Crackers Exploit PHP Vulnerabilities
May 2001
Security researchers have found seven separate vulnerabilities in several versions of the widely used PHP scripting language and warn that crackers are circulating exploit code for at least one of the flaws.The problem lies in the way that PHP handles multipart-data POST requests, through which users can upload files or other content to a Web server. Specifically, there are several flaws in the php_mime_split function that an attacker could use to run arbitrary code on a vulnerable server, according to a bulletin released by Stefan Esser of e-matters GmbH, of Koln, Germany, and a member of the PHP development team.
The PHP team has released an updated version of the language that fixes the security problems. PHP, which began as a project of the Apache Software Foundation, is most often used on Apache Web servers, which make up nearly 60 percent of the servers in the Internet, according to a survey by Netcraft, a U.K. security testing company. But all major Web servers support PHP, as well.
Most of the vulnerabilities are relevant only to machines running Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris and various versions of Linux.
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