Hack the Pentagon: Hackers find over 100 Bugs in U.S. Defense Systems

 

The "Hack the Pentagon" bug bounty program by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) has been successful with more than 100 vulnerabilities uncovered by white hat hackers in Pentagon infrastructure.

In March, the Defense Department launched what it calls "the first cyber Bug Bounty Program in the history of the federal government " inviting hackers to take up the challenge of finding bugs in its networks and public faced websites that are registered under DoD.

Around 1,400 whitehat (ethical) hackers participated in the Hack the Pentagon program and were awarded up to $15,000 for disclosures of the most destructive vulnerabilities in DoDs networks, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said at a technology forum on Friday.

"They are helping us to be more secure at a fraction of the cost," Carter said. "And in a way that enlists the brilliance of the white hatters, rather than waits to learn the lessons of the black hatters."

The Hack the Pentagon program, hosted on bug bounty platform Hacker One, was opened between April 18 and May 12, 2016. All participants were required to qualify a background check.

Although hackers and bug hunters were permitted to hack the agency's web properties, critical and highly sensitive systems of the Pentagon were out of bounds for the bounty program.

When the Hack the Pentagon was initially announced in March, Carter said he believed this effort would "strengthen our digital defenses and ultimately enhance our national security." And yes, it did.

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Hacker Reveals How to Hack Any Facebook Account

Hacking Facebook account is one of the major queries of the Internet user today. It's hard to find — how to hack Facebook account, but an Indian hacker just did it.

A security researcher discovered a 'simple vulnerability' in the social network that allowed him to easily hack into any Facebook account, view message conversations, post anything, view payment card details and do whatever the real account holder can.

Facebook bounty hunter Anand Prakash from India recently discovered a Password Reset Vulnerability, a simple yet critical vulnerability that could have given an attacker endless opportunities to brute force a 6-digit code and reset any account's password.

Here's How the Flaw Works

The vulnerability actually resides in the way Facebook's beta domains handle 'Forgot Password' requests.

Facebook lets users change their account password through Password Reset procedure by confirming their Facebook account with a 6-digit code received via email or text message.

To ensure the genuinity of the user, Facebook allows the account holder to try up to a dozen codes before the account confirmation code is blocked due to the brute force protection that limits a large number of attempts.

However, Prakash discovered that the social media giant had not implemented rate-limiting in its password reset process on the beta sites, beta.facebook.com and mbasic.beta.facebook.com, according to a blog post published by Prakash.

Prakash tried to brute force the 6-digit code on the Facebook beta pages in the 'Forgot Password' window and discovered that there is no limit set by Facebook on the number of attempts for beta pages.

Video Demonstration

Prakash has also provided a proof-of-concept (POC) video demonstration that shows the attack in work. You can watch the video given below that will walk you through the entire procedure:

Here's the culprit:

As Prakash explained, the vulnerable POST request in the beta pages is:

lsd=AVoywo13&n=XXXXX

Brute forcing the 'n' successfully allowed Prakash to launch a brute force attack into any Facebook account by setting a new password, taking complete control of any account.

Prakash (@sehacure) discovered the vulnerability in February and reported it to Facebook on February 22. The social network fixed the issue the next day and had paid him $15,000 as a reward considering the severity and impact of the vulnerability.

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Tor Project to Start Bug Bounty Program — Get Paid for HACKING!

The non-profit organization behind TOR – the largest online anonymity network that allows people to hide their real identity online – will soon be launching a "Bug Bounty Program" for researchers who find loopholes in Tor apps.

The bounty program was announced during the recurring 'State of the Onion' talk by Tor Project at Chaos Communication Congress held in Hamburg, Germany.

Bug bounty programs are cash rewards gave by companies or organizations to white hat hackers and researchers who hunt for serious security vulnerabilities in their website or products and then responsibly disclose them.

Bug bounties are designed to encourage security researchers and hackers to responsibly report the vulnerabilities they discovered, rather than exploiting it.

Here's what one of the founders of the Tor Project, Nick Mathewson, said about the bug bounty program as reported by Motherboard:

"We are grateful to the people who have looked at our code over the years, but the only way to continue to improve is to get more people involved...This program will encourage people to look at our code, find flaws in it, and help us to improve it."

The bug bounty program will start in the new year.

The Tor Project is following in the footsteps of a number of major technology companies, such as Facebook, Google, Paypal, and Mozilla, which offer bug bounties in thousands of Dollars.

Recently United Airlines made headlines by becoming the first airline to launch its own bug bounty program, eventually awarding millions of frequent-flyer miles to hackers and researchers.

The bug bounty could be in the wake of last month’s incident when Tor Project accused the FBI of paying the researchers of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) at least $1 Million to help them Unmask Tor users and reveal their IP addresses. However, the FBI denies the claims.

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Shocking! Instagram HACKED! Researcher hacked into Instagram Server and Admin Panel

Ever wonder how to hack Instagram or how to hack a facebook account? Well, someone just did it!

But, remember, even responsibly reporting a security vulnerability could end up in taking legal actions against you.

