Attacks targeting the software supply chain are on the rise. Indeed, data from the Mend Open Source Risk Report shows a steady quarterly increase in the number of malicious packages published in 2022, with a significant jump in Q3, which jumped 79 percent from Q2. The European Cybersecurity Agency (ENISA) predicts that supply chain attacks will increase fourfold by 2022.

Ransomware’s new favorite victim is educational institutions. Ransomware attacks, that exploit targets utilizing malicious software code, have increased tremendously over the past few years. In addition to targeting business sectors, cybercriminals are now attempting to ambush the security posture of educational sectors. Educational institutions are an easy prey for ransomware attackers as they lack the fundamental elements of a secured network.

For most websites and apps, employing security-related HTTP headers has become standard practice. Websites use headers as part of HTTP requests and replies to convey information about a page or data sent via the HTTP protocol. They might include a Content-Encoding header to indicate that the content is a compressed zip file or a Location header to specify a redirect URL.

Microservices offer significant advantages compared to monoliths. You can scale the development more easily and have precise control over scaling infrastructure. Additionally, the ability to make many minor updates and incremental rollouts significantly reduces the time to market. Despite these benefits, microservices architecture presents a problem — the inability to access its services externally. Fortunately, an API gateway can resolve this issue.

Timing is everything when it comes to responding and recovering from a widespread, destructive attack. As threat actors operate undetected across a victim network and get deeper into the attack lifecycle, it becomes increasingly more challenging to recover and avoid the business disruption that comes from a compromised environment.

Most developers aren’t security experts. This isn’t because we don’t care about security, it’s just that there are only so many hours in the day and features come first. Fortunately, developers don’t need to be security experts to build secure apps — they just need the right tools.

Security researchers at ARMO have found a high-severity vulnerability in the Kyverno admission controller container image signature verification mechanism. The vulnerability enables an attacker who is either running a malicious container image registry or is able to act as a proxy between the registry and Kyverno, to inject unsigned images into the protected cluster, bypassing the image verification policy. The vulnerability was introduced in version 1.8.3 and was fixed in version 1.8.5.

On Wednesday, December 21, 2022, security researchers shared that they observed ransomware threat actors using a new exploit chain that bypasses the ProxyNotShell URL rewrite mitigations that were shared by Microsoft in September and October. This new exploit chain works by abusing CVE-2022-41080 & CVE-2022-41082 and leads to remote code execution on affected Exchange servers through Outlook Web Access (OWA).

This year marks the release of the first 2022 Vulnerability Management Report from Fortra. The report, which was conducted in September 2022, is based on a comprehensive survey of over 390 cybersecurity professionals with the goal of gaining insights into the latest trends, key challenges, and vulnerability management solution preferences.

When it comes to open source vulnerabilities, we seem to be in permanent growth mode. Indeed, data from Mend’s Open Source Risk Report showed 33 percent growth in the number of open source software vulnerabilities that Mend added to its vulnerability database in the first nine months of 2022 compared with the same time period in 2021. However, while some vulnerabilities pose a severe business risk — hello, log4j — others can be safely ignored.

After a two-year hiatus (virtual in 2020 and hybrid in 2021), AWS re:Invent was back in person this year in its full glory. Over 52,000 people attended — more than we saw at RSA (26,000) and Blackhat USA (21,000) combined this year.

CrowdStrike Services recently investigated several Play ransomware intrusions where the common entry vector was suspected to be the Microsoft Exchange ProxyNotShell vulnerabilities CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082. In each case, CrowdStrike reviewed the relevant logs and determined there was no evidence of exploitation of CVE-2022-41040 for initial access.

The holiday season is the perfect time to rewatch some favorite festive movies! While some prefer their holiday movies to be as sappy as possible (Hallmark, we’re looking at you), others relish the annual opportunity to watch an 8-year-old boy exact his revenge on two bumbling bad guys in the 1990 classic Home Alone.

On December 8th, Clinton Herget and Simon Maple, Field CTOs at Snyk, had the opportunity to chat with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, podcast host, curator of “Last Week in AWS”, and snarky Twitter personality. Their conversation took a lot of fun turns, from ranting about the hour-long line to get coffee at AWS re:Invent, to Corey proclaiming that “SBOMs are a fantasy” (there’s more context to that… keep reading).

You may not be familiar with NTFS file streams, but you use them every day when you access files on any modern Windows system. This blog post explains this feature of NTFS ADS, shows how hackers can exploit file stream functionality in cyberattacks, and offers strategies for defending your organization.

