"Researchers Claim CircleCI Breach May Affect Other Cloud, Third-Party Applications"
Researchers are warning that the recent CircleCI security incident impacts not just companies using the CircleCI development platform, but also other third-party applications connected with the platform, including GitHub, AWS, GCP, and Azure. After the CircleCI security breach on January 4, when the company advised its users to rotate all secrets stored on the platform, researchers at Mitiga released a report emphasizing the potential impact of the incident on other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud providers that work with the CircleCI platform. Mitiga also released additional guidance on how organizations can detect malicious activities across third-party applications. Users combine the CircleCI platform with other SaaS and cloud service providers used by their organization. For each integration, the CircleCI platform requires authentication tokens and secrets. When a security incident occurs on the CircleCI platform, not only is the CircleCI platform at risk, but so are all other SaaS platforms and cloud providers that are integrated with CircleCI, because their secrets are stored on the CircleCI platform and could be used by a threat actor to bolster their foothold. Mitiga stated that in addition to following CircleCI's original suggestions to rotate all secrets stored on its platform, customers should look for malicious behavior on all their other SaaS and cloud services. For example, when CircleCI authenticates with GitHub using PAT, an SSH key, or locally created private and public keys, users should be on the lookout for suspicious GitHub activity stemming from CircleCI users. This article continues to discuss the CircleCI security breach, the potential impact of this incident, and additional guidance from Mitiga for CircleCI users.