Two Misconfigurations, Total Backend Access: An Insurance Exposure Study
What if two overlooked security gaps could expose millions of customer records, financial data, and internal communications without triggering a single alert?
For one global insurance provider, this wasn't a hypothetical case.
When "Secure Enough" Isn't Secure At All
A major global insurance provider, handling over 8 million customer records, medical data, financial information, and policy details. Their security team had done the basics - firewalls, encryption, compliance checkboxes. Everything looked secure.
However, during a routine external assessment, ULTRA RED discovered something alarming: two seemingly minor misconfigurations that, when combined, created a highway straight into the company's most sensitive backend systems.
The Anatomy of a Silent Breach
The first vulnerability was almost embarrassingly simple. Hard-coded AWS Cognito credentials- a client ID and secret - were sitting in plain sight within a public-facing JavaScript file. Anyone with basic technical knowledge could extract them.
The second issue was more insidious. The backend APIs trusted any OAuth token presented to them without verifying the user's role, privileges, or whether the request was even legitimate.
Together, these flaws created a perfect storm. An attacker didn't need sophisticated hacking tools or months of reconnaissance. They simply needed to:
- Extract the exposed credentials from the JavaScript file
- Use those credentials to generate valid OAuth tokens
- Present those tokens to access internal APIs
And just like that, attackers could be in - no multi-factor authentication standing in their way.
What Was at Stake?
The access granted was staggering. With nothing more than these two misconfigurations, an attacker could:
- Read complete message contents and customer communications
- Access chat logs and conversation histories
- View sensitive customer and employee data
- Extract personally identifiable information and policy details
- Disrupt claims workflows
- Impersonate internal systems or support portals
For an insurance provider operating under GDPR and HIPAA, this level of exposure threatened the organization's very existence
Why Traditional Security Missed This
Here's what makes this case particularly troubling: traditional vulnerability scanners would likely have missed this entirely. Neither vulnerability alone appears catastrophic. Hard-coded credentials are common enough that they often get deprioritized. Weak authorization checks might not even register as critical without context.
But in combination? They unlocked complete backend access.
This is the reality of modern attack surfaces. The insurance industry like many others is racing toward digital transformation. Organizations today are managing fragmented subsidiaries, broker networks, third-party integrations, legacy systems, and new cloud applications - all at once. Each piece might seem secure in isolation, but the connections between them create invisible pathways that attackers exploit with devastating efficiency.
From Detection to Validation: A New Paradigm
The lessons here extend far beyond insurance — they are universal. It's about fundamentally rethinking how organizations approach exposure management
Traditional security tools answer the question: "What vulnerabilities exist?"
But the critical question is: "Which exposures can actually be weaponized?"
Surface-level scanning generates endless lists of theoretical risks. Validation-first continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) proves which attack chains actually work - with real attacker-level evidence showing exactly how credentials can be extracted, tokens generated, APIs accessed, and data exposed.
This transforms security from theoretical risk assessment into actionable intelligence that helps teams eliminate debate during remediation discussions and justify resources to leadership.
Get the Full Technical Deep Dive
Download the complete case study for the technical breakdown, specific remediation steps to protect your organization, and why validation-first continuous threat exposure management is essential for modern enterprises.
Download the Insurance Exposure Study.
