Salesforce, ServiceNow data targeted in ‘City-Forum’ attacks

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Aug 14, 20262 mins

Reco has identified a new attack vector that is similar to ShinyHunters’ methods.

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Credit: Stokkete / Shutterstock

Records held in Salesforce and ServiceNow systems are under attack leaving user data exposed, according to researchers at Reco.

The attack appears similar to those perpetrated by the extortion group ShinyHunters, Reco said. ShinyHunters has been particularly active this year, attacking dating sites in January and Oracle in June, and there are fears that they could have found a new target.

Reco has named the latest campaign of attacks “City-Forum,” after a domain name associated with the attackers’ IP address. While it bears similarities to Shiny Hunters’ past exploits, there are also differences. This time around the attacker penetrated the systems through the UI-API layer, an attack point that Reco had not seen used before, and had also created its own toolset to carry out the attack. It is also targeting a native ServiceNow Service Portal search endpoint that has almost no online documentation or well-known open-source tools.

The threat is particularly noteworthy, Reco said, as the attackers have studied the services to map different common data-leak vectors, a sign of an advanced approach.

A Salesforce spokesperson said that it was aware of the campaign in which malicious actors are exploiting customers’ overly permissive Experience Cloud guest user configurations in the campaign to potentially access more data than targeted organizations intended.

“This issue highlights risks stemming from misconfigurations, such as overly permissive guest user profiles, and not from a Salesforce vulnerability,” the spokesperson said.

Regardless of who the attackers were and how the attack was carried out, one thing should be clear: Organizations should be increasingly careful about who they give login credentials to.

Maxwell Cooter

Maxwell began writing about technology in 1984, when mainframes ruled the world. Since then he has written for just about every business computing title in the UK, and for a few in the US, covering everything from Artificial intelligence to Zero-day exploits and all points in between. He has also been editor-in-chief of several award-winning titles, including Network Week, Techworld, and Cloud Pro, and a regular contributor to Whatsonstage.com. In his spare time he coaches a junior rugby team.

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