Recently, the Australian Signals Directorate sounded an alarm on a severe remote code execution vulnerability that impacts PHP worldwide, dubbed PHP2Shell. It allows attackers a high chance of hijacking web applications. This, in turn, can give them full control of exposed servers. This red flag, raised by the Signals Directorate, made the organisations aware of the threat, and they scrambled to take control of their public-facing websites offline or apply security patches to overcome this issue. One of our clients encountered this threat through a breached connection that was tied directly to their freight vendor.
Our client is a mid sized logistic company and it operates a high-volume distribution centre. Their daily operations are heavily dependent on automated inventory software that connects with different external logistical partners. Now, among these partners, one of their primary transport vendors used a legacy PHP-based freight portal. This portal was compromised during the initial wave of PHP2 shell exploits. Once the hackers gained entry into the system through the compromised freight portal, they started inserting malicious data payloads into our client’s warehouse management system through a trusted-looking, established API connection.
Thankfully, the attack failed to execute due to their warehouse inventory supervisor, who was conducting routine checks on the morning dispatch logs. In the course of his inspection, he noticed some data anomalies. The operational dashboard first flagged an unexpected and massive spike in the inventory sync requests, which originated from the vendor’s authorised IP address. It was accompanied by scrambled request patterns that interrupted the standard data flow. Upon finding the suspicious string, he immediately halted the API integration and then alerted his superiors.
If the inventory supervisor had not seen the suspicious-looking string, those payloads would have processed normally. Then the financial and operational impact of that malicious hack would have been very severe. This malicious code was specifically engineered to freeze the master stock ledger and then encrypt the entire database. After that, it would have locked down the entire Warehouse automation network. What this meant in real terms was that the forklifts and transport trucks would have sat idle, and all the perishable goods that our client had in their warehouse would have expired on the floor. This would have led the company to face a financial impact costing millions in delayed dispatch, penalties, and ruined inventory.
To avert this huge crisis, Cybernetic GI played an important role. Our company, six months earlier, acting as an independent cyber security auditors, did a comprehensive review of the client’s third-party integrations. During this vulnerability assessment review, we were able to identify a few security gaps, especially in the warehouse API. We found that the warehouse API implicitly trusted all the incoming vendor data without any strict payload validation or even baseline volume thresholds.
We gave our findings to the Executive Board, which mentioned the extreme risk of associated vulnerabilities from third-party partners. Cybernetic GI is a certified cyber security consultant in Australia, and our main function is to expose any structural blind spots so that the leadership of a business or any organisation can take the mandated immediate defensive controls. Our job is to provide exact intelligence that is required by the client to defend themselves. By following our board report, the client’s internal engineering teams were able to build stringent API monitoring and rate limiting dashboards. Because the client took our risk intelligence report very seriously, they were able to contain a global zero-day threat before it crossed into their operations and halt the malicious hacking attempt in its tracks.
Rigorous penetration testing and auditing the digital architecture of your company is the best way to prepare your organisation for any malicious exploits that can make the headlines tomorrow.