Security Incidents: RE: Unicode Attack

["James C Slora Jr" <Jim.Slora () phra com>]

Looking for some enlightenment. Comments and question inline.

Information Security wrote Wednesday, November 13, 2002 1:27 PM
> > 2002-11-12 13:00:37 210.201.100.253 - x.x.x.17 80 GET
> > /scripts/..%5c../..%5c../..%5cwinnt/system32/cmd.exe /c+dir 200 1849 321
> > 31 HTTP/1.1 63.241.137.233
> > Mozilla/4.0+(compatible;+MSIE+5.01;+Windows+NT+5.0) - -
> It's been my experience that the actual URL probably sent to your server
was
> /scripts/..%255c../..%255c../..%255cwinnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir.  If you
> type that into your browser, you'll probably have success.
This fits my experience exactly. The attack performed from a browser or
script uses %255c.. but Snort always logs it as %5c.

> You would see this entry on any proxy device in front of the web server.
> IIS and Snort (IMHO) appropriately run a single URL decode on the
> request, which pretty much follows URI RFC specs, so that's not really a
bug.

Are you saying that Snort has performed one level of Unicode translation
before it creates its hex-level packet dumps? This seems to fit the output,
but it contradicts the expectation that Snort is displaying exactly what was
on the wire in hex format.



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