Not each security vulnerability is excessive danger by itself – however within the palms of a complicated attacker, even small weaknesses can escalate into main breaches. These 5 actual vulnerabilities, uncovered by Intruder’s bug-hunting group, reveal how attackers flip neglected flaws into severe security incidents.
1. Stealing AWS Credentials with a Redirect
Server-Facet Request Forgery (SSRF) is a standard vulnerability that may have a big affect, particularly in cloud-hosted purposes. If an internet software fetches assets from user-supplied URLs, care needs to be taken to make sure attackers cannot manipulate requests to entry unintended assets.
Whereas assessing a home-moving app working in AWS, our group examined widespread SSRF bypass methods.
The assault chain was as follows: the app despatched a webhook request to the attacker’s internet server, which responded with a 302 redirect to AWS’s metadata service. The app adopted the redirect and logged the response, which uncovered delicate metadata – together with AWS credentials.
With these credentials, an attacker may enumerate IAM permissions and try and pivot deeper into the cloud atmosphere.
This assault wouldn’t have been potential if the metadata service was imposing IMDSv2 – a greatest follow {that a} good cloud security scanner would have flagged. Whereas automated instruments won’t have detected the complete assault chain, breaking simply this a part of the chain may have prevented exploitation.
2. From Uncovered .git Repo to Full Database Entry
Whereas investigating an unintentionally uncovered .git repository flagged by a vulnerability scan, our group found it belonged to a publicly accessible internet software.
Reviewing the appliance’s supply code, we uncovered an authentication bypass – the login web page could possibly be accessed by supplying a hidden parameter.
Our group gained entry to a administration software, the place additional evaluation revealed a blind SQL injection vulnerability in an authenticated web page.
Exploiting this vulnerability granted entry to a college’s database, which, if leveraged by an attacker, may have uncovered delicate private data of scholars and workers – exhibiting how a small misconfiguration can rapidly escalate into a serious security danger.
3. How a Tiny Element Led to Distant Code Execution
Whereas looking for bugs in a doc signing app, our group seen that, after signing a PDF, the metadata listed “ExifTool” because the doc creator. Given ExifTool’s historical past of essential vulnerabilities, we dug deeper.
Though the appliance did not disclose the software’s model, testing for current recognized vulnerabilities confirmed it was susceptible to CVE-2021-22204. By creating and importing a malicious PDF, our group efficiently gained distant command execution because the www-data person.
This foothold may have allowed an attacker to leverage extra vulnerabilities on the affected server, enabling them to achieve root entry and pivot to different machines on the community, inflicting in depth injury.
4. From Self-XSS to Web site-Vast Account Takeover
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a strong assault vector for session hijacking assaults, particularly when no person interplay is required. Whereas a ‘Self-XSS’ vulnerability is usually low danger, it may possibly turn into harmful when mixed with one other vulnerability.
Our group uncovered this actual situation whereas assessing an public sale software. A Self-XSS vulnerability was found the place a user-supplied HTTP request header was mirrored within the software’s response.
Usually, this could be innocent since an attacker cannot drive a sufferer’s browser to ship a malicious header – however additional testing uncovered a cache-poisoning vulnerability.
By chaining these two weaknesses, our group tricked the app into caching and serving the Self-XSS payload to all website guests, escalating it to a site-wide persistent XSS assault.
This may have allowed an attacker to hijack any person account – together with admin accounts.
5. Altering a Quantity to Expose Delicate Data
API weaknesses are extra widespread than you’d suppose. Amongst them, IDOR vulnerabilities require little effort to use past modifying an identifier in a request.
The actual problem for an attacker is not execution however discovery – discovering a susceptible endpoint that can be utilized with out correct authentication or authorization, and recognizing that it exposes delicate information. As soon as discovered, exploitation will be so simple as altering the identifier to a useful resource that the person doesn’t personal, or simply making a request to an endpoint that needs to be reserved for directors.
Our group incessantly identifies IDOR, lacking authentication, and damaged authorization weaknesses in APIs. Listed here are some snippets from actual HTTP requests and paths we discovered that uncovered extremely delicate information:
- GET /organisations/edit_user?user_id=1001: The attacker may modify person profiles and hijack accounts
- GET /prod-applicantresumes/12031.pdf: The attacker may entry job seekers’ CVs.
- POST /Order/Obtain, OrderNo=10202: The attacker may entry buyer order data.
These examples are about so simple as API weaknesses get, however the penalties are far-reaching. By merely altering one quantity and enumerating by hundreds of values, total databases of data belonging to different prospects will be downloaded.
Cease breaches earlier than they begin
These real-world examples present how vulnerabilities can escalate into severe breaches when left unchecked. Attackers do not wait – they’re all the time trying to find new entry factors. Step one to staying forward? Understanding what attackers can entry from the web – together with property you won’t even know exist. Intruder repeatedly discovers these unknowns, like subdomains, logins, and APIs, and scans them for exposures that different options miss.
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| Intruder’s Discovery tab – for these property you probably did (or perhaps did not know) existed |
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