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Yakir Kadkoda

Yakir Kadkoda is the Director of Security Research at Aqua’s research team, Team Nautilus. He specializes in vulnerability research, uncovering and analyzing emerging security threats and attack vectors in cloud-native environments, supply chain security, and open-source projects. Before joining Aqua, Yakir worked as a red teamer. He has presented his cybersecurity research at leading industry conferences, including Black Hat (USA, EU, Asia), DEF CON, RSAC, SecTor, CloudNativeSecurityCon, STACK, INTENT, and more

Blog Posts by Yakir Kadkoda

New npm Flaws Let Attackers Better Target Packages for Account Takeover

For the past few years, cybercriminals have been hijacking popular npm packages by taking over maintainers’ accounts. As part of our research at Team Nautilus, we discovered two flaws in the npm platform related to two-factor authentication (2FA). An attacker can use these flaws to target npm packages for account takeover attacks. We reported these …

Package Planting: Are You [Unknowingly] Maintaining Poisoned Packages?

Aqua’s Team Nautilus found a logical flaw in npm that allows threat actors to masquerade a malicious package as legitimate and trick unsuspecting developers into installing it. Up until recently, npm allowed adding anyone as a maintainer of the package without notifying these users or getting their consent. Since you could assign poisoned packages under …

Public Travis CI Logs (Still) Expose Users to Cyber Attacks

In our latest research, we at Team Nautilus found that tens of thousands of user tokens are exposed via the Travis CI API, which allows anyone to access historical clear-text logs. More than 770 million logs of free tier users are available, from which you can easily extract tokens, secrets, and other credentials associated with …

CVE-2022-32223 Discovery: DLL Hijacking via npm CLI

Aqua Team Nautilus recently discovered that all Node.js versions earlier than 16.16.0 (LTS) and 14.20.0 on Windows are vulnerable to dynamic link library (DLL) hijacking if OpenSSL is installed on the host. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to escalate their privileges and establish persistence in a target environment. The vulnerability can also provide another way …

Threat Alert: Private npm Packages Disclosed via Timing Attacks

We at Aqua Nautilus have discovered that npm’s API allows threat actors to execute a timing attack that can detect whether private packages exist on the package manager. By creating a list of possible package names, threat actors can detect organizations’ scoped private packages and then masquerade public packages, tricking employees and users into downloading …

Can You Trust Your VSCode Extensions?

Aqua Nautilus researchers have recently discovered that attackers can easily impersonate popular Visual Studio Code extensions and trick unknowing developers into downloading them. In original vulnerability research, we’ve uncovered a new attack method which could act as an entry point for an attack on many organizations. We’ve also discovered that some extensions may have already …

CorePlague: Critical Vulnerabilities in Jenkins Server Lead to RCE

Aqua Nautilus researchers have discovered a chain of critical vulnerabilities, dubbed CorePlague, in the widely used Jenkins Server and Update Center (CVE-2023-27898, CVE-2023-27905). Exploiting these vulnerabilities could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim’s Jenkins server, potentially leading to a complete compromise of the Jenkins server. Furthermore, these vulnerabilities could be exploited …

GitHub Dataset Research Reveals Millions Potentially Vulnerable to RepoJacking

Millions of GitHub repositories are potentially vulnerable to RepoJacking. New research by Aqua Nautilus sheds light on the extent of RepoJacking, which if exploited may lead to code execution on organizations’ internal environments or on their customers’ environments. As part of our research, we found an enormous source of data that allowed us to sample …

PowerHell: Active Flaws in PowerShell Gallery Expose Users to Attacks

Recent findings by Aqua Nautilus have exposed significant flaws that are still active in the PowerShell Gallery’s policy regarding package names and owners. These flaws make typosquatting attacks inevitable in this registry, while also making it extremely difficult for users to identify the true owner of a package. Consequently, these flaws pave the way for …

New Vulnerability in curl and libcurl Could Lead to Heap Buffer Overflow

A new high severity vulnerability (CVE-2023-38545) was published today along with a technical blog around the popular open source project, curl. This vulnerability could potentially, under various conditions, cause a heap overflow, which might lead to unexpected behavior, crashes, or potentially code execution. Therefore, the developer community should pay extra attention to this vulnerability and …

50 Shades of Vulnerabilities: Uncovering Flaws in Open-Source Vulnerability Disclosures

Aqua Nautilus researchers evaluated the vulnerability disclosure process for tens of thousands of open-source projects and found flaws in the process. These flaws allowed harvesting the vulnerabilities before they were patched and announced. This could enable attackers to exploit security holes before the project’s users are alerted.

