Google Cloud Platform | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a now-patched vulnerability in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that could have enabled an attacker to elevate their privileges in the Cloud Composer workflow orchestration service that's based on Apache Airflow. "This vulnerability lets attackers with edit permissions in Cloud Composer to escalate their access to the default Cloud Build service account, which has high-level permissions across GCP services like Cloud Build itself, Cloud Storage, and Artifact Registry," Liv Matan, senior security researcher at Tenable, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The shortcoming has been codenamed ConfusedComposer by the cybersecurity company, describing it as a variant of ConfusedFunction , a privilege escalation vulnerability impacting GCP's Cloud Functions service that an attacker could exploit to access other services and sensitive data in an unauthorized manner. The disclosure comes weeks after Tenable detailed another pr...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched privilege escalation vulnerability in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Run that could have allowed a malicious actor to access container images and even inject malicious code. "The vulnerability could have allowed such an identity to abuse its Google Cloud Run revision edit permissions in order to pull private Google Artifact Registry and Google Container Registry images in the same account," Tenable security researcher Liv Matan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The security shortcoming has been codenamed ImageRunner by the cybersecurity company. Following responsible disclosure, Google addressed the problem as of January 28, 2025. Google Cloud Run is a fully managed service for executing containerized applications in a scalable, serverless environment. When the technology is used to run a service, container images are retrieved from the Artifact Registry (or Docker Hub) for subsequent depl...

The problem is simple: all breaches start with initial access, and initial access comes down to two primary attack vectors – credentials and devices. This is not news; every report you can find on the threat landscape depicts the same picture.  The solution is more complex. For this article, we'll focus on the device threat vector. The risk they pose is significant, which is why device management tools like Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) are essential components of an organization's security infrastructure. However, relying solely on these tools to manage device risk actually creates a false sense of security. Instead of the blunt tools of device management, organizations are looking for solutions that deliver device trust . Device trust provides a comprehensive, risk-based approach to device security enforcement, closing the large gaps left behind by traditional device management solutions. Here are 5 of those limitations and how to ov...

A now-patched critical security flaw impacting Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Composer could have been exploited to achieve remote code execution on cloud servers by means of a supply chain attack technique called dependency confusion. The vulnerability has been codenamed CloudImposer by Tenable Research. "The vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to hijack an internal software dependency that Google pre-installs on each Google Cloud Composer pipeline-orchestration tool," security researcher Liv Matan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Dependency confusion (aka substitution attack), which was first documented by security researcher Alex Birsan in February 2021, refers to a type of software supply chain compromise in which a package manager is tricked into pulling a malicious package from a public repository instead of the intended file of the same name from an internal repository. So, a threat actor could stage a large-scale supply chain attack by publ...

A set of novel attack methods has been demonstrated against Google Workspace and the Google Cloud Platform that could be potentially leveraged by threat actors to conduct ransomware, data exfiltration, and password recovery attacks. "Starting from a single compromised machine, threat actors could progress in several ways: they could move to other cloned machines with  GCPW  installed, gain access to the cloud platform with custom permissions, or decrypt locally stored passwords to continue their attack beyond the Google ecosystem," Martin Zugec, technical solutions director at Bitdefender,  said  in a new report. A prerequisite for these attacks is that the bad actor has already gained access to a local machine through other means, prompting Google to mark the bug as  not eligible for fixing  "since it's outside of our threat model and the behavior is in line with Chrome's practices of storing local data." However, the Romanian cybersecurity firm has w...

A malicious actor has been linked to a cloud credential stealing campaign in June 2023 that's focused on Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, marking the adversary's expansion in targeting beyond Amazon Web Services (AWS). The findings come from  SentinelOne  and  Permiso , which said the "campaigns share similarity with tools attributed to the notorious TeamTNT cryptojacking crew," although it emphasized that "attribution remains challenging with script-based tools." They also overlap with an ongoing TeamTNT campaign  disclosed  by Aqua called Silentbob that leverages misconfigured cloud services to drop malware as part of what's said to be a testing effort, while also linking  SCARLETEEL  attacks to the threat actor, citing infrastructure commonalities. "TeamTNT is scanning for credentials across multiple cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, and GCP," Aqua noted. The attacks, which single out public-facing Docker instanc...

A new security flaw has been disclosed in the Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) Cloud SQL service that could be potentially exploited to obtain access to confidential data. "The vulnerability could have enabled a malicious actor to escalate from a basic Cloud SQL user to a full-fledged sysadmin on a container, gaining access to internal GCP data like secrets, sensitive files, passwords, in addition to customer data," Israeli cloud security firm Dig  said . Cloud SQL  is a fully-managed solution to build MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server databases for cloud-based applications. The multi-stage attack chain identified by Dig, in a nutshell, leveraged a gap in the cloud platform's security layer associated with SQL Server to escalate the privileges of a user to that of an administrator role. The elevated permissions subsequently made it possible to abuse another critical misconfiguration to obtain system administrator rights and take full control of the database server....

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched zero-day flaw in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that could have enabled threat actors to conceal an unremovable, malicious application inside a victim's Google account. Dubbed GhostToken by Israeli cybersecurity startup Astrix Security, the shortcoming impacts all Google accounts, including enterprise-focused Workspace accounts. It was discovered and reported to Google on June 19, 2022. The company deployed a global-patch more than nine months later on April 7, 2023. "The vulnerability [...] allows attackers to gain permanent and unremovable access to a victim's Google account by converting an already authorized third-party application into a malicious trojan app, leaving the victim's personal data exposed forever," Astrix  said  in a report. In a nutshell, the flaw makes it possible for an attacker to hide their malicious app from a victim's Google account  application management page , the...