How I Discovered a Web Cache Deception Attack Exposing PII — A Real-World Case Study
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Summary
Penetration tester Pratik Dabhi discovered that the caching mechanism of a multinational company’s web application was misconfigured, leading to the exposure of personally identifiable information (PII).
Dabhi highlights this type of vulnerability, which he calls a “web cache deception attack”, is one that takes advantage of caching mechanisms within web servers and CDNs due to misconfiguration.
These systems are designed to cache files to improve performance, but instead, they can inadvertently store dynamic content that should only be visible to authenticated users, thus exposing private data.
Dabhi will not reveal the name of the company, but urges developers to check how their caching mechanisms are set up to ensure this type of data leak does not occur.