Yahoo service SQL Injection vulnerability allows Remote Code Execution

The Yahoo Services has a serious SQL Injection Flaw

Egyptian white hat  hacker Ebrahim Hegazy has discovered a critical Yahoo SQL Injection flaw exploitable to Remote Code Execution and privilege escalation.  Hegazy is a security expert and has been credited with discovering numerous critical flaws in Microsoft, Yahoo and Orange website.

Ebrahim had now discovered a  flaw in the Yahoo service which allows SQL Injection.  Once the SQL injection is initiated, the particular Yahoo service can be exploited by a potential attacker to Remote Code Execution and Escalated to Root Privilege on one of Yahoo servers.

Proof of Concept

As explained in his blog post, Ebrahim started his research with the Yahoo Service domain: https://innovationjockeys.yahoo.net/.

While examining this particular domain with  HTTP POST requests he noticed something that could be exploited for SQL Injection attack.  In Ebrahim’s own words,

while intercepting the POST requests, I found below request that graped my attention with the possibility of SQL Injection.

https://innovationjockeys.net/tictac_chk_req.php
POST:
f_id=9631

After a few manual tests and with the use of SQLMap, the hacker confirmed the presence of a flaw in the Yahoo system:

https://innovationjockeys.net/tictac_chk_req.php
POST:
f_id=-9631? OR (2777=2777)#
Available Databases:
[*] information_schema
[*] innovation******* #Hiding dbnames for Yahoo privacy.
[*] web****

Ebrahim  could read the data stored in the database with SQL Injection attack and once he got the the the administrator credentials from the database he was able to decode them despite it was encoded as Base64.

1- Admin panel found on: https://innovationjockeys.yahoo.net/admin/

2- I found the Administrator Password stored in the database and it was encoded as Base64 :D

SQL Injection Yahoo 1

Good, I’ve decoded the Administrator Password, Logged in to the Admin panel.

SQL Injection Yahoo 2

Once he had access to the admin panel, he tried to trigger a Remote Code Execution uploading his content.

“That said, I’ve found a upload page, but after uploading a file with “phpinfo();” function as a content,
I found that my uploaded file was named as: page_d03b042780c5071521366edc01e52d3d.xrds+xml instead of being page_d03b042780c5071521366edc01e52d3d.php?!” states Hibrahim in the blog post.

Inspecting the uploading request, the expert discovered the cause of the problem in the “Content-Type” Header!

SQL Injection Yahoo 3

Renaming the “Content-Type” Header to be “application/php” the problems was solved.

SQL Injection Yahoo 4

Ebrahim submitted the Proof of Concept to Yahoo and Yahoo patched the vulnerability.  Surprisingly, Yahoo declined to award any bounty to Ebrahim

Time-line of the vulnerability

2014-09-05 Initial report to Yahoo

2014-09-06 Yahoo confirmed the vulnerability

2014-09-07 Yahoo Fixed the Vulnerability

2014-09-19 Yahoo told Ebrahim that this vulnerability is not eligible for a reward!!! 

Subscribe to our newsletter

To be updated with all the latest news

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Subscribe to our newsletter

To be updated with all the latest news

Read More

Suggested Post