Barracuda Networks was hit with an SQL injection attack over the weekend, with partner contact information stolen.
The security firm admitted it "made a mistake" as its own Web Application Firewall sitting in front of the Barracuda website was "unintentionally placed in passive monitoring mode."
The firewall was offline during a maintenance window, which opened late on 8 April after close of business Pacific time, allowing hackers to begin their attacks.
"Starting Saturday night at approximately 5pm Pacific time (1am GMT), an automated script began crawling our website in search of unvalidated parameters," explained Michael Perone, executive vice president and one of the founders of Barracuda, on a blog.
"After approximately two hours of nonstop attempts, the script discovered a SQL injection vulnerability in a simple PHP script that serves up customer reference case studies by vertical market."
That customer case study database shared the same SQL database used for marketing programmes. The hackers raided the database for names and email addresses of leads, channel partners and some Barracuda employees.
"The attack utilised one IP address initially to do reconnaissance and was joined by another IP address about three hours later," Perone added.
He said the firm was reminded of a number of lessons from the attack, noting "you can't leave a website exposed nowadays for even a day (or less)."
Perone warned against being complacent about coding practices, pointing out vulnerabilities can appear in areas far away from where important data is stored.
"We're glad that the impact will be very minimal, but we're not happy about the amount of bandwidth we've spent assessing what happened, responding to affected parties and putting in place the steps to prevent it in the future," he added.
"We are working to notify everyone whose email addresses were exposed, and we apologise for the inconvenience."
Barracuda wasn't the first firm to get hit by a hack this year. RSA, the security arm of EMC, was targeted by an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT), which saw SecurID token data stolen.
-
Bigger salaries, more burnout: Is the CISO role in crisis?In-depth CISOs are more stressed than ever before – but why is this and what can be done?
-
Cheap cyber crime kits can be bought on the dark web for less than $25News Research from NordVPN shows phishing kits are now widely available on the dark web and via messaging apps like Telegram, and are often selling for less than $25.
-
'You need your own bots' to wage war against rogue AI, warns Varonis VPNews Infosec pros are urged to get serious about data access control and automation to thwart AI breaches
-
CrowdStrike CEO: Embrace AI or be crushed by cyber crooksNews Exec urges infosec bods to adopt next-gen SIEM driven by AI – or risk being outpaced by criminals
-
Microsoft security boss warns AI insecurity 'unprecedented' as tech goes mainstreamNews RSA keynote paints a terrifying picture of billion-plus GenAI users facing innovative criminal tactics
-
APIcalypse Now: Akamai CSO warns of surging attacks and backdoored open source componentsNEWS Apps and APIs bear the brunt as threat actors pivot to living off the land
-
AI is changing the game when it comes to cyber securityNews With AI becoming more of an everyday reality, innovative strategies are needed to counter increasingly sophisticated threats
-
RSAC Chairman urges collaboration to ensure collective defense in securityNews Chairman emphasizes the critical need for cooperation among cyber security experts
-
P2PInfect self-replicating Rust worm discovered attacking Redis instancesNews Researchers believe that the worm could be laying the groundwork for a larger campaign to be launched at some point in the future
-
Redefining modern enterprise storage for mission-critical workloadsWhitepaper Evolving technology to meet the mission-critical needs of the most demanding IT environments
