On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, Benjamin Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
>   My understanding is that this hole does not lead directly to privilege
> elevation.  In other words, it might lead to compromise of the "nobody"  
> account or similar, but not full root access (like CodeRed).  Am I correct
> here?

I believe you are correct.  I am just talking about the bad PR aspect of
this vulnerability leading to a fast-spreading worm.  Certainly from
a site administrators point of view a remote root compromise would be
much worse.

An amusing statistic to know would be what fraction of the ~9 million apache
servers are misconfigured and running at elevated privileges, e.g. root :-)

>   (I am aware of the amount of damage even an unprivileged user can do, and
> that root compromise is generally a short step away from an unprivileged
> compromise, but I want to make sure my understanding of this PHP hole itself
> is correct.)

Right, I suppose the worm writer could leave a backdoor program running
that would yield a shell as "nobody" for hackers to scan for come in
trying to capture root.  Not a warm thought: now all the local root 
compromises become remote ones... 


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