Covenant is one of the latest and greatest command and control (C2) post-exploitation frameworks. This post will walk you through the process of configuring Covenant and using it to execute payloads on compromised hosts. Note: This post demonstrates the capabilities of Covenant as of mid-September 2019.

Sudden, unexpected, and potentially very damaging. Zero-day attacks are the perfect storm for malicious actors and one of the worst-case scenarios for developers, security professionals, and DevOps teams. Yet it’s not all bad news for those charged with protecting your code, software, and applications, as long as you expect the unexpected and prepare for it. Building a fast, effective mitigation response for zero-day attacks starts with these three tactics.

In a coordinated disclosure with Microsoft on December 13th, 2022, security researchers with Mandiant, SentinelOne, and Sophos published evidence of a threat actor technique where malicious crafted drivers were invoked using a valid cryptographic signature. The malicious drivers were observed attempting to terminate a list of security products and evade detection.

In our latest Snyk in 30, Jason Lane (Director of Product Marketing) and I (Marco Morales, Partner Solutions Architect) showcased Snyk Open Source with a focus on our integration with Bitbucket Cloud. They covered why open source security is vital for modern app development, along with tips on taking a holistic approach to application security that goes beyond just shifting left.

In early November, a new authorization bypass vulnerability was found in Spring Security 5. Now, before we panic let’s look into this problem to see if you are vulnerable. Although the vulnerability is classified as high, there is only a specific set of use cases that are vulnerable. This means that not everyone is vulnerable, and I will show that in a second. Regardless, the advice is to upgrade to the newer version of the Spring Security.

On Tuesday, December 13, a joint announcement from the United States NSA and Citrix announced a zero-day vulnerability in Citrix ADC. The vulnerability (CVE-2022-27518) is a critical unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) issue currently rated as CVSS 9.8. Patches are already available from Citrix. The NSA attributes the zero-day to APT5, a Chinese hacking collective. There is currently no guidance for how widespread the campaign has been or how long it's been ongoing.

Live conferences are finally back, and the 11th annual AWS re:Invent did not disappoint. After a virtual 2020 and an in-person reduced-sized edition in 2021, there were more than 52,000 (yes — 52,000!) smiling faces milling about this year’s conference in Las Vegas. As per usual, re:Invent was full of exciting product news and updates. Here are the major announcements that got our attention and some of the things Snyk was up to in Vegas.

On December 13th, 2022, Citrix disclosed a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2022-27518) affecting several versions of Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway. Citrix strongly advises affected customers to update to a supported version as soon as possible. While no public proof-of-concept exploit code is available for this vulnerability, Citrix has observed several instances of targeted exploitation.

As part of Microsoft’s September 2022 Security Update, Microsoft released security updates to remediate CVE-2022-37958–an information disclosure vulnerability in SPNEGO NEGOEX that impacted all Windows versions 7 or newer. On December 13, Microsoft reclassified the vulnerability as Critical severity after security researchers discovered that the vulnerability could allow threat actors to remotely execute code pre-authentication.

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise Kubernetes container platform. It lets you build Docker images and use them to deploy your applications on a cloud-like environment (even if it’s not really on the cloud, rather a simulated cloud environment). Images built in OpenShift can be easily pushed into JFrog Artifactory – JFrog’s leading universal repository manager.

On December 9, 2021, Apache upended the cybersecurity industry by publishing a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) for its ubiquitous Log4j logging utility. Dubbed Log4Shell, the remote code execution flaw (CVSS score:10) allows an attacker to take control of a connected device and run malicious code, access sensitive data or alter its configuration. Because Logj4 is free and easy-to-use, it’s embedded (often deeply) in Java applications used by IT and OT platforms worldwide.

In light of the numerous large-scale cyberattacks witnessed in the last year, 2023 promises to be an exciting time for cybersecurity. Outpost24 experts share their thoughts on what we can expect in the new year, and how to best prepare against new threats.

Azure Bicep is getting more popular by the day and is rapidly becoming the replacement for Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. In this post, I am going to go over some security fundamentals when using Bicep. If you are not familiar with Bicep then I recommend taking a look at the Microsoft Learn documentation to find out more.

In August 2021, threat actors started to exploit ProxyShell vulnerabilities in certain Microsoft Exchange Server versions. Today, not only is Kroll seeing actors continue to leverage ProxyShell in larger network intrusions but also now organizations must also be on guard for the so-called ProxyNotShell vulnerabilities, which surfaced in September 2022.

