Researchers have discovered two major vulnerabilities in a popular open-source online course management system that would let an attacker take over teacher and site administrator accounts.
The Moodle system is used by major universities such as California Polytechnic Institute, Cornell University, UCLA, various school systems, and even the Girl Scouts of America.
Moodle, which competes against commercial e-learning portal tools such as Blackboard/WebCT, contains persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) bugs, according to Adrian Pastor, one of the researchers who discovered the flaws during a penetration test. There are over 46,000 Moodle sites around the world.
The vulnerabilities affect Moodle versions below 1.8.0, according to Moodle, which plans to release details tomorrow on fixes to these and other security issues in the software.
Pastor, senior IT security consultant with ProCheckUp Ltd., says all it takes to exploit one of these vulnerabilities is tricking a teacher or administrative user into clicking on a link posted by a malicious student on his or her school or organization’s Moodle site. That’s all too easy given that Moodle combines online classes with a social networking-type environment consisting of blogs, chats, and public profiles, according to the researchers. Moodle can support up to 200,000 students per site.
"We're not aware of the vulnerabilities we discovered being exploited in the wild, and hope they won't ever be,” says ProCheckUp’s Pastor, who along with his colleague Amir Azam on July 22 will publish details of the vulnerabilities they discovered, as well as proof-of-concept of exploits they wrote.
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A co-worker and I were talking about the lack of security focus in the educational software realm just the other day. I am glad to hear that they are getting some "attention".
Hopefully, the software maker recognize the benefit and continue to work with security researchers.
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