Google+ to Shut Down Early After New API Flaw Hits 52.5 Million Users

Dec 10, 2018

Google today revealed ^[1] that Google+ has
suffered another massive data breach, forcing the tech giant to
shut down its struggling social network four months earlier than
its actual scheduled date, i.e., in April 2019 instead of August
2019.

Google said it discovered another critical security
vulnerability in one of Google+’s People APIs that could have
allowed developers to steal private information on 52.5 million
users, including their name, email address, occupation, and
age.

The vulnerable API in question is called “People: get” that has
been designed to let developers request basic information
associated with a user profile.

However, software update in November introduced the bug in the
Google+ People API that allowed apps to view users’ information
even if a user profile was set to not-public.

Google engineers discovered the security issue during standard
testing procedures and addressed it within a week of the issue
being introduced.

The company said it found no evidence that the vulnerability was
exploited or its users’ data was misused by any third-party app
developers.

“No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence
that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six
days were aware of it or misused it in any way,” Google said.

Google also assured its users that no passwords, financial data,
national identification numbers or any other sensitive data were
left exposed by this API bug.

Almost two months ago, Google disclosed a massive data breach
that exposed private data of more than 500,000 Google+
users ^[2] to third-party
developers, and also announced to shut down Google+ for consumers
by the end of August 2019 due to its failure in gaining broad
adoption or significant traction with its consumers.

“Our review showed that Google+ is better suited as an enterprise
product where co-workers can engage in internal discussions on a
secure corporate social network,” Google said in October.

However, following yet another security incident, Google said the
company is going to shut down its social media network in April
2019 instead of August.

References

^{^}
revealed
(www.blog.google)
^{^}
500,000 Google+ users
(thehackernews.com)

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OWASP TOP !0

Injection. Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, OS, and LDAP injection, occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker’s hostile data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization. Broken Authentication. Application functions related to authentication and session management are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise passwords, keys, or session tokens, or to exploit other implementation flaws to assume other users’ identities temporarily or permanently. Sensitive Data Exposure. Many web applications and APIs do not properly protect sensitive data, such as financial, healthcare, and PII. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct credit card fraud, identity theft, or other crimes. Sensitive data may be compromised without extra protection, such as encryption at rest or in transit, and requires special precautions when exchanged with the browser. XML External Entities (XXE). Many older or poorly configured XML processors evaluate external entity references within XML documents. External entities can be used to disclose internal files using the file URI handler, internal file shares, internal port scanning, remote code execution, and denial of service attacks. Broken Access Control. Restrictions on what authenticated users are allowed to do are often not properly enforced. Attackers can exploit these flaws to access unauthorized functionality and/or data, such as access other users’ accounts, view sensitive files, modify other users’ data, change access rights, etc. Security Misconfiguration. Security misconfiguration is the most commonly seen issue. This is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, and verbose error messages containing sensitive information. Not only must all operating systems, frameworks, libraries, and applications be securely configured, but they must be patched/upgraded in a timely fashion. Cross-Site Scripting XSS. XSS flaws occur whenever an application includes untrusted data in a new web page without proper validation or escaping, or updates an existing web page with user-supplied data using a browser API that can create HTML or JavaScript. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites. Insecure Deserialization. Insecure deserialization often leads to remote code execution. Even if deserialization flaws do not result in remote code execution, they can be used to perform attacks, including replay attacks, injection attacks, and privilege escalation attacks. Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities. Components, such as libraries, frameworks, and other software modules, run with the same privileges as the application. If a vulnerable component is exploited, such an attack can facilitate serious data loss or server takeover. Applications and APIs using components with known vulnerabilities may undermine application defenses and enable various attacks and impacts. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring. Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems, and tamper, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies show time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Google+ to Shut Down Early After New API Flaw Hits 52.5 Million Users

References

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