When the CrowdStrike Services team conducts a proactive security engagement, such as a Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment or Tabletop Exercise, it often uses CrowdStrike Falcon® Spotlight to identify what vulnerabilities exist in the environment. Unfortunately, this can be a disheartening experience, as many organizations we see have millions, even tens of millions, of unpatched vulnerabilities. It’s typical to see at least a quarter of those listed with a CVSS rating of Critical.

That’s an excerpt from the fact sheet accompanying the May 2021 Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (EO). It refers to one of seven ambitious measures in the EO: shoring up security of that notorious playground for hackers, the software supply chain. Knowing that organizations lack visibility into the components that comprise their connected assets, bad actors can have a field day exploiting vulnerabilities to penetrate networks and take control.

On the 12th of December 2022, Fortinet published an advisory regarding an actively exploited remote code execution vulnerability affecting FortiOS through the SSL VPN service. Fortinet has stated that they are aware of at least one instance where this vulnerability was successfully exploited in the wild, though other undocumented cases may exist. The threat actors leveraged the vulnerability to deploy malicious files on the filesystem of affected devices.

At this year’s AWS re:Invent conference, Snyk’s VP of Product Marketing, Ravi Maira, spoke with Omar Peerzada, Cyber Security Architect at Neiman Marcus, about how his team transitioned from older security practices to a developer-first security strategy. Watch the full talk now, or keep reading for the highlights.

On Friday, September 23rd, 2022, Sophos disclosed a critical code injection vulnerability impacting Sophos Firewall. This vulnerability, assigned CVE-2022-3236, affects Sophos Firewall versions v19.0 MR1 (19.0.1) and older and could lead to remote code execution. In order for a threat actor to exploit this vulnerability, WAN access would need to be enabled for the Webadmin and User Portal consoles.

Last month, we announced the open beta of Snyk’s new and revamped reporting. Since then, we’ve been amazed at how creative our customers have been in leveraging these new capabilities to answer all sorts of different security questions. We’re not surprised. The new reporting was designed to provide easy access to data across the Snyk platform (including Snyk Code!), and to give customers flexible analysis tools to slice and dice data as they see fit.

As a library focused on building user interfaces rather than a full-fledged framework, React enables developers to choose their preferred libraries for various aspects of an application, such as routing, history, and authentication. Comparatively, Microsoft created TypeScript as an extension of JavaScript to introduce optional static typing to an otherwise loosely typed language.

I share a birthday with the Log4j event. However, unlike this event, I’ve been around for more than one year. On December 9th, 2021, a Tweet exposed a zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a widely-used piece of open-source software. The announcement made headlines everywhere, and cybersecurity was suddenly put in the spotlight. It was a wake-up call for many because, in an instant, software that had been considered secure was suddenly at tremendous risk.

With threats to cloud native applications rising, security leaders feel more pressure than ever to counter an ever-changing risk landscape. But thanks to a rapidly expanding security solutions market, many respond to these growing demands by adding more products. With so many new tools arising to tackle security challenges, it sometimes seems like the right answer is always “one tool out of reach”.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the Log4Shell vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228), Arctic Wolf Labs decided to look back on the impact that this critical vulnerability had (and continues to have) on organizations and assess the long tail of activity we’ve seen with threat actors continuing to use the exploit.

Mastodon, the free open source self-hosted federated social network platform, has been witnessing a surge of interest and new users due to the recent developments on Twitter — specifically that of verifying accounts. One of the interest areas driving users to Mastodon has been the ability to verify their account identity and convey a sense of authenticity for the account. This provides a way to help prevent spam accounts, bots, and other issues related to fake news.

The United States, United Kingdom and other governments around the globe are making strides to defend against software supply chain attacks and strengthen the cybersecurity resilience of their departments, partners, and stakeholders.

CrowdStrike Services reviews a recent, extremely persistent intrusion campaign targeting telecommunications and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies and outlines how organizations can defend and secure their environments.

“This is the golden era of application security,” says Founder of Manicode Security and secure coding trainer Jim Manico on episode 26 of The Secure Developer podcast. Ten years ago, Manico says, security training was “a quirky thing to do — something to do on the side.” Now, assessment tools are mature, good literature on assessment makes knowledge more accessible, and a wide range of intelligent people are building secure applications.

A detailed overview of the Remote Code Execution (RCE) attacks, how it affects the Kubernetes infrastructure, and how the vulnerabilities of the K8 systems can be mitigated. Remote Code Execution (RCE) is a vulnerability in systems that cybercriminals can exploit to perform attacks. In RCE attacks, hackers execute malicious code in target systems remotely, irrespective of their location on the network. That’s because they don’t need the target systems to have the execution functionality.