Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Vulnerabilities

Serious Vulnerability in GitHub Enterprise Earns Researcher $20,000

A security researcher says he has earned $20,000 for a high-severity GitHub Enterprise vulnerability that might have allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary commands.

GitHub Enterprise, the on-premises version of GitHub.com, is designed to make it easier for large enterprise software development teams to collaborate.

A security researcher says he has earned $20,000 for a high-severity GitHub Enterprise vulnerability that might have allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary commands.

GitHub Enterprise, the on-premises version of GitHub.com, is designed to make it easier for large enterprise software development teams to collaborate.

In June, Australia-based software developer and security researcher William Bowling informed GitHub via its bug bounty program that he had identified a potentially serious vulnerability. Successful exploitation may have allowed an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files with malicious content, which could have resulted in arbitrary command execution on Enterprise Server instances.

Exploitation of the vulnerability on Enterprise Server instances involved injecting malicious arguments via git command options.

While in itself this is a serious vulnerability, Bowling and GitHub’s own security team failed to find a way for it to be exploited in a real-world scenario due to a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection mechanism implemented by the company.

“To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would need permission to access repositories within the GitHub Enterprise Server instance. However, due to other protections in place, we could not identify a way to actively exploit this vulnerability,” GitHub explained.

Nevertheless, GitHub assessed that this was a serious vulnerability and decided to award a $20,000 bug bounty, Bowling says. This is the highest reward GitHub is offering for high-severity flaws.

The vulnerability was patched in August with the release of GitHub Enterprise 2.21.4, which also fixes a critical remote code execution vulnerability identified in GitHub Pages.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, said earlier this year that it had paid out a total of more than $1 million through its bug bounty program on HackerOne. The company announced last year that there would be no top limit on critical vulnerability rewards.

Related: New GitHub Features Help Find Vulnerabilities and Secrets in Code

Related: GitHub Announces General Availability of Code Scanning Feature

Related: Hackers Earn Big Bounties for GitHub Enterprise Flaws

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Data Breaches

OpenAI has confirmed a ChatGPT data breach on the same day a security firm reported seeing the use of a component affected by an...

IoT Security

A group of seven security researchers have discovered numerous vulnerabilities in vehicles from 16 car makers, including bugs that allowed them to control car...

Vulnerabilities

A researcher at IOActive discovered that home security systems from SimpliSafe are plagued by a vulnerability that allows tech savvy burglars to remotely disable...

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.

Vulnerabilities

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft warns vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397) could lead to exploitation before an email is viewed in the Preview Pane.

Vulnerabilities

The latest Chrome update brings patches for eight vulnerabilities, including seven reported by external researchers.