Authors and Contributors: As always, security at Splunk is a family business. Credit to authors and collaborators: Ryan Kovar, Shannon Davis, Marcus LaFerrera, John Stoner, James Brodsky, Dave Herrald, Audra Streetman, Johan Bjerke, Drew Church, Mick Baccio, Lily Lee, Tamara Chacon, Ryan Becwar. If you want just to see how to find detections for the Log4j 2 RCE, skip down to the “detections” sections.
Software development organizations are investing more and more resources in their vulnerability management programs. According to Gartner’s forecast, in 2021 enterprise security spending was expected to break records and grow 12.4% to reach 150.4 billion. But how do organizations know if they’re spending their security resources wisely? The answer can only be found by crunching the numbers.
The Metasploit Framework is a Ruby-based, open-source framework that is used by information security professionals and cybercriminals to find, exploit, and validate system vulnerabilities. The framework consists of various exploitation tools and penetration testing tools. Information security teams most commonly use Metasploit for penetration testing (or “ethical hacking”) to identify and remediate any existing vulnerabilities across an organization’s networks.
There are almost 165,000 known CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) listed in the NIST Database. In October of 2020, the NSA published a list of the 25 CVEs most likely to be exploited by Nation-State attackers in China; Checkpoint software found over 3 million attempts to penetrate networks or steal files using these known vulnerabilities.
The JFrog Security research team continuously monitors popular open source software (OSS) repositories with our automated tooling, and reports any vulnerabilities or malicious packages discovered to repository maintainers and the wider community. Most recently we disclosed 11 malicious packages in the PyPI repository, a discovery that shows attacks are getting more sophisticated in their approach.
In 2020, I published an AT&T blog called “Top Cybersecurity Trends & Predictions for 2020’”. In the article I had forecasted that cybersecurity would become even more of a strategic priority for companies as the cost, sophistication, and lethality of breaches would continue to rise.
As we look ahead to 2022, we should pause to reflect on the trends of the past year. Ransomware and supply chain attacks have become two of the top concerns for organizations following a series of high-profile attacks, such as those conducted against Colonial Pipeline, SolarWinds and Kaseya. In 2021, our Project Memoria revealed close to 100 different vulnerabilities in common TCP/IP stacks, affecting hundreds of operational technology (OT) vendors.
On November 10, 2021, Palo Alto Networks released advisories for eight different vulnerabilities affecting the company’s VPN firewall products. The vulnerabilities’ criticality ranges from ‘medium’ to ‘critical,’ with the most severe vulnerability, CVE-2021-3064 (CVSSv3.1 of 9.8), allowing for unauthenticated remote code execution, or RCE.
Trustwave has been accredited by the internationally-recognized professional certification board CREST for its world-class vulnerability assessment services. Trustwave is now uniquely accredited with multiple CREST accreditations across Vulnerability Assessment (VA), Intelligence-Led Penetration Testing (STAR), Penetration Testing (PEN TEST) and STAR-FS Intelligence-Led Penetration Testing.
