Skyhigh Networks researchers is warning about “GhostWriter,”. This entity misconfigures Amazon S3 buckets to allow public write access for a malicious third party to launch man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks.
“GhostWriter underlines the fact that security is just not the responsibility of the cloud service providers, but also the customer, and often it is a customer misconfiguration that exposes their data to threat,” Skyhigh chief scientist Sekhar Sarukkai wrote in blog.
According to Skyhigh, more than 1,600 S3 buckets get accessed from the enterprise network. Four percent are exposed to GhostWriter. “Skyhigh has identified thousands of such buckets being accessed from enterprise networks and has shared these affected buckets with AWS for remediation,” Sarukkai wrote.
Affected entities are major news sites, leading retailers, popular cloud services and ad networks.
“Bucket owners who store JavaScript or other code should pay particular attention to this issue to ensure that third parties don’t silently overwrite their code for drive-by attacks, Bitcoin mining or other exploits,” Sarukkai added.
This kind of misconfiguration is creating high profile data breaches which includes expose of 4 million Verizon customers’ data and 3 million WWE fans’ contact details.
Another survey conducted by AlgoSec of 450 senior security and network professionals showed that thirty percent of the participants plan to increase public cloud usage. Forty four percent said that they faced challenges after migrating to public cloud.
AlgoSec director of communications Joanne Godfrey mentioned that it’s essential for organizations to maintain complete visibility”This enables them to better protect the business and fulfill compliance demands, while taking full advantage of the cost savings and agility offered by the hybrid cloud model,” she said.
“Companies of all sizes are adopting increasingly more complex technical solutions as the market democratizes what was previously reserved for software giants,” Threat Stack CSO Sam Bisbee said in a statement. “This has created an opening for internal and external threats as security teams catch up on cloud, containers, and more.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________
AlertSec ACCESS checks for full disk encryption on PCs running Windows 7, 8, and 10 Home, Pro and Enterprise as well as Mac OS El Capitan and Sierra. AlertSec ACCESS will also verify that all smartphones running iOS and Android are encrypted before access is granted.