Waydev breach: What is the story behind it?

Waydev breach: What is the story behind it?

Everything that is progressing with time has both harms and charms. So does technological progression has! Since the world is advancing, newer and newer technologies are being introduced which not only benefits humans but also puts them at higher risks. For instance, data storage was a manual task a few decades back. All paperwork and nothing. At that time retrieval of some specific data was a big task. You had to go through tons of files to get what you wanted. But now, modern technology has brought the whole world at a single click! You store data electronically and can retrieve it in seconds. Isn’t that great? But good things never come easy.

As technology is advancing, the rate of cybercrimes is accelerating as well. In 2020, a record-breaking number of startups and organizations faced data breaches. This data is collected for use in data analysis and business decisions and is highly secretive. Cybercriminals hack the companies' websites for unauthorized access to their data sets including sensitive keys, tokens, credentials, etc. One similar case reported in July 2020 was about the Waydev breach. This article brings you the whole story and how the company worked through all this. So, keep reading!

What is Waydev?

Waydev GitPrime emerged as a golden name in the world of analytics tools. This San-Francisco-based platform profits product managers and engineering leaders through easy access to the progress of their software developing workers. It helps them analyze their developers speedily and efficiently and generating quick reports and metrics. In this way, the managers can assess the performance of their employees and work accordingly to increase their productivity. The greatest advantage offered by the tool is that it alleviates the risks of mistakes and hassles during report making and helps to generate significant data for meetings and training sessions without any data requirement from the workers.

Waydev breach

Waydev has always been popular for its industry-leading standards of security. They ensure the highest security of the valuable data of their precious customers. However, 2020 was maybe a bad year for them as they disclosed their security breach. The company officials revealed that some hackers infiltrated their platform and stole the GitHub and GitLab OAuth tokens from their internal database. The cybercriminals forced these tokens for gaining unauthorized access to the codebase and steal their clients' sensitive data.

What happens is that Waydev runs an app listed on the GitHub and GitLab app stores. When a user installs the app, Waydev receives an OAuth token which is used to access the GitHub and GitLab projects of customers. The respective token is stored in the database and used daily for generating analytical reports. The CEO of the company told that the hackers stole these tokens using a blind SQL injection. The story doesn't end here, these hackers used some of the tokens to enter the codebases of some other companies and gain access to their projects.      

Later, when the GitHub security team detected some suspicious activity from a customer’s token, the company learned about the breach! However, the company fixed the susceptibility exploited by the hackers on the same day. They also delisted their original apps and revoked the OAuth token and created new apps. They invalidated the hackers' access effectively which is evidence of their high credibility. Waydev was also successful in getting the IP addresses and emails of the hackers and they released it as well. 

Waydev breach is undoubtedly an unpleasant event for the company but the way they’ve tackled it and recovered from it calls for a big round of applause!