When I was younger, I played a variety of team sports and enjoyed competing against opponents with my teammates. Winning was always a matter of applying sound tactics and strategy, attacking and defending well and using a blend of skill, talent and luck. Now that I’m older, I watch more than I play, and I’m able to appreciate the many lessons team sports teach, especially at the professional level. With sports, we can tackle technical topics in a relatable way.

The simplest explanation is that the page takes a value and then creates a redirect to it. If /red.php?url=https://example.com created a redirect to https://example.com that would be a typical Open Redirect-vulnerability.

AT&T Alien Labs has seen a number of reports of active exploitation of a vulnerability in Microsoft Sharepoint (CVE-2019-0604). One report by the Saudi Cyber Security Centre appears to be primarily targeted at organisations within the kingdom. An earlier report by the Canadian Cyber Security Centre identified similar deployment of the tiny China Chopper web-shell to gain an initial foothold.

The importance of a mature vulnerability management program can’t be overstated. File integrity monitoring (FIM) and security configuration management (SCM) might be the bedrock of a strong cybersecurity program, but they can only go so far. Scanning for vulnerabilities needs to be a foundational part of your program, too.

Vulnerability Management is a much-talked-about practice in the IT security industry. Whether it is the debate on vulnerability scoring, how to implement a suitable vulnerability management program based on your own resources or even trying to convince leadership a vulnerability management solution alone won’t solve all your cybersecurity issues, the debate is still strong.

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at some of the metrics that an executive team would want to see to identify how the business risk is trending. It is very important to keep in mind that if the business does not see the information security program as effective and efficient, they will not continue to invest in information security projects. In this part, we will look at the operational level reports that can assist in focusing efforts to reduce the risk to the business.

One of the main issues I find across the information security industry is that we constantly need to justify our existence. Organizations have slowly realized they need to spend on IT to enable their businesses. Information security, on the other hand, is the team that is constantly preventing the business from freely doing as they please. IT is seen as a driver of success, and security can be, too. The security team just needs to learn how to enable the business.

This week CVE-2019-3874 was discovered which details a flaw in the Linux kernel where an attacker can circumvent cgroup memory isolation using the SCTP socket buffer. In containerised environments, this has the potential for a container running as root to create a DoS.

Apache Struts is a well-known development framework for Java-based web applications that is mostly used in enterprise environments. If you search for Apache Struts CVEs on MITRE, you currently get 77 results, and most of the critical ones are due to OGNL expression injection, which is very similar to SSTI (Server Side Template Injection) attacks. In this article we will go through the security history of Apache Struts, common Apache Struts security issues and the impact of these vulnerabilities.

Recently, a new Kubernetes related vulnerability was announced that affected the kube-apiserver. This was a denial of service vulnerability where authorized users with write permissions could overload the API server as it is handling requests. The issue is categorized as a medium severity (CVSS score of 6.5) and can be resolved by upgrading the kube-apiserver to v1.11.8, v1.12.6, or v1.13.4.