ID: IRCNE2011081206
Date: 2011-08-03
According to "computerworld", Hackers are exploiting a problem with an image-resizing utility called TimThumb that is widely used in many themes for the blogging platform WordPress, although some fixes have been made to the latest version.
TimThumb is "inherently insecure" because it writes files into a directory when it fetches an image and resizes it. But that directory is accessible to people visiting the website, Maunder wrote. An attacker can compromise the site by figuring out how to get TimThumb to grab a malicious PHP file and put it in the Wordpress directory. The code will be executed if an attacker then accesses the file using a Web browser.
Maunder explained how to disable TimThumb's ability to load images from external sites, but the most sure-fire way to stop the problem is to remove TimThumb or limit its access to other websites. Aside from that, users should update to the latest version of TimThumb
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