Category: Reliable Penguin

Dirty Cow Vulnerability (CVE-2016-5195)

On October 19, 2016, a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel was disclosed. The bug is nicknamed Dirty COW because the underlying issue was a race condition in the way kernel handles copy-on-write (COW). Dirty COW has existed for a long time — at least since 2007, with kernel version 2.6.22 — so the vast majority of servers are at risk. Exploiting this bug means that a regular, unprivileged user on your server can gain write access to any file they can read, and can therefore increase their privileges on the system. More information can be found on CVE-2016-5195 from Canonical, Red Hat, and Debian. Fortunately, most major distributions have already released a fix. You can follow this tutorial to see if your server is vulnerable and to apply updates as needed. Check Vulnerability Ubuntu/Debian To find out if your server is affected, check your kernel version. uname -rv

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Slow DNS Lookups For Web Requests

Ran into a strange problem recently … web server behind a firewall was able to resolve names with “dig” sucessfully but attempts to fetch web pages with “wget” or “curl” was very slow … seemed to hang on name resolution.  So this would work fine:

but this would hang for several seconds:

This problem extended to curl requests from with in PHP … in this case a Magento website … various plugins in the site were “calling home” when loading admin pages which resulted in making the admin painfully slow. After much debugging we concluded that the problem was due to the fact that certain versions of glibc run IPv4 and IPv6 requests in parallel which breaks some firewalls and/or DNS servers. The work around was to add this option in /etc/resolv.conf:

This forces the requests to be made sequentially instead of in parallel. Hope this helps other

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Great Article – Why Do Websites Get Hacked

Great article from the team at Sucuri about why websites get hacked: https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/02/why-websites-get-hacked.html Covering automation, targeted vs attacks of opportunity and the motivation behind hacking, this article is a great introduction for the non technical user.

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PayPal Certificate Upgrade

PayPal is upgrading the certificate for www.paypal.com to SHA-256. This endpoint is also used by merchants using the Instant Payment Notification (IPN) product. A detailed FAQ has been provided here: Merchant Security System Upgrade Guide Also the microsite: 2015-2016 SSL Certificate Change For most online store owners the primary concern is that your server has the correct new G5 certificate installed. Instructions for testing can be found here: Cert Check For Linux If you’re running CentOS or RedHat then the command is:

   

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MariaDB on CentOS 7 – “Error in accept: Too many open files”

By default is seems the soft and hard open files limits on MariaDB in CentOS 7 are 1024 and 4096 respectfully. You can see these limits by first getting the process ID:

And then looking at the limits in the proc filesystem:

You’ll see something like this:

Notice the numbers for “Max open files”. If you run into problems with MariaDB failing and you see errors like this in the log:

Then you need to increase the open files limits by editing:

and adding this line:

to the “[Service]” section. Then reload the systemctl daemon:

and restart the MariaDB service:

Now the limit will be increased.  For example:

UPDATE: We’ve seen similar problems with nginx. The solution is similar … increase the limits for the nginx service. UPDATE: As noted by Bastiaan Welmers in the comments, it better to copy the service control file

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