When you pay someone to host your website, chances are your site isn’t running on a single box all by itself. Hosting companies like GoDaddy
or Rackspace use shared hosting, which means your website is stored on a computer with multiple other websites to conserve resources and raise profits. This leaves your data on a system that is making all of its users share the same resources assuming that none of the users will run vulnerable software. This means that if one of those users is compromised, then all the users are compromised. Are you prepared to put your site’s security in other people’s hands?
We touched on the issue of default scripts in a
previous post where GoDaddy servers were compromised. Hosting services may provide default web pages, scripts, or CGI gateways for sending mail, uploading files, posting to forum, etc. These are dangerous for two reasons. First, they are open source so that anyone who uses that hosting provider can see the source code and find vulnerabilities. The trick is only customers of the hosting provider can examine the source so the scripts don’t get the same number of eyeballs finding problems as traditional open source applications get. The second reason default scripts are dangerous is due to the further reaching consequences. This means that if an attacker finds an issue in a default script and can properly exploit it, then all the accounts on that server could be compromised. Exploitation like that could be far reaching to thousands of domains with thousands of users all running off of a single server. This high payout for a single vulnerability means that shared hosting environments are targeted more and more by attackers.
Posted
07-14-2006 2:52 PM
by
erik.peterson