Hacking India's largest automaker: Tata Motors

https://eaton-works.com/2025/10/28/tata-motors-hack/

by EatonZ • 9 months ago

273 99 9 months ago

speckx• 9 months ago

The fact that they put their AWS secret keys on their website is incredible.

Sending it with AES encryption(with the key that the client has access to) makes it even worse, as someone knew this shouldn't be shared to client yet they shared it anyway.

horns4lyfe• 9 months ago

If you’ve ever worked with Indian outsourcing firms it’s not

quickthrowman• 9 months ago

That’s exactly the kind of work I’d expect from TCS, I’m not sure why you are surprised.

darth_avocado• 9 months ago

Even more importantly, why do the root keys expose EVERYTHING? Do they just have one account for all of their infra?

Linkd• 9 months ago

The fact that it's nicely commented is even more so. Check out the other environment configs commented out, are they doing this by hand? Wild.

ksynwa• 9 months ago

So the author got nothing but a thank you out of it? That's a shame.

tehlike• 9 months ago

At least there was a "thank you".

Some go on to sue such researchers.

paxys2• 9 months ago

Yup, they said thank you and took action only because this was a US-based researcher. Had any Indian dared to do this they'd be in for a world of pain. Not through a lawsuit, but criminal charges.

DaSHacka• 9 months ago

Typical 'payout' for ""responsible"" disclosure.

sharadov2• 9 months ago

Security for most Indian companies - even conglomerates is a joke.

Look at the websites - most look like they've not been upgraded since the 90s, with endless popups

Ylpertnodi• 9 months ago

endless popups

Ypu get popups? What are you using to browse? IE5?

I sometimes get 'this site is trying to open another window -allow/ block?': answer is always 'No'.

fakedang2• 9 months ago

Not ad popups, site UI popups.

Another example, financial services publicly traded company with a recent 99% profit decline:

https://www.emkayglobal.com/

renewiltord• 9 months ago

In site modals.

alephnerd10• 9 months ago

It's a side effect of pay. Like every other company, you get what you pay for, and for organizations that view web security as a [edit:] Cost Center (eg. Tata Motors) there's no incentive to pay market rate for a Security Engineer - who in India can now demand $60k-100k TCs.

Heck, firms that provide offensive security capabilities to Indian PDs can pay $40k-50k after poaching a junior pentester or exploit developer from a PD.

spelk• 9 months ago

Sorry to be pedantic but I think you mean 'cost center', not loss leader (something sold at a loss to attract customers into your ecosystem/store). You are entirely right otherwise.

vrinsd• 9 months ago

I understand why someone might this this is a pay issue, but it's goes beyond that.

Culturually, doing something "well"(quality oriented, mindful of end-users) vs. "got it done" (transaction, pragmatic way of looking at things) is the heart of why outsourcing to many different geographical areas (India included) often results in something different than expected.

Also condemning every one in one part of the world as thinking one way is certainly not fair or true, but there are definitely unmistakable trends.

f311a• 9 months ago

$60k-100k TC

Really? I think your numbers for the local marker are overestimated.

benced• 9 months ago

I do also wonder if this is because Indian security engineers can get good remote jobs working for American companies who are much more profitable than Indian companies. It places non-startup Indian companies in an odd position.

spaceman_20202• 9 months ago

The customer portal of India's largest insurer with a marketcap of $63B has literally not changed even once in the 14 years that I've been using it to pay my policy premiums

thelastgallon• 9 months ago

Related: Jaguar Land Rover hack cost UK economy an estimated $2.5 billion, report says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45668008

The 'tech' for both these is by guess who? TCS!

Edit: For those who don't know the relation. Tata[1] is a conglomerate, which owns both Tata Motors (Jaguar, Land Rover) and also TCS (Tata Consultancy Services)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Group

cjs_ac• 9 months ago

TCS also contracts for Marks & Spencer, and the Co-op, both of which were also taken offline by hacking earlier this year.

