Attacker apparently didn’t have to breach a single system to pwn Uber

Questions are swirling around Uber’s internal security practices after an 18-year-old hacker gained what appears to have been complete administrative access to critical parts of the company’s IT infrastructure using an employee’s VPN credentials as an initial access vector.

Numerous screenshots that the alleged attacker posted online suggest the intruder did not have to breach a single internal system to essentially pwn the ride-sharing giant’s IT domain almost entirely.

So far, Uber has not disclosed details of the incident beyond saying that the company is responding to it and working with law enforcement to investigate the breach. So, at least some of what is being is reported about the incident is based on a New York Times report from Sept. 15 in which the teen claimed to have gained access to Uber’s internal networks using credentials obtained from an employee via social engineering. The attacker used that access to move laterally across Uber’s internal domain to other critical systems, including its email, cloud storage, and code repository environments.

Since then, he has posted numerous screen shots of internal systems at Uber to confirm the access he had obtained on it and how it was obtained.

The screenshots show the hacker gained full administrative access to Uber’s AWS, Google Cloud, VMware vSphere, and Windows environments — as well as to a full database of vulnerabilities in its platform that security researchers have discovered and disclosed to the company via a bug bounty program managed by HackerOne. The internal data the attacker accessed appears to include Uber sales metrics, information on Slack, and even info from the company’s endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform.

In a tweet thread that some security researchers reposted, Twitter user Corben Leo posted claims from the alleged hacker that he used the socially engineered credentials to access Uber’s VPN and scan the company’s intranet. The hacker described finding an Uber network share that contained PowerShell scripts with privileged admin credentials. “One of the PowerShell scripts contained the username and password for an admin user in Thycotic (PAM). Using this I was able to extract secrets for all services, DA, Duo, OneLogin, AWS, GSuite,” the attacker claimed.

For now, the attacker’s motivations are not very clear. Normally, it’s pretty apparent, but the only thing that hacker has done so far is make a lot of noise, noted that Uber drivers should be paid more, and shared screenshots proving access.

“They seemed really young and maybe even a little sloppy. Some of their screenshots had open chat windows and a ton of metadata,” says Sam Curry, a security engineer at Yuga Labs who has reviewed the screenshots,

Pure-Play Social Engineering

Invincible Security Group (ISG), a Dubai-based security services firm, claimed that its researchers had obtained a list of administrative credentials that the threat actor had gathered. “They seem to be strong passwords, which confirms that it was indeed a social-engineering attack that got him access to Uber’s internal network,” ISG tweeted.

Curry tells Dark Reading that the attacker appears to have gained initial access from compromising one employee’s login information and social engineering that person’s VPN two-factor authentication 2FA prompt.

To read the complete article, visit Dark Reading.