Security incident recap: What happened & what’s being done to prevent it in the future

On May 3rd, 2020, at approximately 03:00 am (UTC +2), a remote attacker managed to exploit a critical vulnerability in a 3rd party system that is a crucial part of Post Affiliate Pro’s infrastructure.

Incident summary

The attack investigation lasted approximately 16 hours to ensure our customer’s data was safe. There’s no indication that the customer’s data was exploited, tampered with, or leaked. According to our insights, the attacker’s goal was to mine cryptocurrencies. 

After the attack was confirmed, our support team immediately shut down most of our servers to prevent any further data vulnerability. The issue was escalated to system admins, as well as top management, and immediate steps were taken to mitigate the attack.

Attack mitigation steps

The following steps were taken to mitigate the attack:

• Access to Salt masters was limited by firewall rules
• Patches provided by SaltStack and additional custom patches were applied

Preventative actions

To ensure that an incident like this won’t happen again, our teams implemented:

• Additional monitoring to identify and patch similar vulnerabilities
• Complete review and improvement of internal emergency  procedures to ensure a faster reaction time
• Additional layers of protection to reduce a hacker’s ability to maneuver as they work their way through different levels of defense mechanisms

FAQ

We apologize

We apologize for any inconvenience this attack may have caused for your business. We appreciate your patience and understanding and hope to make it up to you with years of excellent service.