URGENT SECURITY ALERT

Your Monitoring Dashboard is EXPOSED: Attackers Target Grafana to Read Configuration Files and Steal Credentials!

By CyberDudeBivash • October 04, 2025 • Threat Intelligence Report

cyberdudebivash.com | cyberbivash.blogspot.com

Disclosure: This is a security advisory for DevOps, SRE, and security professionals. It contains affiliate links to relevant security solutions. Your support helps fund our independent research.

Action Guide: Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Window Becomes a Door — Your Grafana is Exposed

Your Grafana dashboard is the window into the health of your infrastructure. But if you are running an unpatched version, that window is a wide-open door for attackers. As we’ve detailed in our ongoing reports on the **exploitation surge targeting CVE-2021-43798**, threat actors are actively and continuously scanning the internet for these vulnerable servers.

They are not interested in your pretty graphs. They are exploiting this simple path traversal flaw for one reason: to turn your monitoring server into their personal credential repository. This is not a low-level threat; it is an initial access vector that leads directly to a full-scale compromise of your most critical systems.

Chapter 2: THE ATTACKER’S SHOPPING LIST — Top 4 Secrets Stolen via This Flaw

When an attacker exploits this path traversal, they have a clear shopping list. They are hunting for the keys to your kingdom, which are often stored in plaintext on the Grafana server.

1. The Grafana Database Password

By reading the `grafana.ini` configuration file, the attacker can steal the password for Grafana’s own database. With this, they can access the database and steal the encrypted credentials for all your configured data sources.

2. Data Source Credentials

Even easier, if your Grafana configuration files contain plaintext credentials for data sources like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, or MySQL, the attacker can steal these directly. They now have the credentials to access your core operational databases and data warehouses.

3. Cloud Provider API Keys

It is a common (and dangerous) practice to store cloud provider API keys on servers in environment files or user profiles. An attacker exploiting CVE-2021-43798 can read the `~/.aws/credentials` file or `/etc/environment` and steal the AWS, Azure, or GCP keys for the entire server. This can lead to a full cloud account takeover.

4. Private SSH Keys

The attacker can read the private SSH keys from the home directory of the user running the Grafana service (e.g., `/home/grafana/.ssh/id_rsa`). They can then use these keys to pivot and gain authenticated access to any other server in your environment that trusts this key.

Chapter 3: The Defender’s Playbook — Patch, Harden, and Rotate

Your response to this threat must be three-fold and immediate.

Step 1: PATCH Your Grafana Instance

This is the first, most obvious step. Identify all Grafana instances in your organization. If any are running a version between 8.0.0-beta1 and 8.3.0, you must **upgrade to a secure version immediately.**

Step 2: HARDEN Your Deployment

A patched server is good, but an isolated server is better. The Grafana web interface should **NEVER** be exposed to the public internet. Place it on a secure, internal network and require users to connect via a VPN or an authenticating proxy.

Step 3: ROTATE All Secrets (CRITICAL)

If you had a vulnerable, internet-exposed Grafana server, you **MUST ASSUME** that all secrets on that server have been stolen. You must immediately begin the process of rotating every single credential:

Change your Grafana database password.
Rotate the credentials for all configured data sources.
Revoke and reissue all cloud provider API keys.
Generate new SSH keys for the user account.

Failure to do this means the attacker retains access to your environment even after you have patched the initial vulnerability.

Detect the Next Step: A stolen credential is the first step in a larger attack. An **EDR or XDR platform** is the only way to detect the attacker’s subsequent actions, such as using the stolen SSH key to log into another server.

Chapter 4: The Strategic Lesson — The Danger of Unmanaged “Helper” Apps

The ongoing exploitation of this old Grafana flaw is a powerful case study in the danger of unmanaged “helper” applications. Often, monitoring dashboards and other utility apps are set up by individual teams and forgotten by central IT and security. They fall out of the standard patch management cycle and become a permanent, unmitigated risk on the network perimeter.

A mature security program requires a comprehensive **Asset Management** process. You must have a full, real-time inventory of every single piece of software running in your environment, who owns it, and what its patch status is. If you don’t know you have it, you can’t protect it.

Get Daily Threat Intelligence

Subscribe for real-time alerts, vulnerability analysis, and strategic insights. Subscribe

About the Author

CyberDudeBivash is a cybersecurity strategist with 15+ years in DevOps security, incident response, and vulnerability management, advising CISOs across APAC. [Last Updated: October 04, 2025]

#CyberDudeBivash #Grafana #CVE #PathTraversal #CyberSecurity #ThreatIntel #InfoSec #PatchManagement #DevOps #CredentialTheft

Cyberdudebivash