Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a group of security vulnerabilities in Google Looker Studio that could have enabled attackers to run unauthorized SQL queries against victims’ databases and extract sensitive information across different organizations.
The flaws, collectively named LeakyLooker, were identified by researchers from Tenable. The vulnerabilities could have exposed data across multiple environments within Google Cloud infrastructures.
Google has confirmed that the issues were fixed after the researchers responsibly disclosed them in June 2025. At present, there is no evidence that these vulnerabilities were exploited in real world attacks.
Nine Security Vulnerabilities Identified
Researchers documented nine distinct vulnerabilities associated with Looker Studio’s handling of cross tenant access and data connectors. These include:
- Cross Tenant Unauthorized Access – Zero-Click SQL Injection on Database Connectors
- Cross Tenant Unauthorized Access – Zero-Click SQL Injection Through Stored Credentials
- Cross Tenant SQL Injection on BigQuery Through Native Functions
- Cross-Tenant Data Sources Leak With Hyperlinks
- Cross Tenant SQL injection on Spanner and BigQuery Through Custom Queries on a Victim’s Data Source
- Cross Tenant SQL Injection on BigQuery and Spanner Through the Linking API
- Cross-Tenant Data Sources Leak With Image Rendering
- Cross-Tenant XS Leak on Arbitrary Data Sources With Frame Counting and Timing Oracles
- Cross Tenant Denial of Wallet Through BigQuery
These vulnerabilities could have allowed attackers to manipulate queries, extract sensitive records, and potentially modify stored information within affected databases.
Potential Impact Across Google Cloud Services
According to security researcher Liv Matan, the weaknesses disrupted several core security assumptions in the platform.
Organizations using Looker Studio connectors to services such as:
- Google Sheets
- BigQuery
- Cloud Spanner
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- Google Cloud Storage
could have been exposed to cross tenant data access if the vulnerabilities were successfully exploited.
In such a scenario, attackers might gain access to datasets belonging to different organizations hosted within the same cloud environment.
Attack Scenario Involving Public Reports
One possible attack method involves locating publicly available Looker Studio reports that rely on database connectors such as BigQuery.
By abusing the vulnerabilities, attackers could gain control over the underlying database connection and execute arbitrary SQL commands across the entire Google Cloud project associated with the report.
Credential Retention in Cloned Reports
Another attack path relates to a logic flaw within the report cloning feature.
If a victim creates a report using a JDBC data connector such as PostgreSQL and shares it publicly or with a specific user, attackers could duplicate the report while retaining the original owner’s database credentials.
This would allow malicious actors to perform actions such as:
- deleting tables
- modifying records
- executing custom SQL queries
within the victim’s database environment.
One Click Data Exfiltration Technique
Researchers also described a high impact attack scenario involving one click data exfiltration.
In this method, attackers distribute a specially crafted Looker Studio report. When a victim opens the report, malicious code executes within the browser and communicates with an attacker controlled project.
The technique allows attackers to reconstruct entire datasets using query logs and other extracted information.
Violation of Looker Studio’s Security Model
According to the research findings, these vulnerabilities undermined a key security principle of Looker Studio.
Normally, users with viewer permissions should only be able to view data without altering or controlling it. However, the LeakyLooker flaws could have enabled viewers to manipulate queries and retrieve unauthorized data from services like BigQuery and Google Sheets.
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