The team behind the Joomla open source content management system (CMS) announced a security breach last week. The incident took place after a member of the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) team left a full backup of the JRD site (resources.joomla.org) on an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket owned by their own company.
Source: ZDNet
In response to the news, Paul Edon, Senior Director Technical Sales and Services (EMEA) at Tripwire, said:
This incident confirms the findings of the Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report 2020, which highlighted that “misconfiguration” is in the top five action varieties for breaches. It is an important acknowledgement that not all incidents are the result of an exploited vulnerability. Misconfigurations actually lead to more breaches than exploited systems, but organizations often don’t put the same effort into assessing them as they do scanning for vulnerabilities.
Joomla users should reset their credentials immediately. In general, users should be wary of reusing passwords and try to use a password manager so that unique, long, complex passwords can be used for each site that they log into. This will prevent attackers from logging into multiple sites if the user’s credentials are compromised. When possible, ensuring multi-factor authentication is enabled on each of their accounts is also very important.
Martin Jartelius, CSO at Outpost24, added:
Partially, this is of course interesting for the risk of targeted attacks based on attacks on the hashed passwords. As could be learnt from the recent DBIR, credentials stuffing attacks are not the result of a data breach, but rather they are used to enhance the quality of already ongoing attacks.
This is just another in a long series of losses of data for forgetting altogether to even protect data, where the backside of the smooth use of modern technology, the fact that anyone without understanding the implications of their actions can spin up new exposed databases or shared workspaces. When its been touted that security is the enemy of usability, sometimes usability is the enemy of secure.
