Has someone in Asia exploited Cisco

Thu Sep 1 13:27:20 UTC 2005

Offhand, I would be tempted to say it is the activity of a not
exceedingly competent attacker trying to exploit a very old bug. The
sender is probing for the HTTP Authentication Bypass Issue from June 27
2001.

Original Advisory
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/IOS-httplevel-pub.html 

Malicious request:  http://<device_addres>/level/16/exec/ 

Analyze the timing and source of log events to determine if it is an
automated issue. 

Robert Guess
Assistant Professor, Information Systems Technology
Tidewater Community College
(757) 822-5022

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>>> "J. Oquendo" <sil at politrix.org> 09/01/05 9:07 AM >>>

After doing some logfile analysis briefly yesterday, I noticed what
seems
to be some form of bot, worm, something, searching for what could seems
to
point to a Cisco exploitation of sorts. (http://tinyurl.com/df9d8)

All the hosts who've tried searching for the string are coming from
APNIC.
So I'm wondering... Has someone taken Michael Lynn's paper "Holy
Grail"
and produced a "DaVinci Code" to exploit the flaws Lynn spoke of...

Code snippet below is of "cisco_scanner.c" which searches for the same
particular /level/16/exec/-///pwd string however the code can be
modified
(obviously) and a search turns up less than one page of results on
Google.
Author's page seems to be gone like the wind... Anyhow.

# grep "/level/16/exec/-///" access_log |awk '{print $1,"\t\t"$7}'
58.236.50.75            /level/16/exec/-///pwd
221.141.168.137         /level/16/exec/-///pwd
221.138.93.31           /level/16/exec/-///pwd
218.53.244.16           /level/16/exec/-///pwd
222.232.84.34           /level/16/exec/-///pwd
222.238.128.14          /level/16/exec/-///pwd
218.50.74.189           /level/16/exec/-///pwd
218.239.26.42           /level/16/exec/-///pwd
218.232.83.18           /level/16/exec/-///pwd
211.208.254.67          /level/16/exec/-///pwd

whois.apnic.net $ABOVE_HOSTS

Code snippet...

/*
        Multi-thread Cisco HTTP vulnerable scanner v0.2
		by Inode
*/

#define HTTP_REQUEST "GET /level/16/exec/-///pwd  HTTP/1.0\n\n"

So now I have yet another mod_security rule added ;)

SecFilterSelective THE_REQUEST "/level/16"
"redirect:http://www.cisco.com"

=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
J. Oquendo
GPG Key ID 0x97B43D89
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x97B43D89 

It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing
about the problem. -- Niklaus Wirth