Summary: Researchers at Tenable have disclosed “LookOut,” a chain of vulnerabilities in Google’s Looker business intelligence platform. The most severe is a Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw that allows attackers to take full control of a Looker server, accessing sensitive user credentials and the “internal management database” that acts as the central nervous system for corporate data.
Business Impact: Extreme Data Integrity Risk. Looker is used by 60,000+ companies to visualize their most sensitive secrets. A breach here allows an attacker to manipulate corporate data or pivot deep into private internal networks. While Google has patched the cloud version, on-premise users remain exposed.
Why It Happened: The platform was tricked into connecting to its own “private brain” through a specialized data-extraction technique, bypassing traditional security barriers between the application and its underlying configuration storage.
Recommended Executive Action: For self-hosted Looker instances, apply security patches immediately. Security teams should inspect the `.git/hooks/` directory for unauthorized scripts (e.g., `pre-push`) and search application logs for unusual SQL errors targeting `looker__ilooker`.
Hashtags: #Looker #GoogleCloud #RCE #BusinessIntelligence #DataTheft #Tenable