Abstract:The use of Moodle quizzes as a continuous assessment and an integral part of the educational methodology in higher education has been analyzed in a case study of physical chemistry subject. Two types of quiz designed with different item types and different settings, called basic quiz (BQ) and thematic block quiz (TBQ), were elaborated making use of a question bank with more than 450 items. BQ has true/false items, while TBQ has randomly mixed items (multiple choice, numerical and matching). The effect of the type of quiz on the student scores is analyzed according to statistical and psychometric data such as the degree of participation, the facility index and the discrimination index of each item, and the average score, calculated according to the classical test theory. This allows us to discern which type of quiz has an enough quality to use it as an assessment tool. Moreover, the effect of this educational activity, developed during the last six academic years from 2014 to 2020, just before of the pandemic situation, is evaluated considering the scores of the students in the Ordinary Calls of exams and comparing them with previous courses taught with a traditional education based on master classes. The statistic results indicate that TBQs are more discriminative than BQs and could be used as an assessment tool, while BQs could be only useful as formative activity. Moodle quizzes turn out to be a reliable strategy for learning of contents in scientific matter, with a high participation in the knowledge tests, with good marks in the average score and a greater number of pass degrees in the Ordinary Calls.Keywords: moodle quizzes; continuous assessment; statistical analysis; physical chemistry
For example, if an admin account is compromised (a harmful message opened in the chatbox), an attacker would be able to access the username and hashed passwords of all the server users and modify their password to something else. As the admin can read database configuration, and the database contains the hashed passwords of all the users, they could either crack those or just change it to something else directly. The attacker could also grant himself admin rights (as admins have this option) and then lock out the other admins.
Moodle 2020 Crack
The vulnerability was discovered on 9th October 2020 however details of it were released last week. According to researchers, the platform was vulnerable for 6 years before being discovered and patched.
Moreover, the admin can also read database configuration and the database contains the hashed passwords of all the users so they could either crack those or just change it to something else directly. The attacker could also grant himself admin rights and then lockout other admins.
Somehow, last spring, teaching and learning staff at the University of Saskatchewan found the time to make a big decision: the university would migrate its learning management system, or LMS, from Blackboard Learn to Canvas. Back in the fall of 2019, the university had narrowed its search to two competing systems. Consultations and tests wrapped up before the university went into lockdown due to the pandemic, and in May 2020 it had signed with Instructure, the Salt Lake City company that offers Canvas.
Schooled features an instance of Moodle, a popular LMS used by many school institutions. The installed Moodle version is vulnerable to stored XSS in MoodleNet Profile (CVE-2020-25627) and role privilege escalation (CVE-2020-14321). Exploiting the XSS allows me to login as a teacher. The teacher role can be escalated to a manager role to get the site administration capability, thus allowing me to install a malicious plugin to gain interactive shell access to the system. Internal enumeration reveals database credentials which can be used to recover a password from the database. The password is reused by one of the users for SSH login. This user is allowed to install FreeBSD packages with sudo permissions, and it can be exploited to gain root access.
This Moodle version is known to be vulnerable to the role privilege escalation (CVE-2020-14321) that allows escalation of privilege from teacher role (Manuel Phillips has teacher role) to manager role. With manager role, it is also possible to obtain code execution by installing a malicious plugin. I will be using this walkthrough video created by the researcher who found this vulnerability as my reference.
We see that we can only enroll ourselves in the Maths course.Enrolling ourselves, we see an anouncement where the teacher ManuelPhillips says that in order to be in the course, we must set ourMoodleNet profile, or we would not be allowed in. We can set ourmoodlenet profile from our Preferences > Edit Profileoptions.
Now, looking around for moodle vulnerabilities, we find that themoodlenet profile field is vulnerable to stored XSS. This vulnerabilityis assigned CVE-2020-25627. It has been patched in this on themoodle forums. This vulnerability occurs due to the fact that the inputis not sanitized. It has been patched as follows:
From the main website, in the teachers section, we find that LianneCarter is the manager. The manager has administrative capabilities, andwe check if we can in any way privesc to that role. Looking around for along time, and finally with the help of a nudge, found a vulnerabilitythat allows privesc from teacher to manager here. Thishas been assigned the CVE-2020-14321. This vulnerability allows Courseenrolments to allow privilege escalation from teacher role into managerrole. The PoC video can be found here.
So, adding a manager as a new student to the course, we can interceptthe request and give ourselves, the teacher role_id=1 whichis the manager role. Then as a manager, we can login as other managers,the main manager, who has capability to edit the moodle. The patchapplied to fix this:
Following the PoC video, we assign our teacher to manager role, andthen we login as the manager from the teacher session, and enableinstallation of plugins, using the rce.zip file as providedby the PoC author, we can get remote code execution. We needed to changethe version info in the zip file. We unzip the zip file and find aversion.php file. Trying to install the rce.zip plugin asis gives us the version number of the moodle on the server20200615, we put this version number in the file and theninstall it to make it work.
Enumerating the box, we were able to find mysql database creds.Reading the man docs for apache on freebsd, we see that the documentroot for apache is /usr/local/www/data. Going around, wefind the site and the moodle data. In the config fileconfig.php of moodle, we find mysql database user andpassword.
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After going to URL found moodle LMS is used for designing this site. Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Since it is an open-source project therefore you can get its source code at its GitHub Repository.
At URL =5 you will find enrol option in Mathematics subject. Click on enrol me button and enrol yourself in the mathematics subject. After some googling found that Course enrolments in moodle allowed privilege escalation from teacher role into manager role then to RCE, see CVE-2020-14321 for more info. To use CVE-2020-14321 exploit we have to first upgrade our account to teacher then teacher can perform privilege escalation to become manager.
You will find that we have successfully hijacked user phillips account using XSS vulnerability. Now its time to follow CVE-2020-14321 to escalate the privilege to manager.
Due to the highly infectious rate of the virus, many countries have agreed on temporarily closing various business sectors to control the spread of the virus. Educational institutions were among the most affected by this action. A report by UNESCO revealed that schools in over 106 countries remain partially and fully closed due to the pandemic. This has affected over 1 billion (60%) of the world's student population across UNESCO (2020a), as of 8 August 2020 (Figure 1).
A study by Dubey (2020) used sentiment analysis techniques such as subjectivity and polarity to examine sentiments of tweets across various countries. The researcher further conducted emotion analysis of tweets from each country. The results of the study revealed that whilst majority of the world population are taking a positive and optimistic approach in fighting the virus, there were also fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and surprise.
Asynchronous learning, on the other hand, defines an unstructured online teaching and learning environment. Although teaching and learning resources and the submission of assignments are made available 24/7 on LMS, learning contents are not available in the form of live lectures or classes (Dhawan, 2020; Kear, 2004).
Also, Microsoft offered educational institutions currently not licensed for Microsoft Teams, a free unlimited Office 365 AI with lifted restrictions on user limits. This offer provided academic institutions with unlimited chat, video calling, file sharing, storage, and more (Microsoft, 2020a).
Countries such as Canada and the United States have issued government directives for the reopening of schools during the pandemic which has led to mixed reactions by students, teachers, parents, politicians, and educational experts (Jarrett & Pomrenze, 2020; Lee, 2020; Young, 2020; Yousif, 2020).
In China, a detailed timeline released for local schools to reopen in June came as a mixed feeling for parents who struggle between work and taking care of their children, however, concerned about the high risk of infection at school (Hui, 2020). 2ff7e9595c
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