Joomla 3.8.8 is now available

Joomla 3.8.8 is now available. This is a security release which addresses 9 security vulnerabilities, contains over 50 bug fixes, and includes various security related improvements.

What's in 3.8.8?

Joomla 3.8.8 addresses 9 security vulnerabilities  / hardenings and several bugs, including:

Security Issues Fixed

• Low Priority  - Core - ACL violation in access levels (affecting Joomla 2.5.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Low Priority -  Core - Add phar files to the upload blacklist (affecting Joomla 2.5.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Moderate Priority -  Core - Information Disclosure about unpublished tags (affecting Joomla 3.1.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Low Priority -  Core - Installer leaks plain text password to local user (affecting Joomla 3.0.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Moderate Priority -  Core - XSS Vulnerabilities & additional hardening (affecting Joomla 3.0.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Filter field in com_fields allows remote code execution (affecting Joomla 3.7.0 through 3.8.7) More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Session deletion race condition (affecting Joomla 3.0.0 through 3.8.7)  More information »
• Low Priority - Core - Possible XSS attack in the redirect method (affecting Joomla 3.2.1 through 3.8.7)  More information »
• Low Priority - Core - XSS vulnerability in the media manager (affecting Joomla 1.5.0 through 3.8.7)  More information »

Please see the documentation wiki for the security recommendations for updated sites.
More details about the session deletion race condition are available on the Developer Network site.

Bug fixes and Improvements

• Miscellaneous accessibility improvements for the Backend
• Updated CodeMirror to 5.37 and various improvements #20269 #19833 #12542
• Improved handling of numeric user group names #20091
• [com_content] Filter by no author #20245
• Added support for PHP 7.3’s is_countable function #20441
• Sending passwords by email disabled by default for new installs #20247

Visit GitHub for the full list of bug fixes.

MALICIOUS PHP SCRIPT INFECTS 2,400 WEBSITES IN THE PAST WEEK

A botnet dubbed Brain Food is giving webmasters indigestion with related attacks that push bogus diet pills and IQ-boosting pills via web pages hosted on legitimate sites. So far, spammers have been successful, thanks to an effective Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) script (also called Brain Food) that has adroitly avoided detection on websites hosting the pitches.

Over the past four months, researchers at Proofpoint said they have tracked 5,000 Brain Food compromised websites. In a post outlining its research Friday, Proofpoint said 2,400 of those compromised sites have been active over the past seven days pushing dubious pills under the false premise the product claims made were originally on television shows Shark Tank and on identified as Entertainment Today.

“While this botnet is small compared to other spam sending infrastructure, the size of this botnet is sufficient to provide the operators with easily reconfigured redirects,” wrote Kevin Epstein, VP Threat Operations, at Proofpoint in an email interview with Threatpost.

Domain registrar and hosting firm GoDaddy has been disproportionately impacted by the Brain Food script, accounting for 40 percent of the 5,000 compromised sites. That’s followed by hosting firms DreamHost, UnitedLayer and CyrusOne.

“An individual website may contain multiple copies of the PHP script. We have observed this script installed on websites using different content management systems including WordPress and Joomla,” researchers wrote.

Spam attacks hit inboxes in the form of stripped down email messages typically with no subject and basic greeting (see below).

The body of the message contained a URL shortener link using Google’s goog.gl and bit.ly. Spammers had been blocked by Google’s URL shortener service when Google stopped allowing anonymous users from creating goo.gl links. “By the end of April, the spammer appears to have found a means of  circumventing the Google restrictions,” wrote researchers.

Recipients who click on the link are redirected to the compromised website that hosts the diet or intelligence-boosting pill pitch.

Brain Food: Malicious PHP Script

The script itself employs several layers of defense to evade detection by researchers and search engine crawlers. “The code is polymorphic and obfuscated with multiple layers of base64 encoding,” they said. “A version recently uploaded to a malware repository was not flagged by any antivirus engine.”

When a site is infected with the malicious Brain Food PHP code and crawled, the script redirects to the correct page. Next, it staggers for five seconds and “redirects to the root of the compromised domain, delays and returns nothing, or redirects to the UNICEF website,” researchers said.

“The attackers want victims to get redirected. But it wants search engines, analysts and sandboxes to get redirected to an innocuous site – whether it be the root of the compromised domain or the UNICEF website. The built-in delays are enough for many automated analysis systems to time out without detecting a potentially malicious redirect,” Epstein said.

Criminals maintain control over the landing pages and keep stats on the campaigns from C2 servers prostodomen1[.]com and thptlienson[.]com.

Even more worrisome, is a backdoor in the Brain Food code that allows “remote execution of shell code on web servers which are configured to allow the PHP ‘system’ command,” researchers wrote.