As reported by The Hacker News, security researchers Shubham Shah and Sam Curry recently demonstrated how a combination of ignored hardening guidelines and default credentials allowed them to take over customer accounts for two major automakers, ultimately unlocking and starting connected vehicles remotely. While the media focus has been on the "car hacking" aspect, the underlying technical failure is a textbook example of identity and access management (IAM) infrastructure misconfiguration that plagues enterprises across every sector.

Security Impact: As reported by The Hacker News, security researchers Shubham Shah and Sam Curry recently demonstrated how a combination of ignored hardening guidelines and default credentials allowed them to take over customer accounts for two major automakers, ultimately unlocking and starting connected vehicles remotely.

Beyond the Headline: The Anatomy of an IAM Failure

The exploit chain did not require a complex zero-day. Instead, it relied on a failure to follow vendor documentation. The affected automakers utilized ForgeRock (now Ping Identity), a heavyweight enterprise identity platform. The researchers exploited the OpenIDM component, which ships with an Apache Felix-based administrative console. ForgeRock’s own hardening guides explicitly mandate removing or securing this console before production deployment. Left exposed with the default admin:admin credentials, it became the initial foothold.

The most dangerous vulnerabilities are often not complex memory corruptions, but simple configuration oversights left unpatched in production environments.

The Path Normalization Bypass

What makes this case noteworthy is how the researchers reached the console. The administrative interface was theoretically blocked from the internet by an edge proxy. However, the edge layer and the backend Java server interpreted URL paths differently. By manipulating encoded slashes and path characters, the researchers slipped past the edge protection, which treated the request as a static file, while the backend routed it directly to the exposed admin console. This is a classic path normalization or "double-fetch" vulnerability, highlighting the inherent danger of relying solely on edge appliances to protect sensitive internal interfaces.

Physical Safety Meets Digital Identity

Once inside the Apache Felix console, the researchers leveraged built-in scheduling features to execute arbitrary code, pivot to the customer database, and alter account credentials. By taking over a legitimate account, they inherited its OAuth tokens, granting them the same API access as the mobile app. Because modern connected vehicles treat the mobile app as a digital key, this identity compromise directly translated to physical access—unlocking doors and starting engines.

This incident underscores a critical shift in threat modeling: identity is now the perimeter, and for connected cars, identity is a physical safety mechanism. When IAM infrastructure fails, the blast radius extends beyond data exfiltration to potential physical harm.

Shield53 Recommendations

Organizations deploying complex IAM stacks or connected IoT/automotive platforms must treat identity infrastructure as tier-0 critical assets. Defenders should immediately act on the following:

Shield53 Recommendations
Audit IAM Infrastructure: Map all identity platforms (ForgeRock, Okta, Keycloak) and verify that all vendor hardening guides have been strictly followed. Explicitly check for and remove default administrative consoles.
Eliminate Default Credentials: Enforce a strict zero-trust policy for credentials. No service, console, or API should ever deploy with default passwords like admin:admin.
Test Edge-to-Backend Parsing: Do not assume your WAF or reverse proxy fully protects internal routes. Test for path normalization differentials (e.g., %2f, double encoding) between your edge layers and backend application servers.
Segment Critical Interfaces: Administrative consoles for IAM systems should not be reachable from the public internet under any circumstances. Place them on isolated management networks requiring VPN or bastion host access.
Implement Behavioral Monitoring: Monitor for anomalous API token generation or sudden changes to account email addresses, which were the pivoting points in this attack.

While the vendors patched this specific issue within two hours of notification, the systemic issue of misconfigured identity infrastructure remains an industry-wide challenge. Security teams must prioritize configuration management over chasing exotic zero-days.