[CentOS] Interpreting logwatch

Bill Campbell centos at celestial.com
Thu Sep 9 16:11:52 UTC 2010


On Thu, Sep 09, 2010, Natxo Asenjo wrote:
>On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 6:17 PM, Bill Campbell <centos at celestial.com> wrote:
>
>> I think it's a mistake to discount any attacks involving php as
>> the vast majority of the systems I have had to clean up after
>> cracks have been compromised through php vulnerabilities, usually
>> in conjunction with weak user level passwords.
>>
>> IHMO, admin tools like phpMyAdmin, webmin, and usermin should be
>> carefully restricted, preferably only accessible via a private
>> LAN, not from the public internet.  Use a VPN to access from the
>> public internet if necessary.  We don't install usermin in most
>> cases as I have seen it used to exploit security bugs on old SuSE
>> systems that permit root access.
>
>Last time I checked, webmin and usermin were written in Perl ;-), no php there.

True enough (although very ugly perl without adequate paramter
checkind in come cases :-) should have said different topic.

>If you're running a web app with a known vulnerability and it's
>available from the internet, then you're in trouble, that's for sure.

Even if it doesn't have known vulnrabilities, running admin
applications that may have root capabilities without guarding
against unauthorized access is a recipe for trouble.

Bill
-- 
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