Apache Spark

Apache Spark is a powerful open-source, distributed computing system used for big data processing and analytics. It offers an interface for programming entire clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Developed by Matei Zaharia at the University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab, Apache Spark has gained significant popularity in the data science community due to its speed and ease of use. Recently, it has been leveraged for financial time series forecasting using streaming data analytics, demonstrating its versatility and applicability across various sectors. However, despite its widespread usage, Apache Spark has faced security vulnerabilities. Notably, CVE-2022-33891, a shell command injection vulnerability via Spark UI, was disclosed on July 17, 2022, on the Apache Spark security page and the oss-sec mailing list. This flaw allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary shell commands. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added this vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog due to active exploitation. Further investigation by Flashpoint revealed that Apache Spark version 3.1.3 remained vulnerable to this issue despite vendor claims to the contrary. The vulnerability, CVE-2022-33891, has also been exploited by malware variants to spread and enhance their attack capabilities. Microsoft identified one such variant that exploits vulnerabilities in both Apache and Apache Spark. The severity of this issue is underscored by its high Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 8.8. As of now, users are advised to take precautionary measures while deploying Apache Spark, especially version 3.1.3, until a comprehensive fix is provided by the vendor.