An independent security researcher claims he was threatened by Facebook after he responsibly revealed a series of security vulnerabilities and configuration flaws that allowed him to successfully gained access to sensitive data stored on Instagram servers, including:

• Source Code of Instagram website
• SSL Certificates and Private Keys for Instagram
• Keys used to sign authentication cookies
• Personal details of Instagram Users and Employees
• Email server credentials
• Keys for over a half-dozen critical other functions

However, instead of paying him a reward, Facebook has threatened to sue the researcher of intentionally withholding flaws and information from its team.

Wesley Weinberg, a senior security researcher at Synack, participated in Facebook's bug bounty program and started analyzing Instagram systems after one of his friends hinted him to a potentially vulnerable server located at sensu.instagram.com

The researcher found an RCE (Remote Code Execution) bug in the way it processed users’ session cookies that are generally used to remember users' log-in details.

Remote code execution bug was possible due to two weaknesses:

1. The Sensu-Admin web app running on the server contained a hard-coded Ruby secret token
2. The host running a version of Ruby (3.x) that was susceptible to code execution via the Ruby session cookie

Exploiting the vulnerability, Weinberg was able to force the server to vomit up a database containing login details, including credentials, of Instagram and Facebook employees.

Although the passwords were encrypted with ‘bcrypt’, Weinberg was able to crack a dozen of passwords that had been very weak (like changeme, instagram, password) in just a few minutes.

Exposed EVERYTHING including Your Selfies

Weinberg did not stop here. He took a close look at other configuration files he found on the server and discovered that one of the files contained some keys for Amazon Web Services accounts, the cloud computing service used to host Instagram's Sensu setup.

These keys listed 82 Amazon S3 buckets (storage units), but these buckets were unique. He found nothing sensitive in the latest file in that bucket, but when he looked at the older version of the file, he found another key pair that let him read the contents of all 82 buckets.

Weinberg had inadvertently stumbled upon almost EVERYTHING including:

• Instagram's source code
• SSL certificates and private keys (including for instagram.com and *.instagram.com)
• API keys that are used for interacting with other services
• Images uploaded by Instagram users
• Static content from the instagram.com website
• Email server credentials
• iOS/Android app signing keys
• Other sensitive data

"To say that I had gained access to basically all of Instagram's secret key material would probably be a fair statement," Weinberg wrote in his blog. "With the keys I obtained, I could now easily impersonate Instagram, or any valid user or staff member. While out of scope, I would have easily been able to gain full access to any user’s account, [personal] pictures and data."

Responsible Disclosure, but Facebook Threatens Lawsuit

Weinberg reported his findings to Facebook's security team, but the social media giant was concerned he had accessed private data of its users and employees while uncovering the issues.

Instead of receiving a reward from Facebook for his hard work, Weinberg was unqualified for the bug bounty program by Facebook.

In early December, Weinberg claims his boss Synack CEO, Jay Kaplan, received a scary call from Facebook security chief Alex Stamos regarding the weaknesses Weinberg discovered in Instagram that left Instagram and Facebook users wide open to a devastating attack.

Stamos "stated that he did not want to have to get Facebook's legal team involved, but that he was not sure if this was something he needed to go to law enforcement over," Weinberg wrote in his blog in a section entitled 'Threats and Intimidation.'

In response, Stamos issued a statement, saying he "did not threaten legal action against Synack or [Weinberg] nor did [he] ask for [Weinberg] to be fired."

Stamos said he only told Kaplan to "keep this out of the hands of the lawyers on both sides."

"Condoning researchers going well above and beyond what is necessary to find and fix critical issues would create a precedent that could be used by those aiming to violate the privacy of our users, and such behavior by legitimate security researchers puts the future of paid bug bounties at risk," Stamos added.

Facebook Responds

After the original publication by the researcher, Facebook issued its response, saying the claims are false and that Weinberg was never told not to publish his findings, rather only asked not to disclose the non-public information he accessed.

The social media giant confirmed the existence of the remote code execution bug in the sensu.instagram.com domain and promised a bug bounty of $2,500 as a reward to Weinberg and his friend who initially hinted that the server was openly accessible.

However, the other vulnerabilities that allowed Weinberg to gain access to sensitive data were not qualified, with Facebook saying he violated user privacy while accessing the data.

Here's the full statement by Facebook:

We are strong advocates of the security researcher community and have built positive relationships with thousands of people through our bug bounty program. These interactions must include trust, however, and that includes reporting the details of bugs that are found and not using them to access private information in an unauthorized manner. In this case, the researcher intentionally withheld bugs and information from our team and went far beyond the guidelines of our program to pull private, non-user data from internal systems. 

We paid him for his initial bug report based on the quality, even though he was not the first to report it, but we didn't pay for the subsequent information that he had withheld. At no point did we say he could not publish his findings — we asked that he refrain from disclosing the non-public information he accessed in violation of our program guidelines. We remain firmly committed to paying for high quality research and helping the community learn from researchers' hard work.

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