Earlier this month, Honda announced it has suffered a cyber attack on its network. It was affecting its operations around the world: their manufacturing plants have shut down, customer service work has been forced to stop, and their internal communication systems were affected. Additionally, systems outside of Japan were affected due to a “virus” that spread through the network. No further details on the root cause of the attack yet, but at Meterian we have done a quick surface scan of their websites honda.com and www.honda.co.uk. Similar issues were found on both. We’ll focus our blog post on Honda UK’s site.
From the summary report above, we see their website’s security scored 0 From the summary report above, we see their website’s security scored 0 out of 100 because it has 19 vulnerabilities, including jquery 1.4.2 which is vulnerable and outdated. Honda.co.uk’s basic cybersecurity hygiene could be improved by making sure to not launch the website with vulnerable and old components — jquery 1.4.2 is from 2010. Similar issues were found after analysing honda.com.
Although we don’t know if these two components’ weaknesses contributed to the hack of Honda’s systems, while investigations are private, we know every software application is part of a company’s digital estate. Altogether, front end systems (like websites and mobile apps) and back end systems (like databases, servers, APIs that store or access a company’s customer data, intellectual property — the real business logic of the services) make up the digital estate. Any security hole is a vulnerable entry point for cyber criminals to exploit and gain unauthorized access to information or systems to cause damage. Last year in 2019, over 40GB of Honda’s data were breached, exposing details about internal systems and devices on their network. Cyber criminals have strategically targeted Honda again.
There are many strategies to build up an organization’s cyber resilience, including cybersecurity cultural awareness among employees and operational and software development best practices. Meterian helps customers reduce the time to detect, mitigate and resolve issues in applications’ software supply chain. These known vulnerabilities are easy to fix with Meterian because:
1. Safe coding practices can be easily adopted into the software development lifecycle
2. Automated controls fit directly into the software development workflow for continuous monitoring
3. Meterian can be set up to run continuously and prevent such vulnerabilities from going live
Most importantly, developers are empowered to recognise and address the issue early with information at their fingertips. As stewards of software, they can automatically cyber-proof their apps with Meterian so the business can run continuously and avert giving unwanted prying eyes unauthorized access to systems and data.
To this day, Equifax’s mistake for not fixing a known security hole in its software application’s open source component still has consequences since the 2017 mega breach they suffered. See TechRadar’s lackluster review of Equifax’s identity theft protection service, which they did not include in their article “Best identity theft protection for 2020.”
Good practices in cybersecurity can help protect a company’s reputation and growth. As we’ve also seen following the EasyJet hack incident revealed in May, business productivity and customer satisfaction can be adversely affected due to any cyber hack incident. You can read our recent analysis on easyjet.com’s website.
To see if your own public assets have open source vulnerabilities that anyone could find out about (and exploit to enter your systems), try our webscanner or project scanner.
Ship software without vulnerabilities. 