Categories: Breaking NewsHackingSecurity

Bugzilla CVE-2015-4499 flaw, be aware hackers could know all your bugs

A Critical vulnerability affects Mozilla Bugzilla bug-tracking software could be exploited to access details of non-public vulnerabilities stored in its database.

The open source Bugzilla bug-tracking system is used hundreds of thousands of software organizations that track the evolution of software bugs discovered in their applications.

Development team urge to upgrade Bugzilla bug tracking system to fix the critical flaws, last version available for the popular application is the 5.0.1, 4.4.10, or 4.2.15.

The bug in Bugzilla is considered critical due to the sensitive data are managed by such kind of application, a data breach could expose information on non-public vulnerability to the hackers that could use them in cyber attacks.

The experts at PerimeterX security firm which disclosed the vulnerability, coded as CVE-2015-4499, explained that the flaw resides in the Bugzilla’s email-based permissions process that could allow an attacker to gain high-level permissions on the popular Bugzilla bug-tracking software.

“The implications of this vulnerability are severe – it could allow an attacker to access undisclosed security vulnerabilities in hundreds of products, in a manner similar to the Mozilla major data leak in August this year, only multiplied by the thousands of publicly available Bugzilla deployments. Imagine the hundreds or thousands of zero-days and other security vulnerabilities that could potentially be exposed!”

An attacker can easily breach unpatched Bugzilla database, among the illustrious organizations that use the bug tracking system there are the Apache Project, Red Hat and LibreOffice.

The researchers explained that the vulnerability is “extremely easy to exploit,” the attackers just need to register for a regular account via email and trick the system into believing that the attacker is part of a privileged domain which allow it to gain domain-specific permissions.

“If you are using email based permissions in your Bugzilla deployment and have not yet installed a patched version, take it down until patched. Make sure to go over the logs and user-list to identify users that were created using this vulnerability. This vulnerability is extremely easy to exploit and the details have been known for more than a week, you have been or will be attacked!” explained

The researchers tested the flaw on Mozilla’s Bugzilla.mozilla.org and found that all Perl-based Bugzilla versions, including 2.0 to 4.2.14, 4.3.1 to 4.4.9, 4.5.1 to 5.0, were vulnerable.

“This vulnerability has been tested and found working on Bugzilla.mozilla.org – the Bugzilla for the Mozilla Foundation. Upon successful exploitation of the vulnerability we were granted permissions that would have potentially allowed us to view confidential data (see screen capture below). ” states the post.

At the time I’m writing there are no information whether the Bugzilla vulnerability has been exploited in the wild to gain access to non-public vulnerabilities.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Bugzilla, hacking)

Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.