Hackers are exploiting intentionally vulnerable penetration testing and security training apps that have been mistakenly exposed to the public internet, giving them access to cloud environments including CloudFlare, F5, and Palo Alto Networks.
New research from offensive security research firm Pentera focuses on ten popular training tools, including Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA), OWASP Juice Shop, Hackazon, and bWAPP.
All these tools are designed to contain weaknesses for education purposes, as well as internal pentesting and product demonstrations. However, when these applications are deployed in real cloud environments with privileged permissions, they can become an easy entry point for attackers.
Pentera warned that the flaws can give threat actors control of the compromised networks and “pathways for lateral movement into sensitive internal systems,” especially when companies violate the “principle of least privilege” or fail to properly sandbox test systems.
Nearly 2,000 exposed training apps found online
Pentera said it found “clear evidence that attackers are exploiting these flaws in the wild – to deploy crypto miners, plant webshells or pivot to sensitive systems.”
Researchers identified 1,926 exposed vulnerability applications on the public web, often deployed on AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, with overly privileged IAM (Identity and Access Management) roles.
Of the total, 1,626 unique servers were verified, and nearly 60% were running on enterprise-owned infrastructure in these major cloud platforms.
The discovery,
documented in a security report, began during a routine cloud security assessment, when Noam Yaffe, a senior security researcher at Pentera, spotted an exposed Hackazon instance running directly in production.
This made him question “how many other vulnerable training applications are publicly exposed, and how can an attacker exploit them?”
He then examined 10 widely used training apps, many of which had known remote code execution paths.
“To assess the risk beyond surface exposure, I built a Python tool to automate exploitation using known vectors to achieve remote code execution,” Yaffe said.
Pentera said the results were “alarming,” with 109 exposed credential sets uncovered, many tied to overprivileged identities.
In some cases, Yaffe said he found cloud access that could enable the reading and writing of sensitive data, interaction with container registries, deployment or destruction of compute resources, and even administrator-level cloud access.
“In multiple cases, we found active secrets (GitHub tokens, Slack keys, Docker Hub creds), proprietary source code, and real user data.”
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