Hackers Breached into Twilio’s AWS; Company Confirms the Attack

In a recent cybersecurity breach incident, Twilio acknowledges that hackers breached into the company’s cloud services (unsecured) and compromised its javascript SDK. The hackers modified the javascript that the company shares with the clients. Twilio, a famous cloud communications company, told a news agency about the incident, after an anonymous whistleblower had reported the issue to the agency. To summarise it all, a cybercriminal breached into Twilio’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) S3 systems. It should be noted that the networks were unsecured and world-writable. The hacker modified the TaskRouter v1.20 SDK and attached some malicious codes designed to tell if the changes worked or not.

In response to the incident, Twilio says that the customer’s privacy safety is the first and foremost concern for the company. Twilio confirms about the malware in the TaskRouter v1.20 SDK, and that it was the work of a 3rd party. The modification of the S3 bucket made the attack possible. According to Twilio, it immediately closed the S3 bucket after knowing the issue and has issued an inquiry into the incident. The company took roundabout 12 hours to deal with the issue. Currently, it has no proof if any of the customer accounts were stolen or not. However, it confirms that the hacker didn’t break into the company’s internal systems to modify coding or data.

 Twilio uses JavaScript SDK as a method to connect your business operations to its task router platforms. The company plans to publish a detailed report about the incident in a few days. However, a friendly suggestion to the users, if you have downloaded or installed an SDK copy, make sure that you have a legit copy.

 “Our investigation of the javascript that was added by the attacker leads us to believe that this attack was opportunistic because of the S3 bucket’s misconfiguration. We believe that the attack was designed to serve malicious advertising to users on mobile devices,” said Twilio to The Register as a response to the incident. It also says, “If you downloaded a copy of v1.20 of the TaskRouter JS SDK between July 19th, 2020 1:12 PM and July 20th, 10:30 PM PDT (UTC-07:00), you should re-download the SDK immediately and replace the old version with the one we currently serve.”