Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

Bug 7528

Summary: hack into base Red Hat 6.0 install
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Umair Hoodbhoy <hoodbu>
Component: bindAssignee: Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <bero>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 6.0Keywords: Security
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 1999-12-08 15:21:58 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Umair Hoodbhoy 1999-12-03 03:20:45 UTC 
I had a fresh Red Hat 6.0 install and had commented out the telnet line of
/etc/inetd.conf. Yet, I came to know that my machine got hacked and anyone
could gain root access without a username/passwd prompt just by doing
'telnet <host> <port>' where the <port> was a string, not a number. Is this
a common bug? What exact security patches do I need to prevent this from
happening again? Thanks.
Comment 1 Umair Hoodbhoy 1999-12-03 03:22:59 UTC 
I forgot to mention: the bug tracker won't allow me to enter this as 'Component
Text' so I'm sending this under 'bind' component.
Comment 2 Bernhard Rosenkraenzer 1999-12-08 15:21:59 UTC 
Someone almost certainly started a daemon to allow this, or modified your
inetd.conf.
To give you any more details, I'd need to know which string was used, as ports
*can* be specified as strings (the translation to port numbers is done by
looking into /etc/services).
This particular entry was almost certainly an exploit of a "service" the hacker
started on your machine before that (probably something along the lines of
adding
something stream tcp nowait root /bin/bash
to /etc/inetd.conf).

There are two known security bugs in Red Hat Linux 6.0; one is in wu-ftpd, the
other is in bind. Update to the current versions of wu-ftpd and bind, and
triple-check your system for trojan horses.