PHP on Omid Farhang

From Laravel and AngularJS to Spring Boot and Angular: A Full-Stack Migration Field Report

Mon, 22 May 2017 10:00:00 +0000

First weeks with Java and Spring Boot 1.5 after years of Laravel APIs and an AngularJS frontend — what felt familiar, what felt alien, and side-by-side code from a money-exchange project.

Laravel, From the Eyes of an Old-School Developer

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 20:30:00 +0000

A reflection on Laravel from a developer who grew up with VB5, VB6, AutoIt, classic ASP, and old-school PHP.

PHP 5.4 Remote Exploit PoC in the wild

Sat, 19 May 2012 18:22:00 +0000

ISC Diary:

There is a remote exploit in the wild for PHP 5.4.3 in Windows, which takes advantage of a vulnerability in the com_print_typeinfo function. The php engine needs to execute the malicious code, which can include any shellcode like the the ones that bind a shell to a port.

Since there is no patch available for this vulnerability yet, you might want to do the following:

Block any file upload function in your php applications to avoid risks of exploit code execution.
Use your IPS to filter known shellcodes like the ones included in metasploit.
Keep PHP in the current available version, so you can know that you are not a possible target for any other vulnerability like CVE-2012-2336 registered at the beginning of the month.
Use your HIPS to block any possible buffer overflow in your system.

Source: http://isc.sans.edu

PHP patch quick but inadequate

Sat, 05 May 2012 19:25:00 +0000

The H-Online: The updates to PHP versions 5.3.12 and 5.4.2 released on Thursday do not fully resolve the vulnerability that was accidentally disclosed on Reddit, according to the discoverer of the flaw. The bug in the way CGI and PHP interact with each other leads to a situation where attackers can execute code on affected servers. The issue remained undiscovered for eight years.

The best protection at present is offered by setting up filter rules on the web server. However, the RewriteRule workaround described on PHP.net is also, according to security expert Christopher Kunz, inadequate. He suggests a slightly modified form of the rule as an alternative.

PHP 5.4.1 and PHP 5.3.11 released

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:52:00 +0000

The H-Online: The PHP developers have released the first update for PHP 5.4, the latest version of their popular scripting language, and an update to PHP 5.3, the older stable branch of the language. The developers say “All users of PHP are strongly encouraged to upgrade” to the new releases.

PHP 5.4.1 has more than 20 bug fixes, including some related to security. One security bug concerned insufficient validating of the an upload name, which then led to corrupted $_FILES indices. Another notable change was open_basedir checks being added to readline_write_history and readline_read_history.

Critical PHP vulnerability being fixed

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:31:00 +0000

The H-Security: The PHP developers are working to fix a critical security vulnerability in PHP that they introduced with a recent security patch. The current stable release is affected; however, it is not yet clear whether the questionable patch was also applied to older versions.

The cause of the problem is the security update to PHP 5.3.9, which was written to prevent denial of service (DoS) attacks using hash collisions. To do so, the developers limited the maximum possible number of input parameters to 1,000 in php_variables.c using max_input_vars. Because of mistakes in the implementation, hackers can intentionally exceed this limit and inject and execute code. The bug is considered to be critical as code can be remotely injected over the web.

phpMyAdmin updates close XSS hole

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 18:29:00 +0000

H-Online: The phpMyAdmin developers have announced the release of versions 3.4.4 and 3.3.10.4 of their open source database administration tool. According to the security advisory, these maintenance and security updates close a hole (CVE-2011-3181) in the Tracking feature that leads to multiple cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.

The exploit was discovered by Norman Hippert and is caused due to improper sanitisation when input is passed to the table, column and index names. For an attack to be successful, an attacker must be logged in via phpMyAdmin. Versions 3.3.0 to 3.4.3.2 are affected and the developers consider the problem to be serious. Updating to phpMyAdmin 3.3.10.4 or 3.4.4 fixes the problem. Alternatively, users can apply the provided patches.

WordPress and PHP-based management systems under attack?

Tue, 11 May 2010 22:37:00 +0000

A variety of sources are reporting that blog hosting sites with WordPress-created sites and php-based management systems such as Zen Care eCommerce are being infected with malicious scripts.

Websites hosted by ISP DreamHost, GoDaddy, Bluehost and Media Temple have been found with the malcode, according to H-Online.com.

The malicious scripts download malcode and block Google’s Safe Browsing API from alerting users.
Story here: “Large-scale attack on WordPress”

The Sucuri Security blog has offered clean-up instructions for those with infected pages here.

What does PHP stand for? Probable Hacked Page?

Tue, 11 May 2010 13:45:00 +0000

Late last week, the wires were buzzing over news that the official site of PHP-Nuke “Professional Content Management System“ was serving malware. I am frankly amazed to see the site still infected 4 days later.

We see hacked sites everyday and the majority are running PHP-driven applications such as Content Management Systems (CMS). The PHP-Nuke site is currently running PHP v. 5.2.9.

Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.9

Building Internal Web Tools on Windows

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 11:45:00 +0000

How small teams built internal web tools with PHP, MySQL, and classic Windows stacks before frameworks dominated — lessons from real IT support work.