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A vulnerability affecting the Apache Struts 2 open-source development framework was reportedly used to breach U.S. credit reporting agency Equifax and gain access to customer data.
Equifax revealed last week that hackers had access to its systems between mid-May and late July. The incident affects roughly 143 million U.S. consumers, along with some individuals in the U.K. and Canada.
The compromised information includes names, social security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and, in some cases, driver's license numbers. The credit card numbers of roughly 209,000 consumers in the United States and dispute documents belonging to 182,000 people may have also been stolen by the attackers.
Equifax only said that "criminals exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files." However, financial services firm Baird claimed the targeted software was Apache Struts, a framework used by many top organizations to create web applications.
"Our understanding is that data entered (and retained) through consumer portals/interactions (consumers inquiring about their credit reports, disputes, etc.) and data around it was breached via the Apache Struts flaw," Baird said in a report.
Some jumped to conclude that it was the recently patched and disclosed CVE-2017-9805, a remote code execution vulnerability that exists when the REST plugin is used with the XStream handler for XML payloads. This flaw was reported to Apache Struts developers in mid-July and it was addressed on September 5 with the release of Struts 2.5.13.
The security hole is now being exploited in the wild, but there had been no evidence of exploitation before the patch was released.
Source: http://www.securityweek.com/apache-struts-flaw-reportedly-exploited-equifax-hack
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:11AM (1 child)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday September 12 2017, @11:54AM
What? Struts is Free and Open Source, you just said so yourself.
As for 'blobware' - it's a large complex codebase, sure, but we're talking about large complex software systems. I don't see that security is necessarily improved by having Equifax write more code and Apache write less.
Modern operating systems are also large, complex, and imperfect. Should web developers write to bare metal?