Tumblr Patches A Flaw That Could Have Exposed Users’ Account Info

Oct 17, 2018

Tumblr today published a report
admitting the presence of a security vulnerability in its website
that could have allowed hackers to steal login credentials and
other private information for users’ accounts.

The affected information included users email addresses,
protected (hashed and salted) account passwords, self-reported
location (a feature no longer available), previously used email
addresses, last login IP addresses, and names of the blog
associated with every account.

According to the company, a security researcher discovered a
critical vulnerability in the desktop version of its website and
responsibly reported it to the Tumblr security team via its bug
bounty program.

Though the company has not revealed the researcher’s name or any
technical details about the vulnerability, Tumblr has disclosed
that the flaw resided in the “Recommended Blogs” feature of its
website.

Recommended Blogs has been designed to display a short, rotating
list of blogs of other users that may be of interest. The feature
appears only for logged-in users.

Tumblr also says:

“If a blog appeared in the module, it was possible, using debugging
software in a certain way, to view certain account information
associated with the blog.”

In short, your account could only be affected if it was
recommended to some an attacker via the vulnerable feature.

The company fails to determine which specific accounts were
recommended via the vulnerable feature, thus is unable to disclose
the number of affected users, but it concludes that “the bug was
rarely present.”

Tumblr also assured that its internal investigation found no
evidence of the bug being abused by an attacker.

“It’s our mission to provide a safe space for people to express
themselves freely and form communities around things they love,”
Tumblr says. “We feel that this bug could have affected that
experience. We want to be transparent with you about it. In our
view, it’s simply the right thing to do.”

Tumblr disclosure comes less than a week after Facebook
announced its worst-ever security
breach that allowed attackers to steal personal information,
including secret access tokens, for 30 million
users.

Also, over a week ago Google announced the shut down of its
social media network Google+ following a massive data
breach ^[4] that exposed the private
data of hundreds of thousands of Google Plus users to third-party
developers.

Late last month, Twitter also revealed a similar security
breach incident ^[5]
in which an API flaw inadvertently exposed direct messages (DMs)
and protected tweets of more than 3 million people to unauthorized
third-party app developers.

^[1]^[2]^[3]

References

^{^}
report
(staff.tumblr.com)
^{^}
worst-ever security breach
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
30 million users
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
a massive data breach
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
similar security breach incident
(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.

Tumblr Patches A Flaw That Could Have Exposed Users’ Account Info

References

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