Barack,donor,data,may,safe,but computer Barack's donor data may be safe, but site was not properly s
----------------------------------------------------------Permission is granted for the below article to forward,reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as longas no changes a Gone are those times when the companies and the organisations didn't need a hi-tech system to handle them. Owing to the considerable increase in the business sector and thus, an enormous increase in the complexity of the organisational struc
I recently reported on donate.barackobama.com being hacked.WhileBlue State Digital and the Democratic Nationinal Committee may disagree, Istand by the statement.It was clear that something was incorrectly configured,whether the data that was exposed belonged to Obamas team or not.In his reportfor the Washington Post, Brian Krebs called the hack a hoax.The best analysis Ican find on what Unu encountered when he stumbled upon Roosevelt Universityscalendar database was posted at the Praetorian Prefect blog.So what actuallyhappened? It appears that the secure areas of barackobama.com (those that useHTTPS:/) had an open redirector that could be used to proxy all traffic throughthe Obama website.While the sites data itself may not have been compromised,the site was still not properly secured.As the folks at Praetorian pointed out,there are several ways to exploit this flaw that could affect the security ofmy.barackobama.com users.Web browsers protect cookies by allowing only theoriginating domain to read those cookies later.When you log in tomy.barackobama.com, the site sets a cookie to remember who you are as you blog,plan fundraisers, and plan events.The proxy capability provided by thesmartproxy functionality that was left open could allow an attacker to directyou to a link that appears to be part of barackobama.com, yet leads you totheir website proxied by the Obama server.Your browser would then allow thethird party site to read any cookies set and allow the attacker to impersonateyou on the barackobama.com website. Fortunately, Obamas site did not storelogins for the donation area, and it appears only my.barackobama.com wasvulnerable to being hijacked.Obamas team and Blue State Digital went to greatlengths to downplay this issue, but the fact remains that the insecure practiceof allowing unfettered proxy traffic could pose a real risk.A user of pastebindiscovered through a simple Google search that many sites that are hosted byBlue State Digital contain the same unrestricted proxy code.At the time ofwriting, the code on Blue State Digitals servers appears to be restricted to alimited number of authorized domains.Spammers have used redirectors like theone found on Blue States sites to scam users for many years now.It allows themto send out URLs that are arguably legitimate to an innocent surfer and stillredirect them to something that is malicious and may steal data from theintermediate website.People also use unauthenticated proxies to subvertcorporate or school proxy systems that block sites based upon their reputationor content.By manipulating the URL, you could surf anything on the web throughan HTTPS session that is unlikely to be blocked by any web filtering solutions.Ifyou host or design your own websites, be sure to restrict any code you use toredirect users to other sites to prevent these type of attacks.The cost to youmay be more than your cookies, not to mention the bandwidth consumed by peoplewho may use your site as a free proxy service.To prevent your users fromaccidentally being redirected to malicious content through a URL that appearsto be from a safe and reputable web destination, be sure you have web filteringtechnology that can look into HTTPS trafficFree Articles, and perform propermalware filtering that is not just reputation-based.Its never fun to lose yourcookies. Article Tags: Blue State Digital, Blue State, State Digital
Barack,donor,data,may,safe,but