Top web hosting platform could be easily exploited using these threats
Documentation has been updated to explain Super Privileges
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Cybersecurityresearchers have successfully conducted remote code execution (RCE) and privilege escalation attacks on popularweb hostingcontrol platformcPanel& WHM by exploiting a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability.
WhilecPanelis limited to managing a single hosting account, cPanel & WHM allows admins to manage the entireserver.
“Our team has found multiple vulnerabilities in cPanel/WHM during a black-boxpentest, the most important one being a privilege escalation via stored XSS,”sharedAdrian Tiron, co-founder ofcloud securityfirm Fortbridge.
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According to Tiron, the researchers were able to exploit the XSS vulnerability to escalate privileges to root.
Ripe for exploit
Whilst disclosing these bugs to the cPanel & WHM team, the Fortbridge team realized that the pentested cPanel account was areselleraccount with the permission to edit locales, leading them to conclude that the XSS vulnerability discovered during their pestest “is considered a feature, and it was not fixed.”
The second bug is an HTML injection vulnerability. Although Tiron says this vulnerability is enough to bypass the CSRF/referrer leak protection, the process to exploit it is a lot more “convoluted.”
Fortbridge notified cPanel of the vulnerabilities earlier this year, and the popular control panel updated therelevant portions of its documentationearlier this month.
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However, cPanel hasn’t yet fixed the flaws, arguing that threat actors must be authenticated to exploit the vulnerability.
In a conversationwithThe Daily Swig, Cory McIntire, product owner on the cPanel security team, said “the Locale interface can only be used by root andSuper Privilegeresellers to whom the root must grant this specific ACL to.”
He added that “this is labelled aSuper Privilegewith a warning icon in the server admins WHM interface, and also flagged as such in the cPanel documentation.”
In terms of protection, McIntire said thatSuper Privilegesshould only be given to people you would trust with root on your server.”
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
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