As usual I woke up from the smell of an unexploited hole. Today is the day of the second hacking experience.

Now I have an access to the admin panel, but what now? Oh yeah sure you are right. But just please stop for a second and think are you going to become a hacker too?

Oh, yes, we need to find something special, something extraordinary, something…something like file input.

Yes, thank you, I know that I am very smart indeed.

After some research of the admin panel, I have found a file manager plugin that allowed file upload to a media folder of the website.

The root path used for all of the uploads is "/uploads" and I have no chance to upload file in another path. But as it usually happens I realized that the file upload root is just hard coded in the PHP configuration file.

Ok, let’s now upload a Wordpress installation to the hacked hosting and make a blog about ponies. Hah, just kidding this is not such kind a of movie blog. Of course, we are going to upload PHP-Shell .

Do you believe that PHP file has been uploaded successfully ?! You better do!

I was very impressed that my way in the criminal is going to be so easy.

But it was just 3-4 seconds after I opened the shell URL in the browser, I got the worst error page: FORBIDDEN .

There are 2 main reasons of that:

.htaccess is blocking PHP files execution in "/uploads" directory

is blocking files execution in directory WAF is somehow blocking all calls to PHP files in "/uploads" directory

I’ve started thinking like their webmaster. In most cases .htaccess will handle this situation and why am I going to write a rule in WAF . Yes, I will not.

Ok, let’s try hacking .htaccess

We are creating a new folder through file manager plugin and trying to upload .htaccess file to it, to override top-level rules.

Content of .htaccess :

php_flag engine on

Do you believe that .htaccess file has been uploaded successfully ?! You better do!

Unfortunately, after that, we can’t even get .png file from our created folder and we get the SAME FORBIDDEN error page, it means that we were right about the webmaster. And it also proofs that our .htaccess is in right place and working.

After couple of tries to hack the .htaccess with techniques like disabling RewriteEngine I released that configuration was done in httpd.conf . This means that it isn’t possible to override the necessary directives in sub-directories by using the .htaccess .

Ok, this really sucks…. Sorry about that, but give me an another try.

We must explore our file manager plugin to find out a way to upload file in top directory of "/uploads" .

You can guess that I find this plugin source code on GitHub. And I think you are guessing that I hacked it.

I opened Fiddler and tracked endpoint where a file is being uploaded. I find out that base_dir parameter is passing via POST request. (Before that, I already released that there is no checking for this paramaeter in server side) Ok, I uploaded my file in "/uploads" directory, pressed “F2” on request in Fiddler, modified base_dir to "/" and pressed “R”. That’s it.

Now I have working shell on their server. Now most boring part:

Search configuration files

Find DB username/password

Dump database

Download all server files ( especially source code )

Go to sleep as nothing happens

Holy monkey I forgot about hacking music…

Hacking Music