Blackstone's Beam Living exposed SSN digits, DOBs, and addresses via GraphQL flaw
A Blackstone real estate company exposed SSN digits, DOBs, addresses and more
A security researcher discovered that Beam Living, a Blackstone portfolio company, left applicants' sensitive data—including the last four digits of Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, and phone numbers—exposed through a GraphQL authorization flaw. Anyone with a user's email could query the API and retrieve that data. The researcher responsibly disclosed the issue, but Beam Living initially denied it and silently patched it weeks later, leading to criticism of their disclosure handling.
It is easier to find the last four digits of someone’s Social Security number than an apartment.
- tptacek
Beam Living is just the property management company that runs buildings Blackstone owns in New York City. There are thousands of companies like this all over the country and if you poke hard at any of them you will find stuff like this.
There's nothing wrong with pitching stories this way, but for context, if you look at this researcher's archive, they're all basically "I found a vulnerability in some big company's thingy". The news hook here is literally just "I found a GraphQL bug". This is not Alex Schapiro's most interesting front-page story (by which I mean: they've posted some genuinely interesting stuff before).
- jjice
I work for a company building real estate adjacent software and have worked on connections to all the major property management systems and large (and small) proptech companies. I can tell you that at least 90% of them have some of the worst security practices you've ever seen. Many of the largest property management systems allow a third-party vendor to export your Social Security number and date of birth, and most property managers I've seen don't bat an eye at giving up as much information as their vendor requests (which they usually don't need).
Real estate is very much a closed of group of more traditional business and has not begun to understand their responsibility to keep this data safe.
Edit for more detail: To tack onto this, it's very much the case we're all familiar with where management doesn't care about something being built correctly, they just want it built. Add on top that the management usually has no technical background. Also add that very few engineers that are passionate about writing good software want to stick around at these companies. It's a real nightmare industry.
There are some companies that will give you faith, but they're the occasional large property manager that's been scared shitless about a security based lawsuit (fine by me) or a proptech that's "disrupting" the industry that will be acquired by one of the big dogs in 18 months and slowly eroded away.
- walrus01
My biggest take away from this is not really anything about the specific security vulnerability, but rather that real estate industry people will buy any SaaS product without research or any due diligence.
I have personally seen real estate people buy some trendy new app based intercom or entry phone system and jam it onto the front of their building and try to require that all of the residents use it...
- toomuchtodo
Beam Living
- josefritzishere
What a trashfire of a company. Where are the legal penalties for such reckless behavior?