Securely Using Spring Boot Actuator

Spring Boot Actuator offers powerful insights into your application’s internals, enabling production-grade monitoring and management. However, if misconfigured, these same tools can expose sensitive information, leading to serious security breaches. A notable example of this occurred when researchers discovered an unprotected Spring Boot Actuator endpoint in a Volkswagen telematics service. A single open /actuator/heapdump endpoint granted access to a heap dump containing AWS credentials in plaintext. Those credentials led to the download of 9 terabytes of GPS data from hundreds of thousands of cars.