An advisory has been issued on the PEAR blog about two packages - Net_Traceroute and Net_Ping - that could expose your site to a security issue, a remote arbitrary command injection.

Net_Ping is an OS independent wrapper class for executing ping calls from PHP. Net_Traceroute is an OS independent wrapper class for executing traceroute calls from PHP. When input from forms are used directly, the attacker could pass variables that would allow him to execute remote arbitrary command injections.

You can use filtering as a workaround until your packages are updated on your server. You can upgrade to the latest packages here: Net_Ping, Net_Traceroute.

In a recent post to his blog Rafael Dohms reminds readers to not forget about the security of their applications because it can be "a huge mistake which can take a turn for the worse."

I have ran into lots of excuses for ignoring security in the past, one of them is the recurring "This is just a simple application, it has no sensitive data", this may be a valid point for the person repeating it like a mantra, especially because this person is generally suffering of great pressures , short timeframes and a lack of proper management ready to deal with web development. [...] Whatever the reason is for neglecting security the consequences can escalate much higher then the "non-sensitive data" of the application.

He looks at a specific case where a security issue was found in a large Brazillian mobile company's website that was caused by improper filtering on a $_GET parameter, leaving it open to possible attack. Through it, he could load the information for sensitive system-related files and found more on the machine than just the site he was working with.

In this new post to his blog Gareth Heyes points out a legacy issue that those running older PHP4-based code might want to look into:

I thought about something I found ages ago in PHP4 and it's been long enough now. This is also quite funny because my server is vulnerable to this. So what happens if you escape PHP_SELF with htmlentities($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'], ENT_QUOTES)? Safe from XSS? I hope so. Safe from everything? Well not really or at least it didn't used to be.

He gives a simple example of how the PHP_SELF issue can be used to change the form's target just by using a few well-placed slashes. Thankfully, this seems to be only back in the world of PHP4, so those working with PHP5 should be safe.

Some of you might have heard about the hacking of the phpBB.com website earlier this week. Well, Stefan Esser has posted a bit more about the vulnerability in the PHPList software that lead to the problem.

A few days ago phpbb.com was hacked through a super-globals-overwrite vulnerability in PHPList that was used by an attacker for a local file inclusion exploit. Details about the whole attack, written down by someone who claims to be the attacker, can be read here.

Stefan talks about the superglobal problem PHPList had - allowing the superglobal information to overwrite the variables inside the script without so much as a check. Example code shows how it was possible for the attacker to provide their own configuration file value to be opened via a stream wrapper.

According to the CyberInsecure.com website around a half-million websites running PHPBB were hacked in a large coordinated effort.

More than half a million websites have been compromised in a new round of attacks that hacked domains in order to infect unsuspecting users' PCs with a variety of trojans. This ongoing campaign includes new malware hosting domains and new trojans variations. All of the sites are running older or misconfigured versions of "phpBB," an open-source message forum manager. Open-source popular applications like phpBB tend to be often targeted by mass scanning and exploiting tools.

The hack redirected visitors through several steps ultimately ending up on a page that tried to take advantage of errors in older Internet Explorer and RealPlayer versions. The article talks about exactly which viruses could have caused the problems and the wide range of sites (both in topic and location) that were effected.

The best way to protect you and your PHPBB install from something like this happening is to get the latest version of the software and learn how to configure it correctly.

The Gentoo linux group has made a new package release for the PHP on their distribution:

PHP contains several vulnerabilities including buffer and integer overflows which could lead to the remote execution of arbitrary code. [...] There is no known workaround at this time. All PHP users should upgrade to the latest version.

You can get more information on the issues that the new package corrects from the Gentoo advisory and use their emerge package manager to make the upgrade automatically.

Via this Secunia advisory posted today, there's information about the update the Fedora Linux group has made to the PHP package included in their distribution. According to the release:

This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

The original advisory post has more details on what the update fixes as well as the link to download the RPM packages to update your system. You can either manually download them or use the "yum" system to handle things a bit more automatically.

On the Secunia site today, there's a new advisory posted for users of Red Hat linux - an update to the system's PHP packages.

Red Hat has issued an update for php. This fixes some vulnerabilities, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to bypass certain security restrictions and by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

The original advisory has more details on what the patch fixes and the checksum information for the update packages for all OSes.

As mentioned by the Int'l PHP Magazine and posted on the Help Net Security website, there are some issues with recent releases of phpMyAdmin that can open the door to potential attackers:

Several remote vulnerabilities have been discovered in phpMyAdmin, a program to administrate MySQL over the web. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project.

There's five issues around the PMA_ArrayWalkRecursive function, the blacklist functionality, cross-site scripting problems, and an issue that allows for the bypassing Allow/Deny access rules. It is recommended that you install the latest version to protect you and your applications.

Secunia.com reports that multiple vulnerabilities have been found in the Joomla! content management system:

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in Joomla!, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct session fixation attacks, cross-site scripting attacks or HTTP response splitting attacks.

The issues are marked as "less critical" but users should still update to the latest version to avoid these issues:

• Certain unspecified input passed in com_search, com_content and mod_login is not properly sanitised before being returned to a user
• Input passed to the "url" parameter is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user. This can be exploited to insert arbitrary HTTP headers.
• An error exists in the handling of sessions and can be exploited to hijack another user's session by tricking the user into logging in after following a specially crafted link.

See the original advisory post here.