‘Gnosis’ Explains The Method And Reasoning Behind Gawker Media Hack

Typically, daemons installed on servers are all running as isolated user accounts. So, if you find a bug in someone's database server, or website, or e-mail daemon, or whatever, most often you only get access to that one user account, which requires you to hope that there is some path from where you are to where you want to be (maybe the password to the database can be gotten from the website)

However, if there is also a local user-to-root exploit available (which is what 99% of kernel exploits are about), then having the ability to execute code as any user now gives you complete access to the entire box: the user security model is totally worthless if you have a kernel sufficiently flawed that it cannot enforce it.

Nine times out of ten with a targeted compromise like this the trail will lead back to a successful spear phishing campaign. Blanket the staff with a malicious pdf, an exclusive first look at a new popular executable, or an older browser exploit. Once you've compromised a client machine (essentially inevitable as long as you have a few dozen or more staff), use that to discover CMS/FTP/SSH credentials, or impersonate the user to request new ones. Once you have a user login on the server, as noted the old kernel reference was undoubtedly connected to a privilege escalation.

Directly exploiting remote flaws in an OS on a major website is usually going to be pretty hard - they focus security efforts there and if there were any existing flaws they'd likely already have been compromised by them (and since fixed it)

Yes?

Tonight, on CNN a security expert said that the attacks from Anonymous were carried out by a bot net of billions of computers.

So, yeah.

Now I wish I had my password as "password," as a matter of fact, because now I have to go do some password changing (I know, my fault).

Also, I'm pretty sure they meant to write "qwerty," not "querty."