Ferrari Website Flaw Exposes Their Database Credentials

Based on the recent report from char49, it appears that there was a critical flaw in Ferrari’s subdomain, which led to an arbitrary file read vulnerability.

The vulnerability existed in the media.ferrari.com subdomain using a vulnerable WordPress plugin (W3 Total Cache) that could allow threat actors to read sensitive files on the server.

The W3 Total Cache plugin is used by millions of WordPress websites, increasing website performance. However, Ferrari had an outdated version of this plugin which threat actors could’ve exploited.

Technical Analysis

Ferrari was running on WordPress CMS(Content Management System), discovered by Inspecting elements with the Developer Tools offered by some browsers.

Hence, initial reconnaissance started with WPScan which revealed some interesting information like installed plugins on the website. This enumeration showed the W3 Total Cache version as 0.9.3, which was outdated. The latest version of this plugin was found to be v2.3.1.

Further research by the research team and some Google Dorking led to the discovery of CVE-2019-6715, in which W3 Total Cache Versions before v0.9.4 were vulnerable to unauthenticated arbitrary file read vulnerability.

The wp-config.php file must be located on the server to exploit this vulnerability. The path to this file depends on the operating system and the HTTP server type used.

The operating system was found and confirmed as Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS by reading the /etc/issue file.

The HTTP server was guessed as Apache and was confirmed by sending the request to the /etc/apache2/apache.conf which loaded the Apache configuration file.

Now, the virtual-host configuration file must be found, which is consistently named by the site owners. After several guessing, the virtual-host configuration file was guessed to be media.ferrari.com which was located at /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/media.ferrari.com

For finding the DocumentRoot path that servers the WordPress files, a cURL request is sent to the virtual-host configuration file.

The response to this request revealed the DocumentRoot path.

With this gathered information, the wp-config.php file location is found as /home/web/mediaferrari/wp-config.php, which contains the database details and keys.

This extracted sensitive data, including DB name, DB password, DB host and other information.

This was reported to Ferrari through Ferrari’s Responsible Disclosure Program. Ferrari’s security team immediately acted upon this and fixed the issue. 

It is recommended that all website owners be aware of securing their websites. They must be aware of vulnerable versions of WordPress plugins on their websites frequently and upgrade them to the latest versions to prevent malicious actors from exploiting them.

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