Cybersecurity researchers are warning that 1000’s of servers internet hosting the Prometheus monitoring and alerting toolkit are prone to info leakage and publicity to denial-of-service (DoS) in addition to distant code execution (RCE) assaults.
“Prometheus servers or exporters, often lacking proper authentication, allowed attackers to easily gather sensitive information, such as credentials and API keys,” Aqua safety researchers Yakir Kadkoda and Assaf Morag mentioned in a brand new report shared with The Hacker Information.
The cloud safety agency additionally mentioned that the publicity of the “/debug/pprof” endpoints used for figuring out heap reminiscence utilization, CPU utilization, and others, may function a vector for DoS assaults, rendering the servers inoperable.
As many as 296,000 Prometheus Node Exporter situations and 40,300 Prometheus servers have been estimated to be publicly accessible over the web, making them an enormous assault floor that would put knowledge and providers in danger.
The truth that delicate info, comparable to credentials, passwords, authentication tokens, and API keys, may very well be leaked by internet-exposed Prometheus servers has been documented beforehand by JFrog in 2021 and Sysdig in 2022.
“Unauthenticated Prometheus servers enable direct querying of internal data, potentially exposing secrets that attackers can exploit to gain an initial foothold in various organizations,” the researchers mentioned.
As well as, it has been discovered that the “/metrics” endpoint cannot solely reveal inside API endpoints, but in addition knowledge about subdomains, Docker registries, and pictures — all priceless info for an attacker conducting reconnaissance and seeking to increase their attain inside the community.
That is not all. An adversary may ship a number of simultaneous requests to endpoints like “/debug/pprof/heap” to set off CPU and memory-intensive heap profiling duties that may overwhelm the servers and trigger them to crash.
Aqua additional known as out a provide chain menace that includes utilizing repojacking strategies to leverage the title related to deleted or renamed GitHub repositories and introduce malicious third-party exporters.
Particularly, it found that eight exporters listed in Prometheus’ official documentation are weak to RepoJacking, thereby permitting an attacker to recreate an exporter with the identical title and host a rogue model. These points have since been addressed by the Prometheus safety workforce as of September 2024.
“Unsuspecting users following the documentation could unknowingly clone and deploy this malicious exporter, leading to remote code execution on their systems,” the researchers mentioned.
Organizations are advisable to safe Prometheus servers and exporters with satisfactory authentication strategies, restrict public publicity, monitor “/debug/pprof” endpoints for any indicators of anomalous exercise, and take steps to keep away from RepoJacking assaults.
