Hosting provider’s compromised password system, not a hacked hypervisor, caused defacing of OpenSSL.org site, site reps say – after VMware cries foul.

The administrators of OpenSSL.org have backed off a up to date charge that their site was defaced Dec. 29 by a Turkish hackers group who reached it through a compromised hypervisor.

The hypervisor that was under suspicion appears to had been VMware’s ESX Server, and the charge brought a denial on Thursday from VMware, after it conducted its own investigation.

OpenSSL site administrators said Friday that the intrusion occurred instead through its hosting provider’s compromised password system. That exposure gave the crowd, calling itself TurkGuvenligiTurkSec, temporary control of a virtualization console and allowed it to put a taunting but otherwise harmless message at the OpenSSL site. Not one of the site’s code repositories were altered within the intrusion, an OpenSSL spokesman said in a post to the OpenSSL.org website.

OpenSSL administrators had previously said in a brand new Year’s Day post that the attack came “via hypervisor throughout the hosting provider and never via any vulnerability inside the OS configuration.” Neither the hosting provider nor the hypervisor were named, but VMware’s quick response on Jan. 2 left little question it was defending the integrity of its ESX Server against the OpenSSL claim.

[Want more on VMware hypervisor security? See VMware Breach: Time To imagine Hypervisor Code Open?]

“VMware knows suggestions that the new defacement of the OpenSSL Foundation website might be due to a hypervisor compromise,” a VMware spokesman said in a Jan. 2 security blog post at the VMware site.

VMware had conducted its own investigation with the OpenSSL Foundation and its business enterprise. “We haven’t any reason to believe that the OpenSSL website defacement is end result of the a safety vulnerability in any VMware products and that the defacement is as a result an operational security error,” the VMware blog said. VMware officials weren’t available for further comment.

In attributing the operational security error to its hosting provider on Friday, VMware added that both had taken steps to insure there has been no repeat of the incident.

Although researchers have documented theoretical examples of possible avenues of attack through a hypervisor, so far there were no concrete incidents of hypervisors being implemented within the field. Furthermore, security experts have shown how those theoretical attacks will be thwarted, so hypervisors haven’t generally been viewed as a source of exposure to the virtual machines running underneath them. Because 18 to 30 or more VMs could be managed by a single hypervisor, a corrupted hypervisor is a threat, if it materialized in operations, that may be leveraged across many virtual servers.

Ars Technica reported that the wear and tear appears mainly to be to OpenSSL.org’s pride. A Turkish hacking group left the message: “TurkGuvenligiTurkSec Was Here… we adore openssl…” The last component to the message suggests the hackers were showing off skills without aspiring to inflict code damage at the site.

Attackers typically attempt to exploit a weak or unpatched Windows or Linux operating system or a database buffer overflow, not the hypervisor. More details may be disclosed as OpenSSL proceeds with its forensics, it said.

Both the character of the attack and sensitivity of the positioning meant this intrusion was going to get thoroughly reconstructed and examined. OpenSSL.org and VMware have both omitted the name of the agency of their statements.

With growing reliance on virtualization inside the datacenter and the general public cloud, any hypervisor breach will draw instant attention. Dan Goodin, security editor for Ars Technica, concluded: “Users should demand an intensive autopsy. And while they’re at it, they ought to demand the official maintainers of PHP and the Linux kernel make good on promises to produce autopsies of great compromises on their lonesome servers.”

The public record of hypervisor operations from all vendors has to this point not cited any cases of intrusion through a corrupted virtual machine system. Hypervisors are new and tougher marks than Windows or Java. Nevertheless, as this incident points out, the intruders have become more sophisticated, and it’s inevitable that 2014 might reveal just how far attackers can go by way of penetrating the hypervisor.

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld, and previous technology editor of Interactive Week.

Private clouds are moving rapidly from concept to production. But some fears about expertise and integration still linger. Also within the Private Clouds Step Up issue of InformationWeek: The general public cloud and the steam engine have more in common than you possibly can think. (Free registration required.)

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