Hacker Breaks Into Stack Overflow Q&A Site, No Evidence of Data Breach

May 17, 2019

Stack Overflow, one of the largest question and answer
site for programmers, revealed today that an unknown hacker(s)
managed to gain unauthorized access to its production systems on
May 11, 2019.

Founded by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008, Stack Overflow
is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network. With 10 million
registered users and over 50 million unique visitors every month,
Stack Overflow is very popular among professional and enthusiast
programmers.

Question — Have my account password, profile data, or online
activity on Stack Overflow website also been compromised?

Answer — There is ‘no evidence’ that users’ data was
accessed.

In a short note ^[1] published by Mary
Ferguson, VP of Engineering at Stack Overflow, the company
confirmed the breach but said it did not find any evidence that
hackers accessed customers’ accounts or any user data.

“Over the weekend, there was an attack on Stack Overflow,”
Ferguson said. “We have confirmed that some level of production
access was gained on May 11.”

Though the company did not share details on how attackers were
able to breach Stack Overflow and the actual extent of the breach,
Stack Overflow said the company is patching all known
vulnerabilities.

“We discovered and investigated the extent of the access and are
addressing all known vulnerabilities,” Ferguson said.

“We have not identified any breach of customer or user data. Our
customers’ and users’ security is of the utmost importance to
us.”

However, Stack Overflow has promised to share more information
about the incident after its investigation is completed.

“Our customers’ and users’ security is of the utmost importance
to us. After we conclude our investigation cycle, we will provide
more information,” Ferguson added.

Late last year, another popular question and answer website
Quora suffered a massive
data ^[2] breach with hackers
gaining access to sensitive information of about 100 million of its
users, including their names, email addresses, hashed password, and
personal messages.

References

^{^}
short note
(stackoverflow.blog)
^{^}
Quora suffered a massive data
(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.

Hacker Breaks Into Stack Overflow Q&A Site, No Evidence of Data Breach

References

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