Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

May 2023

Protect your IT assets through Managed Vulnerability Scanning

Managed vulnerability scanning is a cybersecurity service that uses software, vulnerability scanners, human-led and automated penetration testing, and other tools to help an organization identify, track, evaluate, and mitigate security risks both inside their network and connected external sources. Even organizations with the most sophisticated information technology security professionals are challenged when dealing with the hundreds of new threats released into the wild each month.

CVE-2023-2825 Vulnerability In GitLab Version 16.0.0 - Steps To Take

CVE-2023-2825 vulnerability is a recently discovered vulnerability in GitLab. It allows unauthorized access to GitLab repositories to read arbitrary files. This post will discuss further details of the vulnerability, its location, discovery, and how the Astra scanner scans for it.

Snyk announces new Slack integration

We’re excited to announce a new Snyk app for Slack that provides notifications within the channels your teams rely on to address security issues in your code, open source dependencies, containers, and cloud infrastructure. Your developer teams get the notifications that matter the most, in their preferred collaboration platform, so they can act on them immediately.

What is Exposure Management in Cybersecurity?

Exposure management in cybersecurity is a set of processes that helps organizations view their entire attack surface and understand which areas in their IT infrastructure are most exposed to cyber threats. Organizations can then take the necessary steps to reduce their cyber risk exposure through risk mitigation and risk remediation steps. Exposure management goes hand in hand with attack surface management (ASM) and threat and vulnerability intelligence.

What is DORA? How to prepare your business for compliance

Designed to support the digital resiliency of financial institutions in the EU and UK, the Digital Operational Resilience Act is set to go in effect in January 2025. In this blog, we take a deep dive into what organizations must do in order to be compliant with this new legislation. Digital resiliency is one of the financial sector's most significant challenges today.

API7:2019 Security Misconfiguration: The What, Sample Exploits, and Prevention Methods

Security misconfigurations are very common security risks, not just in web applications but also in APIs. They have been consistently part of the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities. They were part of the original OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks published in 2019 and have now made it to the updated 2023 list. Security misconfiguration maintains its 7th rank in OWASP Top 10 API 2023RC owing to its widespread prevalence, easy exploitability, and easy detectability.

CVE-2023-33009 and CVE-2023-33010: Multiple Critical Unauthenticated RCE Vulnerabilities in Zyxel Firewalls

On Wednesday, the 24th of May, 2023, Zyxel released a security advisory for several vulnerabilities capable of granting unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) in their line of Firewall and VPN products, tracked as CVE-2023-33009 and CVE-2023-33010. These buffer overflow vulnerabilities are also capable of inducing denial of service conditions.

Top 8 penetration testing tools

Penetration testing is crucial to ensuring a resilient security posture within an organization. It simulates an attack on the system, application, or network to discover vulnerabilities before hackers do. Developers often use penetration testing to verify that applications’ internal resources are safe from unauthorized access. In this situation, the tester or ethical hacker serves as a malicious actor. They gather as much information about the system as possible to find exploitable weaknesses.

Track Risk Trends in your Container Images with Sysdig Risk-based Vulnerability Management

The number of detected common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) has significantly increased in the past decade. In the last five years, security researchers reported over 100,000 new CVEs. The highest reported annual figure was in 2022, with over 25,000 new CVEs. This number can overwhelm any security team if it’s not managed correctly between assessment, reporting, remediation, and monitoring.

June Update: The Escalation of the PaperCut Vulnerability Campaign

Over the past two months, the Cyberint research team has witnessed an extensive campaign in which threat actors are actively exploiting the recently discovered vulnerability in the PaperCut print management platform. The Cyberint research team has identified a significant trend in relation to these recent attacks and associated incidents linked to this vulnerability.

Data loss prevention for developers

A security violation in the form of a data breach can create costly damage to a company's reputation. But what exactly is a data breach? The European Commission has divided data breaches into three distinct categories — confidentiality breaches, integrity breaches, and availability breaches: In this article, you'll learn more about what a data breach is and how you can prevent data breaches when designing and developing your software.

Snyk named a Leader in 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing

We’re thrilled to announce that Snyk has been named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing! Snyk was named in the Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing (AST), for the first time, as a Visionary in 2021. And today, we’re excited and honored to announce that Gartner has recognized us in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2023 Magic Quadrant report.

[Hands-On Defense] Unpatched Software Causes 33% of Successful Attacks

As you all know, KnowBe4 frequently promotes security awareness training and we also mention that unpatched software is a distant number two issue after social engineering. We generally say that unpatched software is involved in 20%-40% of successful exploits. It's been hard though to get good figures on that for years and even CISA has not published hard numbers, even though they appear to focus on it.