Mistletoe• 9 months ago

At what point is it more believable that these are inside jobs done on purpose vs. incompetence? I guess that’s just Hanlon’s Razor though.

fencepost2• 9 months ago

Note that M&S dropped TCS in July following the recovery. https://www.ft.com/content/289ec371-2ed4-425a-9bd0-c34e6db39... and elsewhere.

spaceman_20202• 9 months ago

Very realistically, why shouldn't these developers be replaced by AI? The anti-AI argument I've always seen here is that AI is bad at security. But human developers at orgs like TCS don't seem...any better?

lazide• 9 months ago

The issue with folks like TCS is organizational. They don’t have to be this terrible, they intentionally structure what they are doing so their end product is terrible this way.

And people hire them and pay them for it!

The real issue is the last part. It’s why they can also get away with what they do.

Maybe they’ll replace their line devs with AI, but Indian devs are pretty cheap and are much more satisfying to yell at by Indian managers, so….

rdtsc• 9 months ago

October 23, 2023: They confirm receipt and are working on taking action. After this date and up until January 2, 2024, there were various back and forth emails trying to get Tata Motors to revoke the AWS keys. I am not sure if something was lost in translation, but it took a lot of pestering and specific instructions to get it done.

Wow, they had to go out of their way and plead with Tata Motors to fix their own shit. I can only admire their patience. Can't say I would be that patient.

spprashant• 9 months ago

This is embarrassing.

fakedang2• 9 months ago

I'll just leave this here:

September 1, 2023: Tata Motors shared with CERT-IN (who then shared with me) that the issues are remediated. September 3, 2023: I confirm only 2/4 issues were remediated and the AWS keys were still present on the websites, and active. October 22, 2023: After no updates and finding the AWS issues still not remediated, I send over some more specific steps on what must be done. October 23, 2023: They confirm receipt and are working on taking action. After this date and up until January 2, 2024, there were various back and forth emails trying to get Tata Motors to revoke the AWS keys. I am not sure if something was lost in translation, but it took a lot of pestering and specific instructions to get it done.

Stay classy TCS.

paxys2• 9 months ago

This shouldn't be a surprise for anyone who has worked with TCS contractors in the past.

yahoozoo• 9 months ago

Superpower by 2027.

debarshri• 9 months ago

This is a pessimistic comment.

I'm a cofounder of a data and identity security startup operating specifically in APAC. Data security in india a joke.

I would argue even with DPDPA, RBI C-Site and cyber resilience framework from SEBI, it is just going to not happen here.

The list PAN card the blog is taking about is probably already leaked by some other services.

The recent flipkart cash on delivery scams [1] are example of how your personal information is just out there in wild in india, open for exploitation.

There are lot of who do security in good faith (often driven by compliance) and lot of them are our customers too but I hope to see rest of indian tech ecosystem take security seriously.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckFlipkart/comments/1hhrw9w/what_...

alephnerd10• 9 months ago

I've dealt with Indian companies for security sales and I'd say the newer generation of companies like Razorpay (YC W15) are decent at SecOps, but the older and more established companies suck at it and will continue to suck at it until there is a tangible regulatory incentive to enhance security postures.

It also appears to be a side effect of compensation - why would mid-career security professional want to earn ₹15 LPA TC working for a legacy corporation if they have the skills to land at a security MNC that can afford to pay ₹35-50 LPA in TC.

Ofc, it's us foreign investors who are able to afford those higher TCs ;) - especially if we can convert someone who was mid-career in the US but had to return to India due to family or visa issues.

It reminds me of how the Israeli security scene was 10-15 years ago, with similar problems around compensation and brain drain to MNC offices.

connectsnk• 9 months ago

Are there any open source tools that scans the code and detects such gaffes

UltraMagnus• 9 months ago

Not open source, but I have used this before, and they have a very generous free tier: https://www.gitguardian.com/monitor-internal-repositories-fo...

You install their Github app and give them access to your Github repo (private repos are ok too) and they run a Github workflow when each PR is submitted scanning for secrets that should not be in the code. Really happy with how their product works.

unsungNovelty• 9 months ago

If you weren't aware of it... There is a world of static application security tools (SAST) which can help you. Add them to your text editor/ci/cd to use them.

https://owasp.org/www-community/Source_Code_Analysis_Tools

vivzkestrel• 9 months ago

stupid question, can we not make a regex for searching API keys for particular APIs and do a brute force scan across the internet

richbell• 9 months ago

There are a number of products and open source tools that do this. Look up "secret scanning".

