Cybersecurity researchers are warning that hundreds of servers internet hosting the Prometheus monitoring and alerting toolkit are susceptible to data leakage and publicity to denial-of-service (DoS) in addition to distant code execution (RCE) assaults.
“Prometheus servers or exporters, typically missing correct authentication, allowed attackers to simply collect delicate data, reminiscent of 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, might function a vector for DoS assaults, rendering the servers inoperable.
As many as 296,000 Prometheus Node Exporter cases 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 companies in danger.
The truth that delicate data, reminiscent of 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 allow direct querying of inside knowledge, doubtlessly exposing secrets and techniques that attackers can exploit to achieve an preliminary foothold in numerous organizations,” the researchers mentioned.
As well as, it has been discovered that the “/metrics” endpoint can’t solely reveal inside API endpoints, but in addition knowledge about subdomains, Docker registries, and pictures — all priceless data for an attacker conducting reconnaissance and seeking to develop their attain inside the community.
That is not all. An adversary might 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 identify 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 identify and host a rogue model. These points have since been addressed by the Prometheus safety group as of September 2024.
“Unsuspecting customers following the documentation might unknowingly clone and deploy this malicious exporter, resulting in distant code execution on their methods,” the researchers mentioned.
Organizations are really useful to safe Prometheus servers and exporters with sufficient authentication strategies, restrict public publicity, monitor “/debug/pprof” endpoints for any indicators of anomalous exercise, and take steps to keep away from RepoJacking assaults.