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More security issues prang ICANN site

Kevin Murphy, March 3, 2015, 10:14:39 (UTC), Domain Tech

ICANN has revealed details of a security problem on its web site that could have allowed new gTLD registries to view data belonging to their competitors.
The bug affected its Global Domains Division customer relationship management portal, which registries use to communicate with ICANN on issues related to delegation and launch.
ICANN took GDD down for three days, from when it was reported February 27 until last night, while it closed the hole.
The vulnerability would have enabled authenticated users to see information from other users’ accounts.
ICANN tells me the issue was caused because it had misconfigured some third-party software — I’m guessing the Salesforce.com platform upon which GDD runs.
A spokesperson said that the bug was reported by a user.
No third parties would have been able to exploit it, but ICANN has been coy about whether any it believes any registries used the bug to access their competitors’ accounts.
ICANN has ‘fessed up to about half a dozen crippling security problems in its systems since the launch of the new gTLD program.
Just in the last year, several systems have seen downtime due to vulnerabilities or attacks.
A similar kind of privilege escalation bug took down the Centralized Zone Data Service last April.
The RADAR service for registrars was offline for two weeks after being hacked last May.
A phishing attack against ICANN staff in December enabled hackers to view information not normally available to the public.


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Comments (1)

  1. Reg says:

    Looks like the same explanation we got for the TAS issue—and that was only reported when someone notified ICANN that they could see another user’s information. Seems likely that that’s what happened here, too.

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