How I hacked IBM and got full access on many services?

4 min readDec 15, 2020

Hi everyone, today I’m gonna talk about vulnerability that I found it in IBM that allowed me to get full access on many services.

At first, I opened shodan and searched for: Org:'ibm' tomcat

I browsed some servers, but I didn’t find anything interesting, until I found this server and let’s call it x.x.x.x, when I ran ffuf on it, I found “logs” as exposed endpoint. So I opened my browser to visit this endpoint, and as expected, I found more than one folder containing logs file for employees.

I opened some files to make sure that they actually contain information worth reporting, and indeed there were some tokens and emails for IBM employees.
in fact, I checked the tokens but it were expired.
However, these files are not supposed to be exposed, so I opened hackerone to report this bug.

Less than a day later I received this reply..

They want a real exploitation from data in logs to triage my report.

So I opened the logs file to read them, and the thing that intrigued me was that the logs file of the today were there, so I collected all the logs file in one txt file to grep all tokens and tried them.

Note: When I browsed through the logs file, I found admin control URL, and when I clicked on it, it showed me a message saying “There is a missing token”. Then I sent this request to the burp and added a header called “token” and I gave it a random value. Then the response changed to “The token is invalid or expired”. I wanted to say this point so that you know how to I make sure this tokens are working or not.

One of them was valid and I was able to get some information about an employee.

Also I found Credentials for AWS and Azure.

Here I finished interim and I added an update to the report with what I found, and the report was triaged.

After that I decided to dive into the logs file to find something I could present on a separate report. And I found URL of Services DevOps Commander and when I opened it I tried to login with admin as username and pass as password, the surprise was that it was a true credential and I managed to get in.