Recent research uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the Prometheus ecosystem, exposing servers and exporters to severe security risks, which include information disclosure, denial-of-service (DoS), and remote code execution.Â
Attackers can exploit exposed Prometheus servers to steal sensitive information, launch DoS attacks, and execute malicious code, as the findings emphasize the urgent need to secure Prometheus deployments by restricting public access and implementing robust authentication and authorization mechanisms.
Prometheus, a versatile monitoring solution, efficiently collects and stores time-series metrics from diverse sources, where exporters, specialized tools, bridge the gap between systems that don’t natively expose Prometheus-compatible metrics and the Prometheus server.
It enables comprehensive monitoring of complex environments, including Kubernetes clusters, while PromQL, a powerful query language, empowers users to analyze real-time data and identify potential issues.
A Shodan analysis revealed over 336,000 internet-exposed Prometheus servers and exporters, despite warnings in the documentation about potential security risks.
This indicates a significant number of practitioners are exposing these systems without adequate authentication, leaving them vulnerable to unauthorized access and potential data breaches.
Prometheus servers and exporters, when exposed to the public internet without authentication, pose significant security risks. Attackers can query these systems to gather sensitive information such as credentials, passwords, and API keys.
While exposed metrics endpoints can reveal internal API endpoints, subdomains, Docker registries, and other valuable information, which allows attackers to expand their attack surface and potentially compromise sensitive systems.
The security risks associated with exposing the /debug/pprof endpoint in Prometheus components, which were designed for performance profiling and can be exploited by attackers to launch Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.
By sending malicious requests to specific endpoints, attackers can exhaust system resources, leading to performance degradation, service instability, or even complete system outages.
The Aqua research provides a proof-of-concept script demonstrating the exploitability of this vulnerability and its impact on both host-level and pod-level deployments.Â
Researchers discovered a RepoJacking vulnerability in several Prometheus exporters listed in official documentation, which allows attackers to take over abandoned or renamed GitHub repositories with the same names as the exporters.Â
By creating malicious versions under those names, attackers can trick users into deploying them, leading to remote code execution on unsuspecting systems.
There are significant vulnerabilities in the Prometheus stack, including the risks of exposing unauthenticated servers and exporters to the internet, which can lead to sensitive data leaks, denial-of-service attacks, and potential remote code execution.Â
To mitigate these risks, implement robust authentication and authorization mechanisms, limit external exposure, secure debugging endpoints, enforce resource limitations, and carefully vet open-source dependencies to prevent supply chain attacks.
