Categories: Breaking NewsCyber CrimeHacking

Joomla SQL Injection Vulnerability exploited in the wild

Security experts at Sucuri reported a number of attacks exploiting a critical SQL injection flaw recently disclosed in the Joomla Content Management System.

A few days ago, security experts disclosed a critical SQL injection vulnerability in the Joomla Content Management System (CVE-2015-7858), but as expected, threat actors in the wild are exploiting it in attacks against websites running old, unpatched versions of the popular CMS.

According to the researchers at Sucuri, it is quite easy to exploit the SQL injection flaw and to gain full control of a website in order to execute several kinds of attacks.

The experts at Sucuri observed the attacks only four hours after disclosures from both Joomla and the Trustwave security firm. In the following graph is reported the number of exploit attempts over the time, it is possible to note the rapid rise in just four days following the disclosure of the SQL injection vulnerability.

“Within 4 hours of the initial disclosure by Joomla and TrustWave, we saw direct attacks against 2 very popular Joomla sites that use our network. The attack tried to extract the current session from any logged in admin user and were blocked by our generic SQL Injection signatures:”

/index.php?option=com_contenthistory&view=history&list[ordering]=&item_id=75&type_id=1%20&list[select]=%2

” wrote Daniel Cid, the founder and CTO of Sucuri.

The expert explains that attackers carry on the attacks by executing two scans, a first one searching for the default Joomla SQL syntax error page,

/index.php?option=com_contenthistory&view=history&list[select]=1

the second one is a request trying to get the admin user from the jos_users table.

/index.php?option=com_contenthistory&view=history&layout=modal&tmpl=component&
field=jform_contenthistory&item_id=1&type_id=1
&type_alias=com_content.article&e11ddf616076d12a929967862cb0dd3c=1&
list[ordering]=editor&list[select]=
(select%20group_concat(username,%27|%27,email,%27|%27,name,%27|%27,
registerDate,%27|%27,lastvisitDate,%27|%27)%20
from%20jos_users)%20as%20`version_note`

The flaw affects Joomla 3.x versions, the Joomla development team released a patch last week, but many websites still result vulnerable.

“What is very scary to think is that neither of these sites were patched at the time. The disclosure happened on a Thursday afternoon (evening in Europe), when many webmasters were already off for the day,” Cid wrote.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Joomla, hacking)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.