The Ticking Supply Chain Attack Bomb of Exposed Kubernetes Secrets

Exposed Kubernetes secrets pose a critical threat of supply chain attack. Aqua Nautilus researchers found that the exposed Kubernetes secrets of hundreds of organizations and open-source projects allow access to sensitive environments in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and open a severe supply chain attack threat. Among the companies were SAP’s Artifacts management system …

Deceptive Deprecation: The Truth About npm Deprecated Packages

Researchers at Aqua Nautilus found that 8.2% percent of the most downloaded npm packages are officially deprecated, but due to inconsistent practices in handling package dependencies, the real number is much larger, closer to 21.2%. Moreover, some package maintainers, when confronted with security flaws, deprecate their packages instead of reporting them, getting a CVE assigned …

Employee Personal GitHub Repos Expose Internal Azure and Red Hat Secrets

What happens when employees at some of the world’s largest organizations like Microsoft and RedHat use personal GitHub repos for their side projects? They can unknowingly expose corporate secrets and credentials opening the doors for a security incident. Unfortunately, this isn’t just a hypothetical situation.

Phantom Secrets: Undetected Secrets Expose Major Corporations

For years, we’ve been educating developers not to hard-code secrets into their code. Now it turns out that even doing this once might permanently expose that secret, even after its apparent removal – and worse, most secrets scanning methods will miss it. Our research found that almost 18% of secrets might be overlooked.

TrailShark: Understanding AWS API and Service Interactions

In this blog, we introduce TrailShark, a plugin that connects Wireshark with AWS CloudTrail logs. This open-source tool was developed as part of the “Bucket Monopoly” research, during which we identified six vulnerabilities in AWS by tracking service interactions and internal API calls. These vulnerabilities range from remote code execution (RCE) and full-service user takeover …

Bucket Monopoly: Breaching AWS Accounts Through Shadow Resources

During February 2024, we discovered critical vulnerabilities in six AWS services. The impact of these vulnerabilities range between remote code execution (RCE), full-service user takeover (which might provide powerful administrative access), manipulation of AI modules, exposing sensitive data, data exfiltration and denial of service.

AWS CDK Risk: Exploiting a Missing S3 Bucket Allowed Account Takeover

In June 2024, we uncovered a security issue related to the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), an open-source project. This discovery adds to the six other vulnerabilities we discovered within AWS services. The impact of this issue could, in certain scenarios (outlined in the blog), allow an attacker to gain administrative access to a target AWS account, …

300,000+ Prometheus Servers and Exporters Exposed to DoS Attacks

In this research, we uncovered several vulnerabilities and security flaws within the Prometheus ecosystem. These findings span across three major areas: information disclosure, denial-of-service (DoS), and code execution. We found that exposed Prometheus servers or exporters, often lacking proper authentication, allowed attackers to easily gather sensitive information, such as credentials and API keys.

OPA Gatekeeper Bypass Reveals Risks in Kubernetes Policy Engines

Implementing Kubernetes securely can be a daunting task. Fortunately, there are tools in the K8s toolshed that provide out-of-the-box solutions using a single click. One such tools is OPA Gatekeeper. It is a great out-of-the-box security checkpoint to enforce security policies on Kubernetes. But are users using it correctly? Do they understand its limitations? Our …

Shadow Roles: AWS Defaults Can Open the Door to Service Takeover

What if the biggest risk to your cloud environment wasn’t a misconfiguration you made, but one baked into the defaults? Our research uncovered security concerns in the deployment of resources within a few AWS services, specifically in the default AWS service roles. These roles, often created automatically or recommended during setup, grant overly broad permissions, …

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