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> Email addresses, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Social media profiles I just got the email notification from HIBP (Have I Been Pwned)

> Email addresses, Job titles, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Social media profiles I just got the email notification from HIBP (Have I Been Pwned) a few minutes ago [1], but I am not worried about the compromised data because 1) my personal email address, job title and phone number are all visible in my resume which is publicly available in my website, I actually encourage people —mostly tech recruiters— to download the PDF and contact me via email or phone all the time and 2) my physical address is irrelevant because I have been moving houses every year for the last seven (7) years (even across countries a couple of times. All the social media accounts I have are completely empty, I just keep them around to get a hold on to my nickname. I recently found, in my website’s HTTP logs, several requests from a web crawler controlled by ZoomInfo [3] an American subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) company that sells access to its database of information about business people and companies to sales, marketing and recruiting professionals. I was going to configure my firewall to block these requests but then I remembered —hey! my website only has information I am comfortable sharing, so it doesn’t matter— but I’ve been thinking it is just a matter of time before someone hacks one of their systems and leaks their database. In my previous-previous job I found a fairly simple (persistent) XSS vulnerability in BambooHR that allowed non-authorized users to access data from all employees registered in the website including Social Security Numbers (SSN). I told my boss and we immediately edited everything before migrating to a different system. We never knew if BambooHR fixed the vulnerabilities and I wouldn’t be surprised if the data was leaked before or after I found the security hole. Software security is such a Whac-A-Mole game, even if you get the budget to conduct security audits on your code, there is always going to be a weak link somewhere in the chain and that will be your doom. This is one of the many reasons why I left that job as a Security Engineer, the other reasons were Meltdown [3] and Spectre [4] they both made me realize I was fighting for a lost cause. [1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/NotifyMe https://haveibeenpwned.com/NotifyMe [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoomInfo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZoomInfo [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_%28security_vulnerability%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_%28security_vulnerabi... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_%28security_vulnerability%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_%28security_vulnerabil...

Thoughtful 6y ago
On the BambooHR issue, can you elaborate a bit more?
- guessmyname 6y ago
  BambooHR is written in PHP and as it is widely known PHP allows incompetent programmers to create insecure websites. The majority of BambooHR pages are loaded by referencing a page ID, for example, you can access this URL [1] to render a form that allows you to send documents to arbitrary e-mail addresses, and this URL [2] allows you to edit your own profile. So far so good, if you are a competent PHP programmer (or any other programming language) you make sure these IDs are not consecutive to avoid enumeration attacks, but even if they are part of a guessable sequence you can still secure them by restricting access to all pages except the ones associated to the user ID in the session. The vulnerabilities I found were a combination of Path Traversal [3], Forced Browsing [4] and Stored Cross Site Scripting [5] that allowed anyone to 1) force a specific PHP file to load arbitrary pages, 2) access data associated to other employee identifiers and 3) send all documents associated to these employee IDs to arbitrary emails by accessing the “Email File” page and crafting a simple HTTP request to bypass a rudimentary form validation. When I told my boss he continued the investigation and found that we could access certain amount of data associated to employees registered in other subdomains. People who are familiar with BambooHR will understand how stupid this specific problem is considering each subdomain is isolated from the others, so one would expect them to isolate the databases as well. I don’t know anything about the architecture of their system so I cannot explain why these security holes allowed us to access data from other companies. I was very scared to continue digging into it and my boss was super pissed off. We didn’t know if they used soft deletes so instead of removing the company’s data we decided to edit it with garbage information, then we migrated to another system. And that was the end of our story with them. We never reported the problems because I started my “research” without previous authorization from BambooHR so if we reported our findings they could sue my employer and we would be in bigger problems. Same thing happened when we found a vulnerability on HipChat [6] in 2014 or so, we reported it and they got super angry at us for conducting that penetration test without permission, the company made an agreement with them and we migrated to Slack. Good luck to anyone whose employer is still using BambooHR to manage their employee database. [1] /ajax/employees/files/email_file.php?id=19 [2] /employees/employee.php?id=EMPLOYEE_ID&page=PAGE_ID [3] https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Path_Traversal https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Path_Traversal [4] https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Forced_browsing https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Forced_browsing [5] https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/xss/ https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/xss/ [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipChat

Thoughtful 6y ago

On the BambooHR issue, can you elaborate a bit more?

guessmyname 6y ago
BambooHR is written in PHP and as it is widely known PHP allows incompetent programmers to create insecure websites. The majority of BambooHR pages are loaded by referencing a page ID, for example, you can access this URL [1] to render a form that allows you to send documents to arbitrary e-mail addresses, and this URL [2] allows you to edit your own profile. So far so good, if you are a competent PHP programmer (or any other programming language) you make sure these IDs are not consecutive to avoid enumeration attacks, but even if they are part of a guessable sequence you can still secure them by restricting access to all pages except the ones associated to the user ID in the session. The vulnerabilities I found were a combination of Path Traversal [3], Forced Browsing [4] and Stored Cross Site Scripting [5] that allowed anyone to 1) force a specific PHP file to load arbitrary pages, 2) access data associated to other employee identifiers and 3) send all documents associated to these employee IDs to arbitrary emails by accessing the “Email File” page and crafting a simple HTTP request to bypass a rudimentary form validation. When I told my boss he continued the investigation and found that we could access certain amount of data associated to employees registered in other subdomains. People who are familiar with BambooHR will understand how stupid this specific problem is considering each subdomain is isolated from the others, so one would expect them to isolate the databases as well. I don’t know anything about the architecture of their system so I cannot explain why these security holes allowed us to access data from other companies. I was very scared to continue digging into it and my boss was super pissed off. We didn’t know if they used soft deletes so instead of removing the company’s data we decided to edit it with garbage information, then we migrated to another system. And that was the end of our story with them. We never reported the problems because I started my “research” without previous authorization from BambooHR so if we reported our findings they could sue my employer and we would be in bigger problems. Same thing happened when we found a vulnerability on HipChat [6] in 2014 or so, we reported it and they got super angry at us for conducting that penetration test without permission, the company made an agreement with them and we migrated to Slack. Good luck to anyone whose employer is still using BambooHR to manage their employee database. [1] /ajax/employees/files/email_file.php?id=19 [2] /employees/employee.php?id=EMPLOYEE_ID&page=PAGE_ID [3] https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Path_Traversal https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Path_Traversal [4] https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Forced_browsing https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/Forced_browsing [5] https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/xss/ https://owasp.org/www-community/attacks/xss/ [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipChat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipChat