Yahoo! Changes Tune After Saying Servers Were Hacked By Shellshock
Posted on October 7, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
On Monday afternoon, Yahoo confirmed to SecurityWeek that servers associated with Yahoo Games had been hacked as a result of the recently disclosed “Shellshock” vulnerability, but has since said its original conclusion was wrong.
In its original statement issued Monday afternoon, the company said that on Sunday night, a “handful” of its servers were impacted but said there was no evidence of a compromise to user data.
Hours later, Yahoo! Contacted SecurityWeek with a change in tune, saying that after all, the servers in question were NOT compromised via the Shellshock vulnerability, but rather a “minor bug in a parsing script”.
“Earlier today, we reported that we isolated a handful of servers that were detected to have been impacted by Shellshock. After investigating the situation fully, it turns out that the servers were in fact no affected directly by Shellshock, but by a minor bug in a parsing script,” a Yahoo! Spokesperson told SecurityWeek. “Regardless of the cause, our course of action remained the same — to isolate the servers at risk and protect our users’ data.”
The company maintained its position that no evidence has been found suggesting that user information was affected by the incident.
Yahoo! CISO, Alex Stamos provided additional details in a post to Y Combinator’s Hacker News.
“Three of our Sports API servers had malicious code executed on them this weekend by attackers looking for vulnerable Shellshock servers,” Stamos explained. “These attackers had mutated their exploit, likely with the goal of bypassing IDS/IDP or WAF filters. This mutation happened to exactly fit a command injection bug in a monitoring script our Sports team was using at that moment to parse and debug their web logs.
Stamos, who became VP of Information Security and CISO at Yahoo! in March 2014, continued:
“As you can imagine this episode caused some confusion in our team, since the servers in question had been successfully patched (twice!!) immediately after the Bash issue became public. Once we ensured that the impacted servers were isolated from the network, we conducted a comprehensive trace of the attack code through our entire stack which revealed the root cause: not Shellshock. Let this be a lesson to defenders and attackers alike: just because exploit code works doesn’t mean it triggered the bug you expected!
The original story with more background on the incident can he found here.
Managing Editor, SecurityWeek.
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AT&T Admits Insider Illegally Accessed Customer Data
Posted on October 6, 2014 by Kara Dunlap in Security
AT&T is advising customers that a rogue employee illegally accessed their personal information.
In a breach notification letter sent to customers and the Vermont attorney general, AT&T explained the breach occurred in August. The employee responsible is no longer with the company.
According to the letter, the employee was able to view and may have accessed customer information ranging from social security numbers to driver’s license numbers. In addition, while accessing user accounts, the employee would have been able to view their Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) without authorization. CPNI data is associated with services customers purchase from AT&T.
It is not clear how many customers were affected by the breach or if consumers in other states may have been involved.
“AT&T’s commitments to customer privacy and data security are top priorities, and we take those commitments seriously,” according to the letter.
“Simply stated, this is not the way we conduct business, and as a result, this individual no longer works here,” the letter notes.
AT&T is offering affected consumers a year of free credit monitoring, and said in the letter that any unauthorized changes that had been made to accounts would be reversed. The company has contacted federal law enforcement as well.
Earlier this year, employees of one of AT&T’s service providers accessed customer information without authorization as well. According to AT&T, the perpetrators in that case were trying to gather information that could be used to request codes to unlock AT&T mobile phones so that they could be used with other telecommunications providers.
“Insiders are worse than hackers because there’s no way to protect against them that’s truly effective,” opined Jonathan Sander, strategy and research officer for STEALTHbits Technologies. “If you need to do business, you need people to access information. If the wrong person or the person in the wrong frame of mind decides to use that access badly, what can you do?”
“This proves, yet again, that humans are the weakest link in any security plan,” he added. “It’s the old IT administrator joke about a system error called PEBKAC – Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.”
Brian Prince is a Contributing Writer for SecurityWeek.
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