Contractors, freelancers, and other temporary workers have become essential parts of the modern enterprise. For IT and security teams, these individuals present unique challenges compared to full-time workers—and potential risks. The ‘offboarding’ process for these contractors is often less formal than bringing them on. Meaning, many just stop using their entitlements and accounts without actually closing them. These dormant accounts can pose serious risks to the organization.

On Friday, May 27, Security vendor nao_sec identified a malicious document leveraging a zero-day RCE vulnerability (CVE-2022-30190) in Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). The actively exploited vulnerability exists when MSDT is called using the URL protocol from a calling application, such as Microsoft Word.

On Tuesday, June 14, 2022, Citrix released patches for multiple vulnerabilities, including CVE-2022-27511, an unauthenticated remote privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM). The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated user to remotely corrupt an affected system to reset the administrator password at the next device reboot. Successful exploitation allows a threat actor to gain initial access using the default credentials via SSH after a device reboot.

“Software is eating the world.” That phrase entered the high-tech lexicon in 2011, courtesy of Marc Andreessen, co-founder of both Netscape and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. His thesis is proven time and again. If you substitute data for software, it amplifies the power of Andreessen’s observation. Consider the following statistics on how much data is created every day: Technology users alone generate more than 1.145 trillion MB of data every day!

After a two-year hiatus, we couldn’t have been happier to spend the week in the Bay area with our customers, partners, and peers at the RSA Conference. The opportunity to showcase our latest solutions and technologies while connecting with some of the smartest people in the industry is something we’ve missed dearly, and meeting with our customers in person has made the 2022 conference sweeter than ever before.

Summer is here and phishing season is in full swing. May saw a troubling range of phishing attacks carried out against a wide array of targets, from retirement planners to school systems to national defense. Bundle all of those efforts together with a disturbing ransomware attack on the air travel industry and you have all the evidence you need of the dangers of inadequate cybersecurity at every level.

Right now, much of the security world is focused on the RSA conference in San Francisco, California. The Torq team has been preparing for the event for months—and we’re thrilled that we finally get a chance to talk about Torq in person with other security professionals.

In our sixth episode of the Future of Security Operations podcast, Thomas speaks with Niall Heffernan, Head of Security at Cygnvs, a former Senior Manager of Information Security at Informatica, and a Lecturer for BSc, HDIP, PGDip, and MSc students studying in the Cybersecurity courses at the National College of Ireland.

On Tuesday, May 31, 2022, Volexity responsibly disclosed a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability to Atlassian affecting all supported versions of Confluence Server & Data Center. The Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) injection vulnerability allows an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code on a Confluence Server or Data Center instance.