Hackers Breach ZoneAlarm’s Forum Site — Outdated vBulletin to Blame

Nov 11, 2019

ZoneAlarm, an internet security software company owned by
Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point Technologies, has suffered a
data breach exposing data of its discussion forum users, the
company confirmed The Hacker News.

With nearly 100 million downloads, ZoneAlarm offers antivirus
software, firewall, and additional virus protection solutions to
home PC users, small businesses, and mobile phones worldwide.

Though neither ZoneAlarm or its parent company Check Point has
yet publicly disclosed the security incident, the company quietly
sent an alert via email to all affected users over this weekend,
The Hacker News learned.

The email-based breach notification advised ZoneAlarm forum
users to immediately change their forum account passwords,
informing them hackers have unauthorizedly gained access to their
names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and date of births.

Moreover, the company has also clarified that the security
incident only affects users registered with the
“forums.zonealarm.com” domain, which has a small number of
subscribers, nearly 4,500.

“This [forum] is a separate website from any other website we have
and used only by a small number of subscribers who registered to
this specific forum,” the email notification reads.

“The website became inactive in order to fix the problem and
will resume as soon as it is fixed. You will be requested to reset
your password once joining the forum.”

Hackers Exploited Recent vBulletin 0-Day Flaw

Upon reaching out to the company, a spokesperson confirmed The
Hacker News that attackers exploited a known critical RCE
vulnerability (CVE-2019-16759 ^[1]) in the vBulletin forum
software to compromise ZoneAlarm’s website and gain unauthorized
access.

For those unaware, this flaw affected vBulletin versions 5.0.0
up to the latest 5.5.4, for which the project maintainers later
released patch updates, but only for recent versions 5.5.2, 5.5.3,
and 5.5.4.

The Hacker News found that, surprisingly, the security company
itself was running an outdated 5.4.4 version of the vBulletin
software until last week that let attackers compromise the website
easily.

It’s the same then-zero-day
vBulletin exploit that an anonymous hacker publicly disclosed
in late September this year, which, if exploited, could allow
remote attackers to take full control over unpatched vBulletin
installations.
^[2]

Moreover, a week after that, the same flaw was also exploited by
unknown attackers to hack the Comodo
forum ^[3] website, which exposed
login account information of over nearly 245,000 Comodo Forums
users.

Though the ZoneAlarm team learned about the breach just late
last week and immediately informed affected users, it’s unclear
exactly when the attackers breached the website.

“ZoneAlarm is conducting an investigation into the matter. We take
pride in the fact that we took a proactive approach once this
incident was detected and within 24 hours and alerted the forum
members,” the company’s spokesperson told the Hacker News.

Since the ZoneAlarm forum website is down at the time of writing,
users would not be able to change their account password on the
forum at this moment.

But if you are one of the affected users, you are also
recommended to change your passwords for any other online account
where you use the same credentials, and do the same for the
ZoneForum website as soon as the site goes live again.

References

^{^}
CVE-2019-16759
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
then-zero-day vBulletin exploit
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
hack the Comodo forum
(thehackernews.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Hackers Breach ZoneAlarm’s Forum Site — Outdated vBulletin to Blame

Hackers Exploited Recent vBulletin 0-Day Flaw

References

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