Log4j Vulnerability and the Importance of SBOM in Software Supply Chain Security

The Apache Log4j vulnerability has been making global headlines since it became public on 9th December 2021. The report stated that the vulnerability affects Apache log4j between versions 2.0 and 2.14.1 and is independent of the underlying JDK version. It was a full-blown security meltdown that resulted in hackers performing remote code executions and affected digital systems across the globe. In response, Apache implemented patch fixes, but some components remained unattended.

How to generate an SBOM for JavaScript and Node.js applications

SBOM is the acronym for Software Bill of Materials, which is a list of all the open source npm packages that are part of your project. But it’s not only limited to open source or software packages, and can include operating system libraries, microservices inventory and more.

Improved risk assessment with EPSS scores in Snyk

The number and complexity of software vulnerabilities is continuously growing. The ability of development and security teams to assess the threat level a given vulnerability poses and prioritize fix efforts accordingly greatly depends on access to as much context as possible about the vulnerability.

Starting With Snyk: an overview of the CLI onboarding flow

When starting with Snyk, users can import projects via Git repository or utilize CLI to run test their application code locally or via CI/CD. In this video, we will discuss the onboarding flows meant to help new users utilize the CLI to run their first source code (SAST), open source (SCA), container and infrastructure as code (IaC) tests and start fixing issues. Snyk helps software-driven businesses develop fast and stay secure. Continuously find and fix vulnerabilities for npm, Maven, NuGet, RubyGems, PyPI and more.

Setting up the Docker image scan GitHub Action

Nowadays, the final product of most Git repositories is a Docker image, that is then used in a Kubernetes deployment. With security being a hot topic now (and for good reasons), it would be scanning the Docker images you create in the CI is vital. In this piece, I’ll use GitHub Actions to build Docker images and then scan them for security vulnerabilities. The Docker image built in the CI is also pushed to GitHub’s Docker registry.

Snyk top 10 code vulnerabilities report

Earlier this year, we released a report on the top 10 open source vulnerabilities from data based on user scans — giving you an inside look into the most common (and critical) vulnerabilities Snyk users found in their third-party code and dependencies. Building on this trend, we decided to look into the most common vulnerabilities in first-party code. While OWASP served as a guiding light for open source security intel, gathering data on proprietary code was a bit more complex.

Four Critical RCE Vulnerabilities in Cisco Small Business Series Switches

On Wednesday, May 17, 2023, Cisco disclosed four critical remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting the web-based user interface of Cisco Small Business Series Switches. Cisco’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of PoC exploit code being available for these vulnerabilities, however, they have not identified a publicly available PoC exploit.

SafeBreach Coverage for US-CERT Alert (AA23-136A) - BianLian Ransomware Group

On May 16th, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) released an advisory highlighting the various malicious indicators of compromise (IOCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) being leveraged by the BianLian ransomware group.

Microsoft Power Platform DLP Bypass Uncovered - Finding #5 - Parent and Child Flow Execution

Analysis of Microsoft Power Platform’s security features revealed limitations that could expose organizations to security risks, such as difficulty enforcing DLP policies for pre-existing resources and issues with HTTP calls or custom connectors.

Snyk and ServiceNow collaborate on new SBOM solution

ServiceNow’s biggest event of the year — Knowledge 2023 — is here, and Snyk is excited to be a part of it with some big news! Back in January, we announced Snyk Security for Application Vulnerability Response to bring Snyk Open Source software composition analysis to ServiceNow Security Operations.

API5:2019 Broken Function Level Authorization: The What, Impact, Sample Exploit, and Prevention Methods

APIs are great for accessing specific functions and features, but what happens when they allow unauthorized access? Imagine a social media platform where users can share posts. To enable users to access posts, the platform provides an API that allows GET requests to retrieve posts by specifying the user ID and post ID. GET/api/v2.1/user/1438/posts?id=40. The API will return the 40th post for user id 1438. As these are public forums, any user can submit GET requests to access posts.

Abusing Time-Of-Check Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) Race Condition Vulnerabilities in Games, Harry Potter Style

I feel I need to clarify, for legal reasons, that this is nothing to do with any Harry Potter game. The reference is made because we are dealing with spells and magic, and I mean magic in the literal sense, not a reference to application security – although on some/most days it feels like magic. Time-Of-Check Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) and Race Conditions? What’s it all about?