EatonZ2• 9 months ago

TruffleHog: https://trufflesecurity.com/trufflehog

I worked for them a little bit and their product is really impressive and works great.

heretoread9000• 9 months ago

trufflehog is a good starting point, then bake in your own simple regex into your github actions or equivalent and make it part of your test suite

driverdan• 9 months ago

I'm curious, why wait so long to publish this? The incident was in 2023.

coldfoundry• 9 months ago

This might be the first time I felt disappointed and sad reading an article like this. The commented username and password felt like something from an early 2000s tv show with the tech guy doing “hacking”.

Wonder how many others stumbled upon this prior, and makes me also wonder how many other sites have things like this hidden in plain sight. Insane.

alephnerd10• 9 months ago

This may look "boring" or "uninspired" but this is what real cybersecurity and "hacking" looks like.

In most cases, security and QA are essentially two sides of the same coin - and this is why I get pissed when devs treat testing and QA as bulls**t, becuase even a relatively simple XSS attack or cred misconfig can have a massive impact.

hvb2• 9 months ago

This has nothing to do with testing. This is a lack of training.

I would say they need to 'think like an attacker' at least some of the time. But this is still too high of a bar.

I think this is really a problem of rewarding people when they finish things. One way or the other. It works, so on to the next project...

hannofcart• 9 months ago

As recently seen with Intel, there seems to be a trend where developers will do this pointless client-side decryption. When the client has the key, it’s strange that anyone would think that would be secure.

I stay and work in India. Yesterday, as part of a VAPT audit by a third party auditor, the auditors "recommended" that we do exactly this. I wonder if this directive comes as part of some outdated cyber security guidelines that are passed around here? Not entirely sure.

When I asked them about how I'd pass the secret to the client to do the client side encryption/decryption without that key being accessible to someone who is able to MITM intercept our HTTPS only API calls anyway, the guy basically couldn't understand my question and fumbled around in his 'Burp' suite pointing exasperatedly to how he is able to see the JSON body in POST requests.

Most of the security people we've met here, from what I can tell are really clueless. Internally, we call these guys "burp babies" (worse than "script kiddies") who just seem to know how to follow some cookie cutter instructions on using the Burp suite.

sayamqazi• 9 months ago

I am a pretty cookie cutter developer. We just make glorified CRUDs and I have tried to convince the engineering director hundreds of times that "There is no use of encrypting and decrypting localstorage with a key thats sitting right inside the client code." Yet they keep insisting on it in the code-quality checklist.

overtomanu• 9 months ago

I guess they think it results in some kind of security by obscurity... Maybe ward off lazy beginner hackers..

Royce-CMR• 9 months ago

My guess - he’s avoiding political risk. If something goes bad, it’s better to say “it was encrypted but they got the keys” than to defend data wasn’t encrypted.

It’s semantics in terms of actual difference to an attacker, but it’s a world of difference when explaining to executives.

tonyhart7• 9 months ago

lmao

burp suite babies is crazy work

iainmerrick• 9 months ago

You’re right, of course, but this reminds me of when Chrome didn’t obscure your passwords when looking at its autofill settings. The developers argued that it would just be security by obscurity -- if somebody has access to your computer when it’s unlocked, they can do anything they want, so obscuring your passwords does nothing.

The counter-argument is, even if it’s not perfectly secure, that extra bit of friction before you can see the passwords is useful, and may just save your bacon if a casual thief has access to your computer for a few seconds.

The Chrome team eventually saw sense and added some client-side password protection.

As long as you don’t only have client-side protections, of course (and maybe your clueless auditors were making that mistake).

halJordan2• 9 months ago

He's definitely wrong. If you want to see why this is wrong you should look at what Kaspersky had to do to unravel Operation Triangulation. They did, eventually, succeed but the absolute nightmare they went through should simply inform you why its a good thing.

