The cloud provides greater efficiency and speed-to-market, which explains its rapid adoption by organizations all over the world. While the rise in cloud operations allows organizations of all sizes to operate in a way that’s more cost-effective and flexible, opening your data, assets, and networks to the internet creates additional risk — particularly around misconfiguration and compliance.

Arctic Wolf Labs is aware of several instances of ransomware cases where the victim organizations were contacted after the original compromise for additional extortion attempts. In two cases investigated by Arctic Wolf Labs, threat actors spun a narrative of trying to help victim organizations, offering to hack into the server infrastructure of the original ransomware groups involved to.

The world of cybersecurity doesn’t lack for acronyms. Whether it’s protocols and standards or tools and technology, the market is dominated by an endless array of capital letters. In recent years, as both technology and threat actors have evolved, more and more platforms are branding themselves with “D’s” and “R’s” for “detection and response.”

On December 20, 2023, Ivanti announced that 20 vulnerabilities in Ivanti Avalanche On-Prem were patched in the product’s latest update. Arctic Wolf has highlighted 13 of these vulnerabilities in this bulletin that were rated as critical severity and could lead to remote code execution (RCE) or Denial of Service (DoS).

The cybersecurity industry is always evolving. Whether new solutions arrive because of advances in technology, emerging threats, or changing security needs, every few years a new platform — and often acronym — joins the market. Extended detection and response (XDR) is one of those solutions that has gained momentum from buyers and taken over many security conversations in recent years.

With cyber attack frequency hitting new highs, the continued evolution of threat actor tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), and the rapid digitization of organizations across industries, it’s become common to say that it’s not a matter of if, but when you’ll experience a cyber incident.

On December 13, 2023, threat actors began exploitation attempts against CVE-2023-50164, a critical-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability impacting Apache Struts, an open-source framework used to create Java Web applications. Based on current intelligence, the threat actors are leveraging a publicly published proof of concept (PoC) exploit.

On November 14, 2023, FortiGuard published an advisory disclosing that a critical command injection vulnerability (CVE-2023-36553) had been patched in the latest updates for FortiSIEM. The vulnerability was rated with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 9.3, as it can be exploited remotely by an unauthenticated threat actor using crafted API requests to execute unauthorized commands. This vulnerability is caused by improper neutralization of special elements in FortiSIEM report server.

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.

On Tuesday, December 5, 2023, Atlassian published fixes for four critical-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities impacting a variety of Atlassian products, including Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center. The vulnerabilities were discovered by Atlassian as part of a security review and have not been actively exploited by threat actors. Additionally, we have not observed a public proof of concept (PoC) exploit published for any of the vulnerabilities.