I have been talking about PHP scans for a while now. They are so common that we get them on our HoneyPoint deployments all the time, often several times per day, depending on our location.

These scans follow traditional scanner patterns in that they grind through a list of specific urls that are known to have issues looking for a 200 response from the server.

Here is a quick list of a recent scan against one of our HoneyPoints:

/+webvpn+/index.html: 1 Time(s)
/PMA/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/database/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/datenbank/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/db/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/main.php: 2 Time(s)
/admin/myadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/mysql-admin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/mysql/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/mysqladmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/pMA/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/padmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/php-my-admin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.2.3/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.2.6/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.5.1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.5.4/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.5.6/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.6.0-pl1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.6.0/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.6.2-rc1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3-pl1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3-rc1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpMyAdmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpmyadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/phpmyadmin2/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/sqladmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/sqlweb/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/sysadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/web/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/webadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/webdb/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/admin/websql/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/board/index.php: 4 Time(s)
/database/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/datenbank/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/db/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/favicon.ico: 1 Time(s)
/forum/index.php: 4 Time(s)
/forums/index.php: 4 Time(s)
/myadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/mysql-admin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/mysql/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/mysqladmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/padmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/php-my-admin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.2.3/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.2.6/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.5.1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.5.4/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.5.6/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.6.0-pl1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.6.0/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.6.2-rc1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3-pl1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3-rc1/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin-2.6.3/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpMyAdmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpbb/index.php: 4 Time(s)
/phpbb2/index.php: 4 Time(s)
/phpmyadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/phpmyadmin2/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/robots.txt: 15 Time(s)
/sqlweb/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/web/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/webadmin/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/webdb/main.php: 1 Time(s)
/websql/main.php: 1 Time(s)
As you can see, the scanner requests some of the pages many times, usually with subtle differences in the method or url termination scheme. When we have faked the 200 responses for these pages, it simply catalogs the success and continues. Thus far, we have been unable to identify when/if the real human attacker returns to test and play with the finds, since there are just so many scans for these issues going on all the time. But, we continue to monitor and analyze, so hopefully soon we can identify a pattern of scans followed by verification and exploit.

Note that some/many of these scans will immediately exploit the vulnerability in PHP and use it to drop a bot-net client onto the machine. Of course, this immediately compromises the system and adds it to the scanning army. In those cases, the waiting for the return of the human attacker would not apply.

So, what does all of this mean? We wanted to give you some more insight into the wide scale PHP scans and what they look like. If you have not checked your own web site for these known vulnerabilities, it would likely be very wise to do so. It can be done quite easily by hand, using a simple Perl script or any of the publicly available web scanner tools.