EatonZ2• 9 months ago

Appreciate the insight!

halJordan2• 9 months ago

Assuming that youve been mitm'd is a different violation of trust. And when you break your own assumptions, well of course nothing makes sense. Were i the burp baby i would've asked why you think we should not defend against literally any other side channel because maybe they broke tls.

qwertytyyuu• 9 months ago

Woah Tata is everywhere, weren't they also the biggest youtube channel?

sreetamdas• 9 months ago

I believe you're talking about T-Series? pretty sure they are not related

defraudbah• 9 months ago

give this Uri Said by Deepak Gupta

pkphilip• 9 months ago

If there any any TCS employees on Hackernews, please show this post to your management. This is beyond embarrassing on so many levels.

zkmon3• 9 months ago

Users in India wouldn't care that much about privacy of their data as much as the Western folks do. This reduces the importance of this whole episode and I don't think this news flashed across TV screens or caused a debate anywhere.

India is a karma society. Karma doesn't mean upvotes. It means, you get what you destined for, or what you deserve. People take things in their stride and keep moving, while keeping their eyes wide open. When you are moving through a jungle, there is no point in blaming thorns or getting angry on wild animals.

inavida2• 9 months ago

So basically you are saying that India is a society that is still soaked in an ideology that justifies the special privileges of temple staff and tells peasants that being a sharecropper in a rent for protection racket is their own fault, so hand it over, and moreso that you approve. You sound like every temple staff worker ever. Grow up.

zkmon3• 9 months ago

Go out into rural India and ask someone if they care about someone knowing their contact details. Same with 90% of city folks. By the way, growing up may not be so cool. For you.

never_inline2• 9 months ago

You foreigners read first few paragraphs of wikipedia article about caste and never stopped talking about it.

In practice most of Brahmins have been peasant agriculturists, teachers and clerics for centuries, and temple priests have been deservedly pretty poor unless they also had inherited land.

The current PM of India is from what is considered as "other backward caste".

Just noting it, so that your overly reductive american journalism won't convince you that India is a feudalist society where 5% "temple staff" rule over the 95% peasants or whatever. The caste system is mostly limited to ritual avtism and some nepotism (which happens among boomers across all castes but younger ones don't care).

never_inline2• 9 months ago

The kind of cope certain people come up with to justify the faults (and lack of basic living standards) of a civilization are insane.

India is not a "karma" society, India is a 'jugaad' society where everyone does just enough to get by. The lack of civilizational will power to fix things which slightly harm the entrenched elite is very well known. (case in point - the recent stray dogs issue where the life of common man was put in danger because some rich animal welfare aunties protested against it).

Thankfully Indian gen Z at least accepts these problems. Look at the memes on the gen Z spaces. Internet has let them know that living standards can be much better and other countries have risen from similar poverty levels. So there's some hope.

You can't keep doing this 'india is not for beginners' forever.

zkmon3• 9 months ago

"jugaad" is very close to what I stated - not worrying too much about privacy, as it doesn't have immediate material implications. "Karma" philosophy helps it by believing in destiny, instead of blaming one's own lackings and worrying.

inavida2• 9 months ago

Well said. I'm too offended by justification of it not to scold the author of the original comment, but the aggressive assumptions in the replies made it worthwhile. I share your guarded hope. I'm fairly sure India will put people like this in their place eventually.

chisleu• 9 months ago

Total tangent, but I got to ride in some of these on a recent trip to India and I was really impressed with the build quality and utilitarian usefulness of the design.

fred_is_fred• 9 months ago

He would have had better results if he said "do the needful" in his first email to them.

guluarte2• 9 months ago

protip: never trust the client

guluarte2• 9 months ago

btw... some urls in this image contains js with vulnerabilities https://eaton-works.com/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/VwwCqBIYNXeyNQ...

https://imgur.com/a/ybFcY5Y

https://imgur.com/Pf7ywbK

faridv• 8 months ago

I'm just trying to understand, how is finding keys in plain sight termed as hacking?

Hacking India's largest automaker: Tata Motors

Related Stories