Securing custom applications in a sea of vulnerabilities is daunting. To make the task even more challenging, the threat to applications continues to grow: 8 out of the top 10 data breaches last year were related to application attack surfaces.1 This blog details two effective strategies for identifying vulnerabilities in custom software applications so they can be quickly addressed.

A week ago, on March 29th, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that two versions of xz Utils, were found to have been compromised. The xz Utils code had been tampered with to include a malicious “backdoor” that would ultimately give attackers the same level of control over affected systems as authorized administrators.

The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is used to evaluate and communicate the technical severity of software, hardware and firmware vulnerabilities. While CVSS has been around for nearly 2 decades and now stands as an industry standard tool for scoring the severity of a vulnerability, the framework still has its limitations. To mitigate some of these challenges and improve the efficacy of the system, an updated version of CVSS was released in November 2023.

Google has issued a security advisory to owners of its Android Pixel smartphones, warning that it has discovered someone has been targeting some devices to bypass their built-in security. What makes the reported attacks particularly interesting is that traditional cybercriminals may not be behind them, but rather "forensic companies" exploiting two vulnerabilities to extract information and prevent remote wiping.

A look at the recently discovered backdoor hiding in the open source XZ Utils compression service.

A contributor to the liblzma library (a compression library that is used by the OpenSSH project, among many others) submitted malicious code that included an obfuscated backdoor. Since the maintainers had no reason to suspect foul play, they accepted and merged the contribution. The malicious code made it into the compression library release, and later on to the OpenSSH server, which relies on the library in question.

The software development landscape works on speed and efficiency, making CI/CD pipelines essential. While it streamlines software delivery, its rapid adoption has opened doors to new security threats.

The open-source world narrowly escaped a sophisticated supply-chain attack that could have compromised countless systems. A stark reminder of the necessity of vigilant monitoring and rigorous vetting within the open-source ecosystem to maintain trust and security.

CrowdStrike is committed to protecting our customers from the latest and most sophisticated cybersecurity threats. We are actively monitoring activity surrounding CVE-2024-3094, a recently identified vulnerability in XZ Utils.

A penetration test is a sanctioned assault on your organization’s electronic assets and data. If the attack is repelled, you win. If the attack successfully breaches your defenses, technically you also win – as you’ve now got the chance to fix those vulnerabilities before a real attacker tries their luck. Given the complexity of a modern enterprise, a pen test can evaluate a wide range of assets, networks, systems, and apps on premises, mobile, and in the cloud.