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Peloton, the at-home fitness brand synonymous with its indoor stationary bike and beleaguered treadmills, has more than three million subscribers. Even President Biden is said to own one. The exercise bike alone costs upwards of $1,800, but anyone can sign up for a monthly subscription to join a broad variety of classes.
As Biden was inaugurated (and his Peloton moved to the White House — assuming the Secret Service let him), Jan Masters, a security researcher at Pen Test Partners, found he could make unauthenticated requests to Peloton’s API for user account data without it checking to make sure the person was allowed to request it. (An API allows two things to talk to each other over the internet, like a Peloton bike and the company’s servers storing user data.)
But the exposed API let him — and anyone else on the internet — access a Peloton user’s age, gender, city, weight, workout statistics and, if it was the user’s birthday, details that are hidden when users’ profile pages are set to private.
Masters reported the leaky API to Peloton on January 20 with a 90-day deadline to fix the bug, the standard window time that security researchers give to companies to fix bugs before details are made public.
But that deadline came and went, the bug wasn’t fixed and Masters hadn’t heard back from the company, aside from an initial email acknowledging receipt of the bug report. Instead, Peloton only restricted access to its API to its members. But that just meant anyone could sign up with a monthly membership and get access to the API again.
TechCrunch contacted Peloton after the deadline lapsed to ask why the vulnerability report had been ignored, and Peloton confirmed yesterday that it had fixed the vulnerability. (TechCrunch held this story until the bug was fixed in order to prevent misuse.)
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Masters has since put up a blog post explaining the vulnerabilities in more detail.
Munro, who founded Pen Test Partners, told TechCrunch: “Peloton had a bit of a fail in responding to the vulnerability report, but after a nudge in the right direction, took appropriate action. A vulnerability disclosure program isn’t just a page on a website; it requires coordinated action across the organisation.”
But questions remain for Peloton. When asked repeatedly, the company declined to say why it had not responded to Masters’ vulnerability report. It’s also not known if anyone maliciously exploited the vulnerabilities, such as mass-scraping account data.
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Source: Peloton’s leaky API let anyone grab riders’ private account data | TechCrunch
Robin Edgar
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