A young hacker from the Czech Republic discovered a security hole in one of the applications Google support.
If exploited by someone with malicious intent, the bug could allow hackers to steal Google employees' cookies for internal applications and take over their accounts. Then they could launch extremely convincing phishing attempts, which would grant them access in many other parts of Google's internal network.
The security loophole was discovered by researcher Thomas Orlita in February 2019. It was fixed in mid-April, but has only just been published.
Η vulnerability was a cross-site scripting (XSS), and was found on Google's invoicing portal, a public domain that Google redirects business users of the platform to submit invoices.
Most cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are not considered as dangerous but there are cases that can lead to very serious problems.
One of these cases was discovery of Orlita. The researcher said that a malicious user could upload their own files to the Google Invoice Submission Portal, via Upload Invoice.
Using a proxy the attacker could prevent the Google Invoice Submission Portal from changing the PDF document (after the submission and validation of the form) and modifying it into HTML, with malicious XSS load.
The malicious document would be stored in Google's billing backend and wait for someone to open it.
“The XSS runs on a subdomain of googleplex.com and while the worker is logged in, the attacker can access the table control of the subdomain from where invoices can be viewed and managed," Orlita told ZDNet.
"Depending on how cookies are configured on googleplex.com, it may be possible to access other internal applications hosted on this domain," the researcher added.
So since most of Google's internal applications are hosted on the googleplex.com domain, this gives attackers a lot of possibilities.
Of course, like most security vulnerabilities XSS, the risk of error depends on the hacker's skill level, and his ability to carry out more complex attacks.
For more technical details you can read Orlita publication.
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