Password Reset Exploit Review
Rapid forensic analysis reconstructed the attack and found no evidence that protected code repositories were accessed.
Industries
Technology
Services
Digital Forensics
About the project
An automated actor exploited a critical password-reset flaw in a self-hosted source-code platform and changed the password on a privileged account. Although the reset succeeded, the organization did not know whether the actor had signed in or reached private repositories.
The service held sensitive source code, including client codebases, so the team needed to contain possible access and establish the incident's scope quickly. The review also had to separate relevant exploit activity from unrelated crawler, scanner, and bot traffic without overstating what the evidence could prove.
What we did
- The affected service was taken offline when the unauthorized password change was recognized to prevent possible continued access while the review began. We set a focused scope: determine how the password changed, whether the actor completed a sign-in, whether any protected repositories were accessed, and whether the attack involved other accounts.
- We compared application and authentication logs with the platform provider's security guidance. Request paths, parameters, timing, and response codes showed an automated sequence that requested a password reset, followed the reset link, and changed the password on a privileged account.
- The logs also contained unrelated activity from web crawlers, security scanners, and malicious bots. We used open-source intelligence and IP reputation checks alongside requested resources and traffic patterns to classify that background activity and isolate the requests that matched the active password-reset exploit.
- We checked authentication history, account configuration, and two-factor authentication status to determine whether the password change became a successful account takeover. We found no successful attacker sign-in, no evidence of access to protected repositories, and no attack activity involving other accounts. Two-factor authentication stopped the actor at the sign-in stage.
- We completed the investigation and documented the findings in less than 24 hours. The findings traced the attack path, defined the limits of the compromise, and set two follow-up priorities: remove an unnecessary default administrator account and improve the process for reviewing and acting on critical security advisories.
Technologies Used
GitLab
