Not each safety vulnerability is excessive threat by itself – however within the fingers of a sophisticated attacker, even small weaknesses can escalate into main breaches. These 5 actual vulnerabilities, uncovered by Intruder’s bug-hunting crew, reveal how attackers flip ignored flaws into severe safety incidents.
1. Stealing AWS Credentials with a Redirect
Server-Aspect Request Forgery (SSRF) is a typical vulnerability that may have a major impression, particularly in cloud-hosted purposes. If an online utility 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 crew examined widespread SSRF bypass strategies.
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 might enumerate IAM permissions and try to pivot deeper into the cloud setting.
This assault wouldn’t have been potential if the metadata service was implementing IMDSv2 – a greatest observe {that a} good cloud safety scanner would have flagged. Whereas automated instruments may not have detected the total assault chain, breaking simply this a part of the chain might 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 appliance’s supply code, we uncovered an authentication bypass – the login web page might 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, might have uncovered delicate private data of scholars and employees – exhibiting how a small misconfiguration can shortly escalate into a significant safety threat.
3. How a Tiny Element Led to Distant Code Execution
Whereas looking for bugs in a doc signing app, our crew 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 device’s model, testing for latest recognized 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 might have allowed an attacker to leverage further vulnerabilities on the affected server, enabling them to realize root entry and pivot to different machines on the community, inflicting in depth harm.
4. From Self-XSS to Website-Large 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 often low threat, it may possibly grow to be harmful when mixed with one other vulnerability.
Our crew uncovered this precise state of affairs 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 might be innocent since an attacker cannot power 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 web site 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 Information
API weaknesses are extra widespread than you’d assume. Amongst them, IDOR vulnerabilities require little effort to take advantage of 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 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 crew ceaselessly 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 knowledge:
- GET /organisations/edit_user?user_id=1001: The attacker might modify person profiles and hijack accounts
- GET /prod-applicantresumes/12031.pdf: The attacker might entry job seekers’ CVs.
- POST /Order/Obtain, OrderNo=10202: The attacker might 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 way of hundreds of values, complete databases of knowledge 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 belongings you may not even know exist. Intruder constantly discovers these unknowns, like subdomains, logins, and APIs, and scans them for exposures that different options miss.
 |
| Intruder’s Discovery tab – for these belongings you probably did (or perhaps did not know) existed |
From purposes to cloud infrastructure, discover and safe it multi function, highly effective platform with Intruder. Be taught extra or begin scanning with a 14 day free trial.
