Symantec Japan website bamboozled by hacker

Plaintext passwords revealed

A Symantec-run website was vulnerable to Blind SQL Injection problems that reportedly exposes a wealth of potentially sensitive information.

Romanian hacker Unu used off-the-shelf tools (Pangolin and sqlmap) to steal a glimpse at the database behind Symantec's Japanese website. A peek at the Symantec store revealed by the hack appears to show clear-text passwords associated with customer records. Product keys held on a Symantec server in Japan were also exposed by the hack.

Unu has previously exposed similar problems involving the websites of the UK's parliament and Kaspersky, among many others. The grey-hat hacker has published screenshots to back up his latest claims which, if verified, run deeper than shortcomings on the websites of Kaspersky, F-secure and other security firms previously reported by Unu.

Symantec said it was investigating the reported breach, which Unu claims gave him full disk and database access. The security giant said the vulnerability only affected a website used by consumer customers in the Far East. Symantec admitted there was a problem without commenting on how serious the snafu might be, pending the result of an investigation. The offending site - pcd.symantec.com - has been taken offline pending the addition of extra security defences.

A SQL injection vulnerability has been identified at pcd.symantec.com. The Web site facilitates customer support for users of Symantec's Norton-branded products in Japan and South Korea only. This incident does not affect Symantec customers anywhere else in the world.

This incident impacts customer support in Japan and South Korea but does not affect the safety and usage of Symantec's Norton-branded consumer products.

Symantec is currently in the process of updating the Web site with appropriate security measures and will bring it back online as soon as possible. Symantec is still investigating the incident and has no further details to share at this time.

SQL injection flaws lie at the heart of all the security problems reported by Unu. The class of vulnerability in general makes it possible to trick back-end databases into handing over potentially sensitive data in response to commands appended onto the end of URLs entered into a browser.

Attacks based on Blind SQL Injection can be labour intensive, reports Gunter Ollmann, VP of research at Damballa, whose blog entry explained that attacks hunting for these types of web security vulnerability are beginning to be automated by botnets. "[This] means that exploitation of these vulnerabilities and enumeration of the the database data can be conducted in a few minutes - way before a security team can actively respond to the attack and close down the breach and loss of confidential data," he explains. ®