Ruby on Rails security hole still being exploited by hackers

Hackers are continuing to exploit a vulnerability in the Ruby on Rails (RoR) application framework, despite being patched several months ago.

At the beginning of this year when the RoR software weakness was discovered, it was claimed that over 200,000 websites that used the framework were at risk of being hacked.

Coming off the RoR 'critical vulnerability' in January, it has been claimed that some of the affected sites were recently hit by hackers.

Jeff Jarmoc, a security researcher, posted on his personal blog that he isn't surprised there are still problems with RoR because some administrators may not have installed the update.

"In short, this is a pretty straightforward skiddy exploit of a vulnerability that has been publicly known, and warned about, for months," Jarmoc wrote in his post.

This wave of hacks on servers come from a remote command, which downloads and executes files called cmd1, cmd2, and cmd3.

Allowing the bot to change servers, download and execute additional files when commanded. There is no authentication needed, allowing other attackers to manipulate these hacked sites after the initial hacking.

The total number of servers that were hit this time is unknown.

This vulnerability is easy to fix, and an update to system versions 3.2.11, 3.1.10, 3.0.19, or 2.3.15 should fix the weakness claimed maintainers of the Rails framework.

Jarmoc believes this is just a continued exploit of a weakness that has been know about since January, but it does and has continued to cause headaches for those who haven't taken the time to update.