Know Your Breach: OWASP
May 3, 2024 9:54:26 AM
The Target: The OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Foundation is a nonprofit organization focused on improving the security of software. It provides freely available resources, tools, and documentation to help organizations develop, deploy, and maintain secure software applications.
The Take: The incident impacted OWASP members from 2006 to around 2014 who provided their resumes as part of joining OWASP. Exposed resumes contained names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, and other personally identifiable information.
The Vector: In late February 2024, the Foundation received a few support requests and became aware of a misconfiguration of OWASP’s old Wiki web server. The misconfiguration led to a data breach involving old member resumes.
This breach highlights the extreme importance of timely software updates for known software vulnerabilities, not only in systems directly under a firm’s control, but in third-party systems the firm relies upon as well. The longer a firm, or its vendors, hold out on deploying the most up-to-date software for their systems, the greater the chance an attacker will exploit the issue.