In recent months, there's been a noticeable surge in scams targeting online shoppers. Fraudsters have impersonated support teams to extract payments by citing fake order issues (Business Today), circulated fake courier delivery alerts to steal personal data (TOI), and even INR 14.8 lakh lost in a gift scam targeting a young woman (The Hindu)
Just as the biggest e-commerce platforms geared up for their Mother’s Day mega sales — a critical supply chain vulnerability threatened to expose the personal and transactional data of over 375,000 customers. Thanks to CloudSEK’s SVigil, disaster was averted just in time.
Had this vulnerability gone undetected, it could have fueled similar frauds at an unprecedented scale during one of the busiest shopping periods of the year.
The Discovery: SVigil Flags Open Dashboard in Production
SVigil, CloudSEK’s Digital Supply Chain Security solution, recently discovered a critical misconfiguration on a dashboard maintained by a third-party logistics vendor — one responsible for handling order processing, returns, and refunds for several leading brands.
The exposed dashboard was processing live order activities at high speed — about 170 actions per minute (over 3,600 actions every hour) — potentially exposing sensitive data of over 375,000 customers, including:
- Order creation and dispatch updates
- Cancellation and refund processing
- Real-time payment validations
- Session tokens and checkout metadata
None of this was behind authentication. Anyone on the internet could access the dashboard and extract customer details in real-time.
Technical Analysis: What Was Exposed?
- 🔓 Unauthenticated Laravel Horizon Dashboard
- No login or access control mechanism implemented
- Vulnerable to OWASP A03:2021 – Sensitive Data Exposure
- 📦 Real-Time Job Payloads Included:
- Customer names, phone numbers, email, shipping addresses, IPs
- Shopify checkout sessions, order IDs, session tokens
- Refund metadata: amount, timestamp, gateway
- 📉 Live Operational Visibility:
- Included job names, timestamps, and queue activity
- Revealed backend workflows and fulfillment patterns
- Enabled visibility into operational load and system behavior
- 🛠️ Infrastructure Overview at Risk:
- Full access to internal telemetry on order and refund jobs
- Potential for queue flooding, surveillance, or exploitation of weak workflows
Business Impact
Had this gone undetected, here’s the real-world fallout we were staring at:
- Session hijacking: Exploiting Shopify tokens to replicate orders and refunds
- Data theft: Stealing customer PII and selling it in dark web marketplaces
- Operational sabotage: Queue flooding or delivery manipulation across partner brands
- Brand backlash: Regulatory fines, loss of vendor trust, and mass customer churn
- Regulatory Non-Compliance: Violation of India’s DPDP Bill, potential GDPR non-compliance, and breach of Shopify agreements due to leaked customer session data.
And worst of all — all of this right before Mother’s Day, one of the biggest revenue-generating weekends for lifestyle and beauty brands.
Recommendations
- Restrict Public Access:
- Enforce authentication, IP whitelisting, or VPN-only access to Horizon dashboards
- Monitor and Audit:
- Review access logs for potential unauthorized sessions
- Set up alerting for suspicious dashboard activity
- Harden Infrastructure:
- Follow Laravel Horizon security guidelines
- Regularly test production endpoints for access control failures
References
- Laravel Horizon – Security & Access Control
- OWASP A03:2021 – Sensitive Data Exposure
The SVigil Advantage: Proactive Protection that Pays Off
This incident underscores the value of continuous vendor and third-party risk monitoring. SVigil flagged and contained a high-impact vulnerability that could have affected thousands of e-commerce transactions across multiple brands.
By discovering the vulnerability before malicious actors did, SVigil prevented real-time data manipulation, refund fraud, and broader system abuse.
In the world of digital trust, prevention isn’t just better — it’s priceless.
About CloudSEK
CloudSEK is a unified digital risk management platform that leverages AI and machine learning to deliver real-time threat intelligence, attack surface monitoring, and supply chain security across enterprises globally.