In recent years, there has been a major ongoing trend toward more digital infrastructure and an increased dependence on technology across a wide variety of sectors. In the property industry, this has manifested heavily in the growth of the property technology (PropTech) market. These developments have had a serious impact on the sector, enabling advances that both improve existing processes and add new features to real estate transactions.

The October 2023 Okta breach is the latest example in a long line of third-party identity attacks. Based on reports to date, it seems that the attack on Okta’s support case management system enabled a threat actor to launch downstream attacks into other companies. So far, 1Password, BeyondTrust and Cloudflare have publicly confirmed they were targeted. Such attacks don’t discriminate and pointing fingers is unproductive.

An exploit kit is a toolkit that cybercriminals use to attack the security vulnerabilities of a system or device to distribute malware. An exploit is a bit of code that takes advantage of security vulnerabilities found within software and hardware. Cybercriminals collect these bits of code and compile them into a kit that can target multiple security vulnerabilities at once, and secretly install malware on devices.

Cyberattacks are a constant and evolving threat across all sectors with 2023 seeing a resurgence in data breaches and ransomware attacks with popular variants like Clop, LockBit, and ALPHV, among others, terrorizing businesses and exploiting system vulnerabilities. The 2021–2022 financial year saw an increase in cybercrime, with over 76,000 reports made to the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), with no signs of slowing down.

In an evolving era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), innovative tools like GitHub's Copilot are transforming the landscape of software development. In a prior article, I published about the implications of this transformation and how it extends to both the convenience offered by these intelligently automated tools and the new set of challenges it brings to maintaining robust security in our coding practices.

Threat actors attempt moving laterally from SQL server to the cloud, ShellBot avoids detection in attacks on Linux SSH servers, and Smart Links attacks target Microsoft accounts.