Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Password Security Tools

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Password Security Tools
For vBulletin 3.7.0 and above
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Description
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A product designed to combat the recent increase in weak password attacks by spammers.

For background information, read the following threads:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=278975
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=281371

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The Problem
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The problem stems from the fact that vBulletin doesn't check the quality of a user's password when registering or changing the password in the User CP. As a result, users are able to choose easily guessable passwords to protect their account. The most common passwords are things like "password", "12345", "qwerty", "letmein", as well as the user's own username. On a large forum, these poorly protected accounts can number hundreds or even thousands, and this has shown itself to be a prime opportunity for spammers to exploit. With a relatively simple script, spammers are able to scrape the member list from your forum and automatically validate which of the accounts have such passwords. A spammer with access to tens, hundreds or thousands of legitimate user accounts is a situation you don't want to be in.

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What This Does
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This product has two main functions.
1. It prevents users from using their own username as a password, or any other commonly used word. (An editable list of banned passwords is available in the Admin CP.) The same rules apply if a user tries to change their password after registration.
2. It provides you with a tool to identify existing user accounts that have bad passwords, and lets you reset those passwords. Emails will be automatically dispatched to affected users notifying them of the change, and providing instructions on how to gain access to their account.

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Installation
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To install:
1. Upload cpnav_passrepair.xml to includes/xml/
2. Upload passsec.php to admincp/
3. Upload product-passrepair.xml to your Admin CP as a product
4. Enable the product in vBulletin Options

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Password Scanner - Usage Notes
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The password scanning portion of this product is a utility designed for use by administrators. There are a few things to be aware of.
1. BACK UP YOUR DATA BEFORE USING THIS SCRIPT.
2. It's not a tool designed for frequent usage, it's a quick and dirty way of getting the job done. If Jelsoft don't address this issue, I might return to it and optimize the password scanner to make it a little less server intensive. Use it sparingly, and close your forums before commencing a scan.
3. The password scanner has the potential to send out a lot of email. Use the "Users Per Page" setting to process accounts at whatever rate you deem your server capable of handling.
4. After you've installed this product it'll be impossible for users to register using a blacklisted or invalid password (or to change it to one afterwards). As a result, you should only need to use the password scanner once. Feel free to remove the passsec.php and cpnav_passrepair.xml files from your server once you're done with the scanner, the rest of the product will still function.
5. For unattended bulk processing of accounts, there's some javascript in passsec.php that's currently commented out. Use it at your own risk.

[glorify]

Weeeeee. Installing now John

[GaiLoan]

wow sound kool, thanks let me try

[sinucello]

Hi,

thanks a lot for sharing this. Should have already been released by Jelsoft IMHO, but this has been discussed in the threads you mentioned. Great job anyway.

all the best,
Sacha

[RedTrinity]

I just got the following error after running the script to update bad passwords, it happened as soon as it tried to attend to the first member in the list:

Database error in vBulletin 3.7.2:

Invalid SQL:
UPDATE user SET password='19c024c9537eca5a91fca3606caa7796' WHERE userid=81;

MySQL Error : Table 'xxxx_forums.user' doesn't exist
Error Number : 1146
Request Date : Wednesday, August 13th 2008 @ 05:21:56 PM
Error Date : Wednesday, August 13th 2008 @ 05:21:56 PM
Script : http://www.theparentingsanctuary.com...?do=dopassscan
Referrer : http://www.theparentingsanctuary.com...reparepassscan
IP Address : xxxx
Username : xxxx
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version : 5.0.48

[digicom]

Installed Thankyou :up:

[wacnstac]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Too bad you had to do Jelsoft's job for them. They'll probably be using this hack too, or they should be.

[John]

Originally Posted by GamerGirl27

I just got the following error after running the script to update bad passwords, it happened as soon as it tried to attend to the first member in the list:

Ah, missed a table prefix. Download the zip again, and overwrite passsec.php.

[MGSteve]

Is there any reason this won't work on 3.6.0? I haven't upgraded my forum in a while (haven't got the time to redo all the plugins I've done again)!

[John]

Originally Posted by MGSteve

Is there any reason this won't work on 3.6.0? I haven't upgraded my forum in a while (haven't got the time to redo all the plugins I've done again)!

Try it on a test installation first. (You might have to edit the product XML file to remove the 3.7.0 vBulletin version dependency.) There's a good chance it'll work, although I haven't tested.