Cloud servers hacked

The attacks began a couple of days after the vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed without a proof-of-concept exploit being available, highlighting that IT operations teams have very little time to react when flaws become known and should increasingly rely on automated patching.

The Salt vulnerabilities

On April 30, researchers from security firm F-Secure published an advisory about two vulnerabilities -- CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652 -- found in Salt, a popular open-source Python-based framework that's used to automate tasks, data collection, configuration and updates for servers in private data centers or in the cloud. The Salt architecture involves the use of a master server where administrators can define tasks and clients called "minions" that execute them.

Read more: administrator definition

"The vulnerabilities described in this advisory allow an attacker who can connect to the 'request server' port to bypass all authentication and authorization controls and publish arbitrary control messages, read and write files anywhere on the 'master' server filesystem and steal the secret key used to authenticate to the master as root," the F-Secure researchers said. "The impact is full remote command execution as root on both the master and all minions that connect to it."