Trustwave Threat Hunt Team Uncovers Healthcare Industry Vulnerabilities

The healthcare industry has been struck with a growing number of cyberattacks over the last few months, raising concerns in the healthcare industry and in Washington, D.C. The continued onslaught of attacks has raised the question of how healthcare entities can and should be raising their cyber defenses. One potential tool in a hospital, or any industry's toolbox, can be Trustwave's patent-pending Advanced Continual Threat Hunt (ACTH) platform.

DevSecOps lifecycle coverage with new Snyk and Dynatrace app

Balancing the volume of applications and the increased deployment frequency with the need for security is a struggle for both development and security teams. Recent research indicates that vulnerability management in modern software development has become more complex, with 69% of CISOs acknowledging this challenge. Consequently, many applications are not adequately covered by security scans.

How to Write a PoC for an Uninitialized Smart Contract Vulnerability in BadgerDAO Using Foundry

In this post, we’re going to learn how Foundry can be used to write a proof of concept (PoC) for uninitialized smart contract vulnerabilities. We will take a look at and exploit a simple uninitialized smart contract vulnerability we found in BadgerDAO. If you are familiar with this type of vulnerability, jump straight to the Foundry PoC section. You can also find the PoC code on this GitHub repository.

CVE-2023-29343: Sysmon Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

In a security advisory published on May 9th, Microsoft disclosed the existence of a Local Privilege Escalation vulnerability in Sysmon (CVE-2023-29343). The vulnerability was discovered by an independent security researcher and was responsibly disclosed to Microsoft. Microsoft has released Sysmon version 14.16 to address this vulnerability.

SafeBreach Coverage for US-CERT Alert (AA23-131A) - Exploit CVE-2023-27350 in PaperCut MF and NG

On May 11th, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released an advisory highlighting the active malicious exploitation of CVE-2023-27350 in PaperCut MF and PaperCut NG software by a threat actors including one known as the Bl00dy Ransomware Gang. The US-CERT Alert (AA23-131A) Malicious Actors Exploit CVE-2023-27350 in PaperCut MF and NG includes detailed information about this investigation (along with attacker TTPs and IOCs).

Rendezvous with a Chatbot: Chaining Contextual Risk Vulnerabilities

Ignoring the little stuff is never a good idea. Anyone who has pretended that the small noise their car engine is making is unimportant, only to later find themselves stuck on the side of the road with a dead motor will understand this statement. The same holds true when it comes to dealing with minor vulnerabilities in a web application. Several small issues that alone do not amount to much, can in fact prove dangerous, if not fatal, when strung together by a threat actor.

How to prevent XPath injection attacks

Web applications are vulnerable to several kinds of attacks, but they’re particularly susceptible to code injection attacks. One such attack, the XPath Injection, takes advantage of websites that require user-supplied information to access data stored in XML format. All sites that use a database in XML format might be vulnerable to this attack. XPath is a query syntax that websites can use to search their XML data stores.

KrakenLabs' Threat Actors Naming Convention

KrakenLabs has developed a new naming convention that uses poisonous plants to represent the origin and criminal activities of threat actors. This approach provides a creative way to classify different types of threat actors, allowing security professionals to quickly understand the nature and behavior of the threat actor, which is helpful for identifying and mitigating threats effectively.

Snyk named to CNBC 2023 Disruptor 50 List

We are honored and humbled to announce Snyk has been named to the CNBC 2023 Disruptor 50 List, following our debut on the Disruptor List in 2021 and our listing as a Top Startup for the Enterprise in 2022. The full list was unveiled this morning. Industry recognitions like this are a testament to all of the hard work and dedication our global team puts into fulfilling our founding mission each and every day: equipping and empowering every one of the world’s developers to build securely.

Overcoming Security Gaps with Active Vulnerability Management

Organizations can reduce security risks in containerized applications by actively managing vulnerabilities through scanning, automated image deployment, tracking runtime risk and deploying mitigating controls to reduce risk Kubernetes and containers have become de facto standards for cloud-native application development due to their ability to accelerate the pace of innovation and codify best practices for production deployments, but such acceleration can introduce risk if not operationalized properly.

AI-generated security fixes in Snyk Code now available

Finding and fixing security issues in your code has its challenges. Chief among them is the important step of actually changing your code to fix the problem. Getting there is a process: sorting through security tickets, deciphering what those security findings mean and where they come from in the source code, and then determining how to fix the problem so you can get back to development. Not to worry — AI will take care of everything, right?

Application Vulnerability Management demo

Application Vulnerability Management provides continuous, real-time vulnerability detection across applications in production. See how you can use Application Vulnerability Management to identify, prioritize, and resolve high-impact vulnerabilities exposed in production, without any performance overhead.

