Not each safety 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 crew, reveal how attackers flip neglected flaws into severe safety incidents.
1. Stealing AWS Credentials with a Redirect
- 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 info.
Server-Facet Request Forgery (SSRF) is a typical vulnerability that may have a big impression, particularly in cloud-hosted functions. If an online utility fetches assets from user-supplied URLs, care ought to be taken to make sure attackers cannot manipulate requests to entry unintended assets.
Whereas assessing a home-moving app working in AWS, our crew examined frequent 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 setting.
This assault wouldn’t have been doable if the metadata service was enforcing IMDSv2 – a greatest follow {that a} good cloud security scanner would have flagged. Whereas automated instruments won’t have detected the total 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 crew found it belonged to a publicly accessible internet utility.
Reviewing the applying’s supply code, we uncovered an authentication bypass – the login web page may very well be accessed by supplying a hidden parameter.
Our crew gained entry to a administration device, 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 info of scholars and workers – exhibiting how a small misconfiguration can rapidly escalate into a significant safety danger.
3. How a Tiny Element Led to Distant Code Execution
Whereas attempting to find bugs in a doc signing app, our crew observed that, after signing a PDF, the metadata listed “ExifTool” because the doc creator. Given ExifTool’s historical past of crucial vulnerabilities, we dug deeper.
Though the applying did not disclose the device’s model, testing for latest identified vulnerabilities confirmed it was weak to CVE-2021-22204. By creating and importing a malicious PDF, our crew efficiently gained distant command execution because the www-data person.
This foothold may have allowed an attacker to leverage further vulnerabilities on the affected server, enabling them to achieve root entry and pivot to different machines on the community, inflicting in depth harm.
4. From Self-XSS to Website-Huge Account Takeover
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a robust assault vector for session hijacking assaults, particularly when no person interplay is required. Whereas a ‘Self-XSS’ vulnerability is often low danger, it could turn into harmful when mixed with one other vulnerability.
Our crew uncovered this actual situation whereas assessing an public sale utility. A Self-XSS vulnerability was found the place a user-supplied HTTP request header was mirrored within the utility’s response.
Usually, this may be innocent since an attacker cannot pressure a sufferer’s browser to ship a malicious header – however additional testing uncovered a cache-poisoning vulnerability.
By chaining these two weaknesses, our crew 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 is able to have allowed an attacker to hijack any person account – together with admin accounts.
5. Altering a Quantity to Expose Delicate Knowledge
API weaknesses are extra frequent than you’d assume. 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 weak endpoint that can be utilized with out correct authentication or authorization, and recognizing that it exposes delicate knowledge. As soon as discovered, exploitation may 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 ought to be reserved for directors.
Our crew often identifies IDOR, lacking authentication, and damaged authorization weaknesses in APIs. Listed below are some snippets from actual HTTP requests and paths we discovered that uncovered extremely delicate knowledge:
These examples are about so simple as API weaknesses get, however the penalties are far-reaching. By merely altering one quantity and enumerating via 1000’s of values, complete databases of knowledge belonging to different prospects may 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 at all times trying to find new entry factors. Step one to staying forward? Understanding what attackers can entry from the web – together with belongings 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 belongings you probably did (or perhaps did not know) existed |
From functions to cloud infrastructure, discover and safe it multi functional, highly effective platform with Intruder. Learn more or start scanning with a 14 day free trial.
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