The massive Equifax data breach that exposed highly sensitive data of as many as 143 million people was caused by exploiting a flaw in Apache Struts framework, which Apache patched over two months earlier of the security incident, Equifax has confirmed.
Credit rating agency Equifax is yet another example of the companies that became victims of massive cyber attacks due to not patching a critical vulnerability on time, for which patches were already issued by the respected companies.
Rated critical with a maximum 10.0 score, the Apache Struts2 vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) exploited in the Equifax breach was disclosed and fixed by Apache on March 6 with the release of Apache Struts version 2.3.32 or 2.5.10.1.
This flaw is separate from CVE-2017-9805, another Apache Struts2 vulnerability that was patched earlier this month, which was a programming bug that manifests due to the way Struts REST plugin handles XML payloads while deserializing them, and was fixed in Struts version 2.5.13.
Right after the disclosure of the vulnerability, hackers started actively exploiting the flaw in the wild to install rogue applications on affected web servers after its proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code was uploaded to a Chinese site.
Despite patches were made available and proofs that the flaw was already under mass attack by hackers, Equifax failed to patched its Web applications against the flaw, which resulted in the breach of personal data of nearly half of the US population.
“Equifax has been intensely investigating the scope of the intrusion with the assistance of a leading, independent cyber security firm to determine what information was accessed and who have been impacted,” the company officials wrote in an update on the website with a new “A Progress Update for Consumers.”
“We know that criminals exploited a US website application vulnerability. The vulnerability was Apache Struts CVE-2017-5638. We continue to work with law enforcement as part of our criminal investigation, and have shared indicators of compromise with law enforcement.”
CVE-2017-5638 was a then-zero-day vulnerability discovered in the popular Apache Struts web application framework by Cisco’s Threat intelligence firm Talos, which observed a number of active attacks exploiting the flaw.
Source: The Hacker News