“Fortunately, there are safeguards against the potential ‘Ghostwriter’ attacks enabled by the issue.”
An Amazon Web Services data storage service has a serious data security flaw, according to new research.
Citing Skyhigh Networks, NuData Security outlines the issue in a new blog post. It concerns AWS’s Simple Storage Service, or ‘S3’, which features storage ‘buckets’ that are “misconfigured to allow public write access, enabling a malicious third party to launch man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks,” as NuData puts it.
Fortunately, there are safeguards against the potential ‘Ghostwriter’ attacks enabled by the issue. The AWS Trusted Advisor, for example, has an ‘Amazon S3 Bucket Permissions’ security check that can be used to flag buckets that allow API access for both the authenticated AWS users and the open internet. Users can also check the Public bucket count in their AWS S3 consoles to see how many buckets are vulnerable, and NuData’s blog provides an AWS CLI query that can be used for programmers to check which buckets are vulnerable.
While there are solutions available, the fact that such a security vulnerability exists in as high-profile a platform as Amazon Web Services helps to highlight the dangers emerging as more and more data is stored online. And, of course, it also highlights the value of user authentication systems that can run in the background to provide an extra layer of security, such as behavioral biometrics solutions like NuData’s NuDetect.
Source: NuData Security Blog
Follow Us