Bety.php Hack. Part 2. Black Hats in Action.

This is the second article about the hacker attack against osCommerce-powered sites. In the first part, you can find the description of the attack along with detection and clean-up instructions. Now I want to show you what exactly hackers did and how they managed to poison Google search results.

The main goal is to demystify hackers and encourage webmasters to explore their own sites. The more you know about hackers, the better you’ll be at protecting your site against their attacks.

This post is based on the files and access logs of three compromised sites that I received from a webmaster who contacted me a couple of weeks ago.

Quick facts

1. The attack uses unpatched vulnerability in osCommerce 2.2 that allows an attacker to upload arbitrary files to compromised servers using a security hole in file_manager.php.
2. Only one of the three sites actually uses osCommerse (site-1).The rest two sites had been hacked using access gained via the hacked site-1.

Chronicle of the attack »»