Saint OMIGOD, the Agent Nobody Had Installed

Patron of Azure virtual machines, hidden management agents, and everyone who didn't know they had them.

Life

On 14 September 2021 Wiz revealed OMIGOD, a cluster of flaws in OMI, an open-source management agent that Azure quietly installed on many Linux machines. An HTTP request missing its authentication header was executed as root: so, with no credentials, one could take over the machine. Many discovered they even had the agent only when they read the advisory.

Prayer

O Saint OMIGOD, invisible agent who runs as root whoever fails to introduce himself, let us always know which services run on our machines. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by updating OMI to 1.6.8.1 and reviewing the agents the cloud installed behind our backs.

An agent you don't know you have, a flaw you don't know you run.