5 minute read

We can all admit that as dreary as 2020 has been, it has at least been consistent in its dreariness. One organisation that can definitely vouch for this is music streaming giant Spotify. In true 2020 style, Spotify wrapped up the end of the year with a data breach on November 12th¹ in which customers’ private account details were exposed.

Now, we may wonder why a hacker would be interested in Spotify accounts. Sadly, it’s not because they want to steal music inspiration from us. The details of targeted private accounts include customer display names, passwords, genders and D.O.B.’s which were leaked to various Spotify business partners. Speaking of business partners, we must also note that a Spotify breach does not solely expose Spotify users but may also put customers on connected devices or platforms at risk. The interconnectedness of our information sharing means that a problem for Spotify could be a problem for us all. This information is harvested by malicious actors to perform credential stuffing attacks, in which stolen passwords are used to uncover more stolen passwords for other sites and applications.

Moreover, this would not be the last experience Spotify had of data breaches in 2020. A week later, a cyber criminal under the guise ‘Daniel’ infiltrated celebrity Spotify accounts including Dua Lipa and Lana Del Rey². Although in this case it was not customers PII that was exposed, it still casts a shadow on Spotify’s claim of prioritising “protecting privacy and maintaining user’s trust” as outlined in an official statement released on the 9th December 2020³.

Enter now: Meterian web scanner, which we’ve used to perform a quick surface scan of http://www.spotify.com to identify what security, stability and licensing risks of open source components are within the website’s codebase. Here we can see that Spotify currently has a security score of 0 out of 100, with 1 known vulnerable component – jquery 2.1.3 which has at least one high and several medium threats as confirmed by NVD⁴. Although we do not know for sure what the unlocked route of entry was in Spotify’s case, this open source entry may well have been it. Subsequently, there is nothing stopping cyber criminals from using this chink in the armour to perpetrate similar breaches in the future. 

Although the vulnerability was discovered on November 12th, Spotify disclosed that it was present within the system from as far back as April. This means that more than 320 million user’s personal data was at risk for at least 7 months prior. Having carried out our own analysis in a matter of minutes, we immediately notice that the vulnerable component in use is actually more than three years out of date! We hope their web and mobile apps get greater scrutiny with regards to the maintenance of their open source dependencies. At Meterian we have developed a security platform that automatically identifies known vulnerabilities in software applications’ open source supply chain. To give our customers the best chance of resolving such issues, the platform can be easily integrated in software development teams’ DevOps process. The continuous nature of DevSecOps empowers development teams to be the first line of defence as they code applications.

Open source components have become fundamental components of applications that are relied upon for basic functionality and security. Since over 90% of applications consist of open source components nowadays, securing this part of a business’ IT and software has become an area that requires greater scrutiny in quality and maintenance.

Meterian helps ensure software applications’ open source supply chain is free from any known vulnerabilities that could compromise the application’s security and stability. Is it worth risking to damage the firm’s reputation and competitive edge in the market?

Curious to see what we can automatically report on your software applications? Detect known vulnerabilities in your open source software supply chain before your own applications become an Achilles heel. Get in touch and see how Meterian can make your company’s application security defence more robust. 

¹ Whittaker, Zack. “Spotify resets passwords after a security bug exposed users’ private account information.” Tech Crunch, 10 Dec 2020, https:// techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/spotify-resets-user-passwords-after-a-bug-exposed-private-account-information/

² “Dua Lipa and other Spotify artists’ pages hacked by Taylor Swift ‘fan’”. BBC News, 2 Dec 2020, https:// bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55158317.

³ “Spotify Breach Notice Letter.” Spotify, 9 Dec 2020, https:// beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20422370-spotify-breach-notice-letter-californiadocx

⁴ U.S. Department of Commerce. “National Vulnerability Database.” https:// nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?adv_search=true&cpe_version=cpe%3A%2Fa%3Ajquery%3Ajquery%3A2.1.3