An anonymous whisteblower has claimed that Internet of Things (IoT) specialists Ubiquiti massively downplayed its recent system breach.
Ubiquity urged its customers to change their passwords blaming in January 2021 after claiming an incident at a third-party cloud provider may have exposed authentication information.
However, this was apparently false information given out at the behest of the company’s legal department apparently to protect Ubiquity’s share price, the anonymous letter to the European Data Protection Supervisor claims.
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According to the letter, which the whistleblower shared with leading cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs, the breach potentially put all Ubiquiti devices at risk.
Downplaying the incident
The whistleblower shared that the attackers had gained administrative access to Ubiquiti’s cloud servers at Amazon Web Service (AWS) and accessed all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials, and secrets required to forge single sign-on (SSO) cookies.
In the letter, the whistleblower alleges that Ubiquiti’s security noticed something was amiss in late December last year, and soon found a backdoor left by the intruders.
Removing the backdoor invited a ransom note from the intruder threatening to expose the breach along with details of another backdoor. Ubiquiti however didn’t engage with the intruders and found and closed the second backdoor.
“Ubiquiti had negligent logging (no access logging on databases) so it was unable to prove or disprove what they accessed, but the attacker targeted the credentials to the databases, and created Linux instances with networking connectivity to said databases,” wrote the whistleblower in the letter reiterating that it was the company’s legal department that overrode repeated requests to take stringent action.
Via: KrebsOnSecurity