This time it’s a little more scary.


I was looking over the referral logs to philisha.net to see who’s been visiting. I saw that I was linked to by http://www.mazfaka.ru/, which was interesting…. A Russian site, huh…. Let’s see what it is…. Yikes: Network Terrorism! Let me tell you, to have your site listed on a page titled Network Terrorism is pretty unnerving.

It turns out that the site is a listing of a bunch of sites that are vulnerable to a certain password-grabbing exploit. Basically all the links on that site point to pages that will output the contents of a filename that you give it. On certain poorly-configured servers, this can allow anyone who understands this vulnerability to access any file on the computer, including password lists. These are usually encrypted, but a brute-force attack can crack them given enough time.

I’ve realized for some time that my site could theoretically allow for this to happen, but I never imagined someone would actually try it! Thankfully Biola’s admins are smart enough to block permissions in this case, but it’s a good lesson to learn for strong security measures even when you don’t think them necessary.