Security Experts:

Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Vulnerabilities

Vulnerability Provided Access to Toyota Supplier Management Network

Security researcher finds severe vulnerability providing system admin access to Toyota’s global supplier management network.

A severe vulnerability in the web portal of Toyota’s global supplier management network allowed a security researcher to gain access to sensitive information.

The issue was identified by US-based researcher Eaton Zveare in Toyota’s Global Supplier Preparation Information Management System (GSPIMS), a web portal that provides Toyota employees and suppliers with access to ongoing projects, surveys, information on purchases, and more.

The issue, Zveare says, was related to the implementation of JWT (JSON Web Token) authentication and could allow access to any account to anyone using a valid email address.

Essentially, JWT is a session token that is typically generated when logging in to a website, and which is then used to authenticate the user to secure sections of the website or APIs.

What the researcher discovered was that Toyota’s GSPIMS contained a function that would allow users to generate a JWT based on the provided email address, without requiring a password.

With corporate Toyota email addresses easy to guess – as they are using the format [email protected] – the researcher was able to guess an email address by searching the internet for Toyota employees that might be involved in the supply chain.

Next, Zveare used that email address to generate a valid JWT and used it to access the GSPIMS. After some reconnaissance on the portal, he discovered an account with system administrator privileges and used the same method to access it.

The system admin account, the researcher says, provided access to everything on the portal, including information on over 14,000 user accounts, control over roles each account could have, details on all available projects, surveys, and various classified documents.

According to the researcher, the GSPIMS also provides the system admin with the option to log in as any of the available 14,000 users, to supervise their activities. The function that generates the JWT based on email address was apparently implemented to enable this option, but it also created a backdoor into the network.

An attacker with system admin access to GSPIMS could have created a rogue account for persistence, exfiltrated all available data, tampered with or deleted the data, and fetched the corporate email and roles of all 14,000 user accounts to target them in phishing attacks.

The researcher reported the vulnerability to Toyota on November 3, 2022. The car maker patched the issue shortly after.

Related: Toyota Discloses Data Breach Impacting Source Code, Customer Email Addresses

Related: Toyota’s Japan Production Halted Over Suspected Cyberattack

Related: Vulnerabilities Expose Lexus, Toyota Cars to Hacker Attacks

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

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 this webinar to learn best practices that organizations can use to improve both their resilience to new threats and their response times to incidents.

Register

Join this live webinar as we explore the potential security threats that can arise when third parties are granted access to a sensitive data or systems.

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...

Application Security

Drupal released updates that resolve four vulnerabilities in Drupal core and three plugins.

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...

Vulnerabilities

Apple has released updates for macOS, iOS and Safari and they all include a WebKit patch for a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-23529.

Cloud Security

VMware vRealize Log Insight vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to take full control of a target system.

Application Security

A CSRF vulnerability in the source control management (SCM) service Kudu could be exploited to achieve remote code execution in multiple Azure services.

IoT Security

Lexmark warns of a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability impacting over 120 printer models, for which PoC code has been published.

Vulnerabilities

GoAnywhere MFT users warned about a zero-day remote code injection exploit that can be targeted directly from the internet