Invision Power Services (IPS) has released patches to address an SQL injection vulnerability affecting versions 3.3.x and 3.4.x of the popular online forum software IP.Board.
IPS learned of the existence of an exploit for the vulnerability on Sunday when it published a post advising users to disable the IPS Connect service, which allows multiple sites to share one login, by deleting the “interface/ipsconnect/ipsconnect.php” file from their installations.
“Most clients will not need this service but if you do use it then we still suggest you temporarily disable until a fix is released tomorrow,” IPS said.
Patches and additional details on the SQL injection vulnerability were released a few hours later. According to developers, SQL injection attacks are possible on certain PHP configurations.
“Although this exploit requires some knowledge of your configuration and for certain files to be web-readable, we felt it important to release an update,” IPS explained.
An exploit written in Python was published on several websites on Sunday. According to the author of the exploit, the error-based blind SQL injection flaw affects IP.Board version 3.4.7 and earlier.
One of the administrators of the vpsBoard forum claims IPS only learned of the existence of the exploit after he notified them. A vpsBoard member said he successfully tested the exploit on his own website by knowing only the URL.
“I ran the exploit against my IPB and it injected SQL just fine – no ‘knowledge’ was needed other than the URL,” the user with the online moniker raindog308 said.
IP.Board developers have also learned “that it may be possible to send attachments via the email classes which would ordinarily be removed.” A fix for this issue, reported privately to IPS by Andrew Erb, is also included in the patches.
The patches are automatically applied for IPS Community in the Cloud customers running IP.Board 3.3 or above. Users who have installed or upgraded their installations to version 3.4.7 after the patches were released don’t need to take any action since the main download files have been updated.
This year, IPS released a total of four security updates to address cross-site scripting (XSS), file inclusion and other vulnerabilities found in IP.Board.
