Incident Details
In December of 2020, Ubiquiti suffered a significant data breach executed by a senior cloud engineer who exfiltrated source code and customer information, which led to a substantial loss in the company's stock value.
Incident
How Did the Breach Happen?
The breach occurred when the senior cloud engineer used his employee credentials to access and clone Ubiquiti's GitHub repository, as well as altering AWS log retention policies to hide his traces.
What Data has been Compromised?
The compromised data included source code stored in over 1,100 GitHub repositories, proprietary code, and customer information, including details from the AWS Secrets Manager and over 1,400 AWS task definition files.
Why Did the company's Security Measures Fail?
The company's security measures failed due to a lack of adequate monitoring of privileged activity, insufficient protective measures for logging data, and not having controls like MFA Delete on S3 Buckets that contained sensitive log data.
What Immediate Impact Did the Breach Have on the company?
The immediate impact included a ransom email demanding 25 BTC and public leak of the incident after the company did not comply, leading to Ubiquiti's stock price plummeting over 20%, resulting in a $4 billion loss to shareholders.
How could this have been prevented?
Preventative measures could have included better monitoring of privileged activity, segregated AWS accounts for log data, enforced multifactor authentication on critical operations, and the utilization of secret scanning services to detect unauthorized cloning and access.
What have we learned from this data breach?
We've learned the importance of stringent security measures even for internal employees, the necessity of securing and monitoring privileged accounts, and the benefits of tools like MFA and logging services that can help prevent insider threats.
Summary of Coverage
The Ubiquiti data breach was executed by an employee who exploited his privileged access to steal sensitive data, manipulatively interacted with company response efforts, and eventually led to large financial losses and legal implications, illustrating the need for comprehensive security strategies against insider threats.