MOSC Hacking likened to Google Hacking

June 1, 2005

In this eWeek article by Lisa Vaas, we see reports of new security vulnerabilities, this time mentioning the Oracle bug database and the Oracle MOSC portal:

Vaas references the super-popular book by Johnny Long "Google Hacking for Penetration Testers", and notes that the newly-exposed Oracle vulnerabilities are related:

MOSC hacking is similar to Google hacking, the use of Google as a hacking tool to uncover information on, for example, vulnerable servers, error messages that reveal too much information, and even passwords. . . .

MOSC hacking is a similar exploit, but it pertains to a private rather than a public domain since it is accessible only to Oracle customers who purchase a support contract and to authorized Oracle support staff, on a need-to-know basis.

While the article is unclear, it appears that MOSC users can issue commands to reveal sensitive information from bug reports and MOSC forum questions:

Kornbrust found that search strings that returned sensitive information included "hacker," "hacking," SQL Injection," "Cross Site Scripting," Buffer Overflow," "denial of service," "crash," "memory leak," "abort," and many more.

What makes the vulnerabilities particularly disturbing, security experts say, is that Oracle has built up such a rich repository in its MOSC forum.

The bad news for Oracle professional is the report that Oracle MOSC has allegedly cut-off access to forum reports of these new security exposures:

Oracle reportedly has blocked access to forum entries listed in RDS' research. Those include, for example, an October 2004 report from an Oracle user in which he or she explained the following bug:

When executing a scheduler job, the user was made SYS!—in other words, the user experienced inappropriately escalated user privileges. According to Kornbrust's research, this report was returned after searching on the term "security bug."

The user report was explicit in how the bug was inadvertently accessed.

This explosive usage of Google API to expose hacking vulnerabilities has led to a new freeware tool called SiteDigger (which requires a free license to use the Google API):