There are truisms that span history. One truism is that a single mistake can lead to disaster, and to some extent the series of vulnerabilities affecting the organizations that use Apache Log4j.

Our security research team will explain a real attack scenario from the black box and white box perspective on how a vulnerable AWS Lambda function could be used by attackers as initial access into your cloud environment. Finally, we show the best practices to mitigate this vector of attack. Serverless is becoming mainstream in business applications to achieve scalability, performance, and cost efficiency without managing the underlying infrastructure.

No sooner did word start to spread about Apache Log4j that the usual torrent of blaring headlines, vendor marketing, and tips and tricks-style “information” quickly followed. You can find plenty of solid technical analysis out there about Log4j, and we’ve already posted information about Netskope protections and threat coverage from Netskope Threat Labs. But that’s not this post.

Learn about the five cryptography best practices every developer should follow to secure their applications. Cryptography is a huge subject with dedicated experts, but that doesn’t mean developers can leave it entirely to their security teams. Building security into DevOps means you need to understand how to deliver secure, high-quality code at velocity. Having some basic cryptography under your belt will help.

Managing the security of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment requires constant vigilance. Your strategy should include identifying potential threats to your environment and proactively monitoring for vulnerabilities and system weaknesses that malicious actors might exploit. In a complex environment—such as your AWS account with a multitude of services, coupled with various architectures and applications—the ideal solution should be both comprehensive and straightforward.

Following the discovery of Log4Shell, a vulnerability in Log4J2, Elastic released a blog post describing how users of our platform can leverage Elastic Security to help defend their networks. We also released an advisory detailing how Elastic products and users are impacted.

Microsoft recently published two critical CVEs related to Active Directory (CVE-2021-42278 and CVE-2021-42287), which when combined by a malicious actor could lead to privilege escalation with a direct path to a compromised domain. In mid-December 2021, a public exploit that combined these two Microsoft Active Directory design flaws (referred also as “noPac”) was released.

IDOR is a broken access control vulnerability where invalidated user input can be used to perform unauthorized access to application functions. IDOR can result in sensitive information disclosure, information tampering etc. This issue was previously part of OWASP top 10 2007, later it was merged with OWASP top 10 A5 Broken Access control vulnerability.

In recent weeks a critical vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) has been discovered in Log4j2, a popular logging library for Java applications. Attackers can exploit this flaw by performing Remote Code Execution (RCE) on any systems where it is implemented.

URLs have forever changed the way we interact with computers. Conceptualized in 1992 and defined in 1994, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) continues to be a critical component of the internet, allowing people to navigate the web via descriptive, human-understandable addresses. But with the need for human readability came the need for breaking them into machine-usable components; this is handled with URL parsers.