Servage security issues

Servage is a big internet service provider that offers webhosting for the mass and for quite some time I used it because I thought that the price is ok for what they offer and for what I need. What I noticed throughout the whole time I was a servage customer is the lack of speed. You always have busy web and mysql servers which are in general on high load or unavailable but that’s not the point here.

My point here is that Servage has several security issues they are not willing to listen nor to fix it.

Servage probaly faced security problems with their login form in the past so they implemented a captcha mechanism which is basically a scrambled graphic with letters the user has to identify and enter into a textbox beside username and password to successfully login to the servage control panel.

This is how the theory describes the process but in practice this shit doesn’t work. In fact if you enter the captcha correctly your login _will_ fail. If you enter _no_ captcha at all, your login will _succeed_ :).

Another issue is when you decide to register an international domainname (idn) with special characters in its name. The good thing is that you can successfully add such a domainname to the servage control panel but you can’t use mail nor any other service with it and if you decide to delete this domainname from your portfolio you can’t :). If you click on “Remove Domain” a window pops up and asks for confirmation but it won’t delete it from the control panel.

Another big issue imho is the behaviour when you are adding a new virtual host or adding a new existing domainname because Servage uses by default the option to turn on register_globals for every newly added vhost which can be a big problem for you as the “webmaster” if you aren’t aware of this and using php.

What’s worse is that the enemy exploiting this issue or wrong setting isn’t someone grepping the web for websites to be exploitable but a user on the same server which is a customer of servage itself.

You simply have to produce a script error which gets indexed by google. So what’s the catch you might think…the catch is that you can identify parts of the directory structure servage is using on their servers and you simply have to search for it via google. So if you e.g. search for “/mounted-storage/home105a” which is a directory name you can easily find via a simple php script that uses the “system” command (system(”ls /”) etc…HINT: you have to turn php-safe-mode off to make this work, servage allows it), you will find several results listing websites that have faulty php scripts running outputting some sort of error which in most cases also includes the full path to the script that errored.

Now that servage customer or the script kiddie simply have to change to that directory (with the opensource php shell e.g.) he extracted from the errormessage before and read that php file…yes…he is allowed to read that file…the default rights allow any user to read your files _if_ they know where they are located. You can’t cd to “/mounted-storage/home105a” e.g. but you can cd to “/mounted-storage/home105a/sub006/sc4711-LCNB” where the last part seems to be a unique-identifier nobody should be able to find out but I as I’ve shown you it’s simple to.

The script kiddie now can easily inspect your file and look for exploits which is easy as you have register_globals turned on by default. Even worse if you set the wrong permissions the scriptkiddie can create new files or at least edit the existing one.

When I searched at google I found a lot of websites already being hacked or defaced and guess where they were hosted at…servage…

In my time as a customer of servage they moved my complete account twice to a complete different cluster and I now know why. Because of compromised systems.

I asked Servage to set register_globals to off by default but the guys you are talking to at the support are slaves with no rights. They aren’t the decision makers apparently so no luck at all.

In fact I asked for many things like an update to dbd::mysql which is still version 3.x something or to fix the captcha problem, or to fix the security issues etc.

I now cancelled my account at servage because it’s a big security hole at all. I don’t need that.