Data Leak: Critical Data Being Exposed From Salesforce Servers

According to a post by KrebsOnSecurity published on Friday, servers running Salesforce software are leaking private data controlled by governmental bodies, financial institutions, and other businesses.

According to Brian Krebs, Vermont had at least five websites that gave anyone access to critical information. One of the programs impacted was the state's Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. It revealed the applicants' full names, Social Security numbers, residences, contact information (phone, email, and address), and bank account details. Vermont adopted Salesforce Community, a cloud-based software solution created to make it simple for businesses to quickly construct websites, just like the other organizations giving the general public access to sensitive data.

Among the other victims was Columbus, an Ohio-based Huntington Bank. It recently bought TCF Bank, which processed commercial loans using Salesforce Community. Names, residences, Social Security numbers, titles, federal IDs, IP addresses, average monthly payrolls, and loan amounts were among the data components that were revealed.

Apparently, both Vermont and Huntington discovered the data leak after Krebs reached them for a comment on the matter. Following this, both the customers withdrew public access to the critical data.. Salesforce Community websites can be set up to require authentication, limiting access to internal resources and sensitive information to a select group of authorized users. The websites can also be configured to let anyone read public information without requiring authentication. In certain instances, administrators unintentionally permit unauthorized users to view website sections that are meant to be accessible only to authorized personnel.

Salesforce tells Krebs that it provides users with clear guidance on how to set up Salesforce Community so that only certain data is accessible to unauthorized guests, according to Krebs.

Doug Merret, who raised awareness in regards to the issue eight months ago, further elaborated his concerns on the ease of misconfiguring Salesforce in a post headlined ‘The Salesforce Communities Security Issue.’

“The issue was that you are able to ‘hack’ the URL to see standard Salesforce pages - Account, Contact, User, etc.[…]This would not really be an issue, except that the admin has not expected you to see the standard pages as they had not added the objects associated to the Aura community navigation and therefore had not created appropriate page layouts to hide fields that they did not want the user to see,” he wrote.

Krebs noted that it came to know about the leaks from security researcher Charan Akiri, who apparently identified hundreds of organizations with misconfigured Salesforce sites. He claimed only five of the many companies and governmental agencies that Akiri informed had the issues resolved, among which none were in the government sector.