howdark.com exploits - follow up

[psoTFX]

Following my original post it has been brought to our attention that the highlighting exploit can be taken advantage of, and it a serious way. We are hastily preparing a new release. However that release contains a number of other fixes and additions and thus we carrying out some internal testing to limit the chances of other issues arising.

In the mean time we strongly, and I mean strongly! urge all our users to make the following change to viewtopic.php as a matter of urgency.

Open viewtopic.php in any text editor. Find the following section of code:

Code: Select all

//
// Was a highlight request part of the URI?
//
$highlight_match = $highlight = '';
if (isset($HTTP_GET_VARS['highlight']))
{
   // Split words and phrases
   $words = explode(' ', trim(htmlspecialchars(urldecode($HTTP_GET_VARS['highlight']))));

   for($i = 0; $i < sizeof($words); $i++)
   {

and replace with:

Code: Select all

//
// Was a highlight request part of the URI?
//
$highlight_match = $highlight = '';
if (isset($HTTP_GET_VARS['highlight']))
{
   // Split words and phrases
   $words = explode(' ', trim(htmlspecialchars($HTTP_GET_VARS['highlight'])));

   for($i = 0; $i < sizeof($words); $i++)
   {

Please inform as many people as possible about this issue. If you're a hosting provider please inform your customers if possible. Else we advise you implement some level of additional security if you run ensim or have PHP running cgi under suexec, etc.