How to Identify Vulnerable Third-Party Software (Quickly)

Third-party software security risks are on the rise, and so are the significant cyberattacks they facilitate. According to a CrowdStrike report, 45% of surveyed organizations said they experienced at least one software supply chain attack in 2021. In 2023, the average number of SaaS apps used by each company is 130 - a 5x increase compared to 2021.

Fixing half a million security vulnerabilities

Hackathons are well known among software development teams for driving innovation and collaboration. So, what if we applied that model to cybersecurity to improve an organization’s application security posture? That would be a dream come true for any CISO and security practitioner — and is exactly what we set out to do at Snyk in February 2023. Check out some of the funniest moments from our panels.

Snyk in a galaxy far away

In honor of May the 4th, we’re featuring a narrative from an Imperial trooper in a faraway galaxy as he reflects on his organization’s worst day and how it could’ve gone differently. Don’t get me wrong. I’m still proud to work for one of the most formidable organizations in the galaxy. But as most of you probably know, we’ve recently hit quite a setback. Our higher-ups decided to build a space station.

Run Faster, Runtime Followers

Recently, there has been a flurry of announcements claiming to have what we call Runtime Insights, the ability to prioritize vulnerabilities. Here are two examples: I can confirm that this approach works, and it works very well. It substantially decreases the number of vulnerabilities that a team has to manage, sometimes by a factor of 100 or more! How do I know it? Because Sysdig invented this approach.

Patch now! The Mirai IoT botnet is exploiting TP-Link routers

Businesses should patch their TP-Link routers as soon as possible, after the revelation that a legendary IoT botnet is targeting them for recruitment. The notorious Mirai botnet, which hijacks control of vulnerable IoT devices, is now exploiting TP-Link Archer AX21 routers to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Can AI write secure code?

AI is advancing at a stunning rate, with new tools and use cases are being discovered and announced every week, from writing poems all the way through to securing networks. Researchers aren’t completely sure what new AI models such as GPT-4 are capable of, which has led some big names such as Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, alongside AI researchers, to call for a halt on training more powerful models for 6 months so focus can shift to developing safety protocols and regulations.

Zero day remediation tips: Preparing for the next vulnerability

Businesses increasingly run on software, which, unbeknownst to its developers, can contain vulnerabilities that attackers often discover and exploit before a patch is available. This makes zero day attacks inevitable, but you can reduce their impact in your network and across your supply chain if you’re prepared to act fast.

A Mere Five Percent of Vulnerable Enterprises Fix Their Issues Every Month: How to Help Them Do Better?

Software vulnerabilities are one of the leading threats to an organization's cybersecurity posture, yet recent research from Bitsight reveals that enterprises affected by software vulnerabilities resolve them at a typical compound rate1 of only about 5% per month compounded continuously. However, there is evidence of much faster remediation for certain classes of vulnerabilities.

CVE-2023-21932: Critical Unauthenticated RCE Vulnerability in Oracle Hospitality OPERA 5 Property Services

Oracle recently released their Critical Patch Update addressing 433 vulnerabilities across their products, including a vulnerability in the Oracle Hospitality OPERA 5 Property Services product. According to Oracle’s vulnerability description, CVE-2023-21932 is a difficult– to– exploit vulnerability, requiring network access via HTTP and high privileges.

Security implications of HTTP response headers

When a web server receives an HTTP request, it is processed and sent back with a response containing the requested resource and any additional information in the form of HTTP response headers. These headers provide important data, such as last-modified dates, content types, and cache-control settings. The browser then uses this information to determine how to display or store that particular resource. This process helps ensure efficient communication between web servers and browsers.

API3:2019 Excessive Data Exposure: Understanding the Risks, Impacts, and How to Prevent It

Excessive data exposure occurs when APIs reveal more fields, data, and information than the client requires through the API response. Excessive data exposure flaws expose all object properties to API calls rather than what the user needs to act on without considering the object’s sensitivity level. This vulnerability exposes you to data leaks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and other cyber threats. That is why excessive data exposure in APIs is listed as #3 in the OWASP API Security Top 10 2019.

Three New BGP Message Parsing Vulnerabilities Disclosed in FRRouting Software

In our new vulnerability research report, Forescout Vedere Labs discusses an often-overlooked aspect of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) security: vulnerabilities in its software implementations. More specifically, vulnerabilities in BGP message parsing found in the popular FRRouting implementation that could be exploited by attackers to achieve a denial of service (DoS) condition on vulnerable BGP peers.