Researchers have found thousands of publicly exposed and misconfigured container registries and artifact repositories belonging to businesses that could give attackers access to access tokens, encryption keys, and other sensitive information about internal systems. This information can allow attackers to plan and execute attacks against production and development systems, and in some cases even inject malicious code into repositories.
“In many cases artifact management systems and container registries are connected to the internet deliberately and by design allowing anonymous users to connect to various areas in the registry or even to the entire registry,” researchers from cloud security firm Aqua Security said in a report. “This design allows global teams, customers, and other stakeholders access to open-source software that is shared across the company or with outside users. In some cases, however, restricted environments are accidentally shared with anonymous users; in other cases teams accidentally publish sensitive information to public areas.”
