL [level => 3]
Account previously suspended (password was locked).
/bin/df: `/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc': No such file or directory
Using Universal Quota Support (quota=0)
Suspended document root /home/abuse_user/public_html
Suspended document root /home/abuse_user/public_html/updateverificationonline.com
Using Universal Quota Support (quota=0)
Updating ftp passwords for abuse_user
Ftp password files updated.
Ftp vhost passwords synced
abuse_user's account has been suspended

That’s all now the user is suspended, so hopefully the DC will bring the server online in few minutes.

Scanning shared hosting servers to catch abusers, unwanted files, phishers, spammers and script kiddies with clamav

Friday, August 12th, 2011

Clamav scanning shared hosting servers to catch abusers, phishers, spammers, script kiddies etc. logo

I’m responsible for some GNU/Linux servers which are shared hosting and therefore contain plenty of user accounts.
Every now and then our company servers gets suspended because of a Phishing websites, Spammers script kiddies and all the kind of abusers one can think of.

To mitigate the impact of the server existing unwanted users activities, I decided to use the Clamav Antivirus – open source virus scanner to look up for potentially dangerous files, stored Viruses, Spammer mailer scripts, kernel exploits etc.

The Hosting servers are running latest CentOS 5.5. Linux and fortunately CentOS is equipped with an RPM pre-packaged latest Clamav release which of the time of writting is ver. (0.97.2).

Installing Clamav on CentOS is a piece of cake and it comes to issuing:

[root@centos:/root]# yum -y install clamav
...

After the install is completed, I’ve used freshclam to update clamav virus definitions

[root@centos:/root]# freshclam
ClamAV update process started at Fri Aug 12 13:19:32 2011
main.cvd is up to date (version: 53, sigs: 846214, f-level: 53, builder: sven)
WARNING: getfile: daily-13357.cdiff not found on remote server (IP: 81.91.100.173)
WARNING: getpatch: Can't download daily-13357.cdiff from db.gb.clamav.net
WARNING: getfile: daily-13357.cdiff not found on remote server (IP: 163.1.3.8)
WARNING: getpatch: Can't download daily-13357.cdiff from db.gb.clamav.net
WARNING: getfile: daily-13357.cdiff not found on remote server (IP: 193.1.193.64)
WARNING: getpatch: Can't download daily-13357.cdiff from db.gb.clamav.net
WARNING: Incremental update failed, trying to download daily.cvd
Downloading daily.cvd [100%]
daily.cvd updated (version: 13431, sigs: 173670, f-level: 60, builder: arnaud)
Downloading bytecode.cvd [100%]
bytecode.cvd updated (version: 144, sigs: 41, f-level: 60, builder: edwin)
Database updated (1019925 signatures) from db.gb.clamav.net (IP: 217.135.32.99)

In my case the shared hosting hosted websites and FTP user files are stored in /home directory thus I further used clamscan in the following way to check report and log into file the scan results for our company hosted user content.

[root@centos:/root]# screen clamscan -r -i --heuristic-scan-precedence=yes --phishing-scan-urls=yes --phishing-cloak=yes --phishing-ssl=yes --scan-archive=no /home/ -l /var/log/clamscan.log
home/user1/mail/new/1313103706.H805502P12513.hosting,S=14295: Heuristics.Phishing.Email.SpoofedDomain FOUND/home/user1/mail/new/1313111001.H714629P29084.hosting,S=14260: Heuristics.Phishing.Email.SpoofedDomain FOUND/home/user1/mail/new/1305115464.H192447P14802.hosting,S=22663: Heuristics.Phishing.Email.SpoofedDomain FOUND/home/user1/mail/new/1311076363.H967421P17372.hosting,S=13114: Heuristics.Phishing.Email.SpoofedDomain FOUND/home/user1/mail/domain.com/infos/cur/859.hosting,S=8283:2,S: Heuristics.Phishing.Email.SSL-Spoof FOUND/home/user1/mail/domain.com/infos/cur/131.hosting,S=6935:2,S: Heuristics.Phishing.Email.SSL-Spoof FOUND

I prefer running the clamscan in a screen session, because it’s handier, if for example my ssh connection dies the screen session will preserve the clamscan cmd execution and I can attach later on to see how scan went.

clamscan of course is slower as it does not use Clamav antivirus daemon clamd , however I prefer running it without running the daemon, as having a permanently running clamd on the servers sometimes creates problems or hangs and it’s not really worthy to have it running since I’m intending to do a clamscan no more than once per month to see some potential users which might need to be suspended.

Also later on, after it finishes all possible problems are logged to /var/log/clamscan.log , so I can read the file report any time.

A good idea might also be to implement the above clamscan to be conducted, once per month via a cron job, though I’m still in doubt if it’s better to run it manually once per month to search for the malicious users content or it’s better to run it via cron schedule.

One possible pitfall with automating the above clamscan /home virus check up, might be the increased load it puts to the system. In some cases the Webserver and SQL server might be under a heavy load at the exactly same time the clamscan cron work is running, this might possible create severe issues for users websites, if it’s not monitored.
Thus I would probably go with running above clamscan manually each month and monitor the server performance.
However for people, who have “iron” system hardware and clamscan file scan is less likely to cause any issues, probably a cronjob would be fine. Here is sample cron job to run clamscan:

10 05 01 * * clamscan -r -i --heuristic-scan-precedence=yes --phishing-scan-urls=yes --phishing-cloak=yes --phishing-ssl=yes --scan-archive=no /home/ -l /var/log/clamscan.log >/dev/null 2>&1

I’m interested to hear if somebody already is using a clamscan to run on cron without issues, once I’m sure that running it on cron would not lead to server down-times, i’ll implement it via cron job.

Anyone having experience with running clamscan directory scan through crond? 🙂