Lessons Learned From the Yahoo! Hack
How SQL Injection Vulnerabilities in Third-Party Code Can Make for Security Cloudy
1. Executive Summary
On December 2012, an Egyptian hacker who calls himself ViruS_HimA, claimed to have breached Yahoo!’s security systems and acquired full access to certain Yahoo! databases, leading to full access on the server for that domain. Technically, we found that the hacker was able to determine the allegedly vulnerable Yahoo! application and the exact attack method – error message based SQL injection for the MSSQL (Microsoft SQL Server) database (DB).
From a business perspective, this attack underscores the security problem posed by hosting third-party code – as is often done with cloud-based services. In fact, according to a survey from PricewaterhouseCoopers, 23.6% of respondents say that cloud computing has increased vulnerabilities, and the largest perceived risk is the uncertain ability to enforce provider security policies.In the Yahoo! incident, the vulnerable application was probably not coded by the Yahoo! team, and not even hosted on Yahoo!’s server farm. This left Yahoo! with full responsibility for securing the application on one hand, and a very limited capability to actually control the code, on the other hand. This episode underscores technical and business urgencies:
read more.............http://www.imperva.com/docs/HII_Lessons_Learned_From_the_Yahoo_Hack.pdf