MySQL 1 Liner Hack Gives Root Access Without Password

MySQL 1 Liner Hack Gives Root Access Without Password

The latest news that has hit the streets is the occurence of the easiest hack ever, if you have local shell access (any user privelege level) and you can connect to MySQL – you can get root access to MySQL within a few seconds.
I tried this yesterday on one of my servers on Ubuntu 12.04 running the latest version of MySQL in the repo…and it worked in about 30 seconds. Scary really, you can use this single line of bash to hack MySQL:

while [ 1 ];do mysql -u root --password=123; done

1	while [ 1 ];do mysql -u root --password=123; done

Or the Python version I originally saw:

#!/usr/bin/python import subprocess while 1: subprocess.Popen("mysql -u root mysql --password=blah", shell=True).wait()

1 2 3 4 5

#!/usr/bin/python import subprocess while 1:         subprocess.Popen("mysql -u root mysql --password=blah", shell=True).wait()

Security experts have identified some 879,046 servers vulnerable to a brute force flaw that undermines password controls in MySQL and MariaDB systems.
According to Rapid7 security chief HD Moore, one in every 256 brute force attempts could override authentication controls on the servers and allow any password combination to be accepted. An attacker only needed to know a legitimate username which in most circumstances included the name ‘root’.
The flaw has already been exploited. Moore reported that the flaw (CVE-2012-2122) was already patched for both MySQL and MariaDB, but many MySQL administrators had not fixed the hole in their deployments.
Upon scanning 1.7 million publicly exposed MySQL servers, he found more than half (879,046) vulnerable to the “tragically comedic” flaw.

There’s a lot of vulnerable servers out there, so you better hope they aren’t yours because it’s not hard to scan whole subnets for servers with port 3306 open that accept connections from the outside world.
And if your server is in that state – it’s vulnerable. I just checked the repos for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and they both have a patched version of MySQL available for download so I suggest you get on your servers and do -

aptitude update; aptitude safe-upgrade

1	aptitude update; aptitude safe-upgrade

If you are using a shitty OS that uses yum or something – figure it out yourself.

Affected versions, listed below, require for memcmp() to return an arbitrary integer outside of the range -128 to 127. All MariaDB and MySQL versions up to 5.1.61, 5.2.11, 5.3.5 and 5.5.22 were vulnerable, Golubchik said.
Moore and other security boffins identified vulnerable versions in Ubuntu 64-bit versions 10.04, 10.10, 11.04, 11.10, and 12.04, OpenSUSE 12.1 64-bit MySQL 5.5.23, and Fedora. Official builds of MariaDB and MySQL were safe, along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 and 6 and some flavours of Debian Linux and Gentoo 64 bit.
A list of accessible MySQL servers found 356,000 deployments running versions of 5.0.x, followed by 285,000 running 5.1.x, and 134,436 running 5.5.x. Another list of MySQL build flavours revealed 43,900 running Ubuntu, 6408 on Debian, and 98,665 on Windows.

Honestly I find that this is a really serious vulnerability, but has a pretty low risk profile. It will only work in cases of badly configured MySQL users where they accept connections from any IP address – user@% type entries in the user table.
NO ONE should be running root@% – so that would mean the attacker would need local shell access. And well if they have that, it’s pretty much game over anyway.