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.

The National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the world’s most widely used vulnerability data source, has been having some problems recently, causing uncertainty and anxiety for everyone dealing with security vulnerabilities. Many organizations, including cybersecurity vendors, rely on CVE data provided by NVD. As a government organization operated by the U.S.

Cyberattacks on large companies grab the headlines, creating the false impression that only big organizations are targeted by cybercriminals. This misleads smaller companies into believing that they are not potential targets because of their size or low profile. However, threats against small and medium-sized companies have been a cause for concern in recent years. Experts warn that companies with fewer than 100 employees are especially vulnerable to a range of threats.

A severe backdoor has been discovered in XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, potentially allowing threat actors to remotely access systems using these versions within SSH implementations. Many major Linux distributions were inadvertently distributing compromised versions. Consult your distribution’s security advisory for specific impact information.

It seems as though responders cannot catch a break when it comes to 0-day vulnerabilities and supply chain compromise avenues. On March 29th, 2024, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency published an alert regarding a supply chain compromise of the XZ Utils package. At time of writing, there is no information regarding exploitation of the vulnerability and follow-on post-compromise activity.

On March 28th, Red Hat released an advisory for CVE-2024-3094 which is a critical vulnerability identified in XZ Utils – a widely used data compression software included in many Linux distributions. This vulnerability stems from a backdoor inserted in versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of XZ Utils and has been given a CVSS score of 10 out of 10, indicating its severity as critical.

On March 29th, it was reported that malicious code enabling unauthorized remote SSH access has been detected within XZ Utils, a widely used package present in major Linux distributions (The GitHub project originally hosted here is now suspended). Fortunately, the malicious code was discovered quickly by the OSS community and managed to infect only two of the most recent versions of the package, 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, which were released within the past month.

On March 29, 2024, Red Hat disclosed CVE-2024-3094 (a.k.a XZ vulnerability) scoring a critical CVSS rating of 10. Stemming from a supply chain compromise it affects the latest iterations of XZ tools and libraries. The CVE was identified by a software engineer following the discovery of performance issues in SSH connections. This led to the exposure of a major supply chain attack where a compromised library was inserted into sshd and exploited during the authentication process.

Unveiled on the 29th of March 2024 is the high-stakes investment and prolonged campaign by a malicious actor to plant a backdoor in the Linux software library liblzma to gain access to multiple operating systems via Linux distributions, which arguably worked out successfully. That is until a curious engineer noticed a glitch. Currently known affected upstream software and proposed mitigation.

*April 1 update. it was confirmed that Fedora 40 is not affected by the backdoor. However, users should still downgrade to a 5.4 build to be safe. On March 29th, 2024, a critical CVE was issued for the XZ-Utils library. This vulnerability allows an attacker to run arbitrary code remotely on affected systems. Due to its immediate impact and wide scope, the vulnerability has scored 10 for both CVSS 3.1 and CVSS 4, which is the highest score available.