On November 14, 2024, Palo Alto Networks (PAN) revealed that a critical unauthenticated remote command execution vulnerability is being actively exploited against internet-exposed firewall management interfaces. According to their security advisory, Prisma Access and Cloud NGFW are not impacted by this issue. A CVE has not yet been assigned to the vulnerability.

On October 12, 2024, Ivanti released fixes for CVE-2024-50330, a critical severity vulnerability in Ivanti Endpoint Manager (EPM). This flaw allows Remote Code Execution (RCE) by an unauthenticated attacker.

On November 5, 2024, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the parent company of Aruba Networks, released a security bulletin addressing two critical-severity vulnerabilities affecting Aruba Networks Access Points. These vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2024-42509 and CVE-2024-47460, could allow unauthenticated command injection.

On November 1, 2024, details of a critical vulnerability affecting Synology NAS devices, which had been patched a few days earlier, were publicly disclosed. This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-10443 is classified as a zero-click flaw, meaning no user interaction is required for exploitation. The issue originates from the SynologyPhotos application, which comes pre-installed and enabled by default on Synology’s BeeStation storage devices and is also widely used among DiskStation users.

With governments across the globe gearing up for major elections, experts have been predicting an increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks from nation-states and, so far, those predictions have paid off. According to Forbes, a recently thwarted DDoS attack found hackers sending traffic at 3.8 terabytes per second to a target server, peaking at 2.14 billion packets per second, making it the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.

On October 29, 2024, QNAP issued a security advisory regarding a critical OS command injection vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-50388. Discovered by researchers at the Pwn2Own conference, this vulnerability affects HBS 3 Hybrid Backup Sync, a backup and disaster recovery solution used by organizations for secure data protection across multiple locations. The flaw allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands.

When security information and event management (SIEM) tools came to the market over a decade ago, many practitioners considered the combination of information management and event management groundbreaking. Since then, the technology has gone through iterations to improve and enhance its capabilities, including the incorporation of user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), machine learning and AI capabilities, and “out-of-the-box” configurations for smaller organizations to rely on.

In early August, Arctic Wolf Labs began observing a marked increase in Fog and Akira ransomware intrusions where initial access to victim environments involved the use of SonicWall SSL VPN accounts. Based on victimology data showing a variety of targeted industries and organization sizes, we assess that the intrusions are likely opportunistic, and the threat actors are not targeting a specific set of industries.

On October 23, 2024, Fortinet published an advisory disclosing an actively exploited vulnerability (CVE-2024-47575) affecting FortiManager and FortiManager Cloud. The critical-severity vulnerability can be exploited on FortiManager instances exposed to the internet via port 541. Successful exploitation could allow a remote, unauthenticated threat actor to execute arbitrary code or commands via specially crafted requests.

One of the most challenging elements of securing an organization from cyber threats is ensuring that their employees aren’t placing themselves or their colleagues at risk. But as Arctic Wolf’s new Human Risk Behavior Snapshot shows, even security practitioners and IT leaders aren’t always model citizens when it comes to mitigating their own cyber risk.