Deserialized web security roundup: Twitter 2FA backlash, GoDaddy suffers years-long attack campaign, and XSS Hunter adds e2e encryption

Your fortnightly rundown of AppSec vulnerabilities, new hacking techniques, and other cybersecurity news

Twitter faced further criticism this week when Elon Musk’s social networking platform announced SMS-based 2FA will only be available to paying customers going forward.

The social media site historically enabled two-factor authentication (2FA) to all users, providing they connected their mobile phone number to their account.

This week, however, users were warned that this security option would no longer be available to users who did not pay for verification.

Of course, this sparked huge backlash online, particularly among the majority of those with non-paid accounts.

It’s worth noting, though, that users can still use 2FA with third-party authentication apps such as Google Authenticate.

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Elsewhere, web hosting provider GoDaddy announced it had fallen victim to a cyber-attack… and this was part of a campaign lasting almost three years.

The company announced in a statement that it had evidence of an intrusion that took place back in December 2022, when “a small number of customers” complained about their websites being intermittently redirected.

In a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (PDF), the American domain registrar also divulged that it had evidence this attack was linked to an earlier incident in March 2020, when an attacker “compromised the hosting login credentials of approximately 28,000 hosting customers to their hosting accounts as well as the login credentials of a small number of our personnel”.

GoDaddy says it believes these attacks, together with a 2021 compromise of its hosted WordPress service, “are part of a multi-year campaign by a sophisticated threat actor group”.

BACKGROUND Truffle Security relaunches XSS Hunter tool with new features

Finally, the maintainers of newly resurfaced tool XSS Hunter announced the introduction of optional end-to-end (e2e) encryption to its fork after a backlash from privacy-conscious users.

Truffle Security, which launched a new fork of the open source utility after its deprecation by original creator Matthew Bryant, were criticized earlier this month for inspecting potentially sensitive data generated by users after they shared anonymized statistics about the vulnerabilities unearthed.

As reported by The Daily Swig, users have now been reassured that e2e encryption has been added to the fork in a statement given by Truffle Security’s founder.

We also recently reported that Belgium has become the first European country to adopt a national, comprehensive safe harbor framework for ethical hackers, and how Frans Rosén topped PortSwigger’s top 10 web hacking techniques of 2022 with his research ‘Account hijacking using dirty dancing in sign-in OAuth-flows’.

You can catch up with the full range of our recent news coverage by visiting The Daily Swig’s homepage.

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Here are some more web security stories and other cybersecurity news that caught our attention in the last fortnight:

Web vulnerabilities

FortiNAC / Critical / Unauthenticated RCE / An external control of file name or path in certain Fortinet FortiNAC versions allow attackers to execute unauthorized code / Patched and disclosed February 16Node.js / Medium / CLRF injection / The fetch API in Node.js did not prevent CRLF injection in the host header potentially allowing attacks such as HTTP response splitting and HTTP header injection / Patched and disclosed February 16Node.js / High / Permissions policies bypass / Non-authorized modules potentially accessible via / Patched and disclosed February 16Kardex MLOG / Severity TBC / RCE / SSTI to RCE due to sanitization issue on industrial web interface / Patched January 24, disclosed February 7Apache Kerby / LDAP injection / Vulnerability exists in / Patched and disclosed February 20

Research and attack techniques

PortSwigger’s* Gareth Heyes demonstrated how to detect server-side prototype pollution without causing denial-of-service at AppSec Dublin conference earlier this month.Researchers from CyberXplore detailed how they hacked GitHub for a whole month, resulting in the finding of six vulnerabilities, which are detailed in this blog post.Software engineer Matt Frisbie built a purposely-malicious Google Chrome extension that steals as much data as possible to demonstrate what users could expose themselves to if they aren’t careful with what they install.

A security researcher has praised the merits of hacking on Apple’s bug bounty program

Bug bounty/vulnerability disclosure

A write-up from security researcher Omar Hashem, who fully took over a HubSpot account, details his failures on the path to exploitation. Research is inherently about trial and error, yet few write ups shared online talk about the things that didn’t work.A researcher calling themselves ‘infiltrateops’ shared details on how they were awarded a decent payout from Apple and lauded the response from its security team.Google released a review of all of the bugs found in its vulnerability reward program in 2022, revealing it fixed more than 2,900 issues in that year alone.

New open source security tools

Legitify, a tool for detecting and remediating security issues across GitHub and GitLab assets, added support for GPT-based misconfiguration scanning.GuardDog, a tool used to identify malicious Python packages using Semgrep and package metadata analysis, has been updated to provide npm support, new heuristics, and easier CI integration.

*PortSwigger is the parent company of The Daily Swig.

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