Atlassian has released software fixes to address four critical flaws in its software that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution. In late October 2023, Atlassian issued a warning about a critical security flaw, CVE-2023-22518 (CVSS score 9.1), impacting all versions of Confluence Data Center and Server. This improper authorization issue poses a significant risk of data loss if exploited by an unauthenticated attacker.

On Tuesday, December 5, 2023, Atlassian published fixes for four critical-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities impacting a variety of Atlassian products, including Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center. The vulnerabilities were discovered by Atlassian as part of a security review and have not been actively exploited by threat actors. Additionally, we have not observed a public proof of concept (PoC) exploit published for any of the vulnerabilities.

On November 21, 2023, ownCloud published advisories on three security vulnerabilities. The most severe of these vulnerabilities is an information disclosure vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-49103 (CVSS: 10). The vulnerability is within the “graphapi” extension and is due to a library it relies on. The library provides a URL that when accessed discloses configuration details regarding the PHP environment including environment variables.

December 9 marks two years since the world went on high alert because of what was deemed one of the most critical zero-day vulnerabilities ever: Log4Shell. The vulnerability that carried the highest possible severity rating (10.0) was in Apache Log4j, an ubiquitous Java logging framework that Veracode estimated at the time was used in 88 percent of organizations.

On November 23, 2023, Arcserve released Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) 9.2 to address three vulnerabilities, including a critical-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability. Subsequently on November 27, 2023, Tenable published public Proof of Concepts (PoCs) for these vulnerabilities, as they were the ones who initially disclosed these vulnerabilities to Arcserve back in August 2023.

On December 5th, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released an advisory that confirmed the exploitation of CVE-2023-26360 at a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agency by unknown threat actors. Exploiting this vulnerability allowed threat actors to gain access to the FCEB agency network on two separate occasions in June 2023.

During a recent penetration test on a customer application, I noticed weird interactions between the web front-end and back-end. This would eventually turn out to be a vulnerability called HTTP request smuggling, enabled by the fact that the front-end was configured to downgrade HTTP/2 requests to HTTP/1.1. With the help from my colleague Thomas Stacey, we were able to construct an exploit chain with response queue desynchronization along with traditional HTTP/1.1 request smuggling techniques.

As software becomes increasingly integral to our professional and personal lives, the need to protect information and systems from malicious attacks grows proportionately. One of the critical threats that Python developers must grapple with is the risk of code injection, a sophisticated and often devastating form of cyberattack.

Securing C/C++ applications has been a massive challenge historically. Until today, many organizations using C/C++ have had to rely on a niche, single-language tool that, while decent at finding vulnerabilities, requires code to be compiled before scanning, slows down developers with clunky integrations, and provides vulnerability alerts that do not help developers to remediate the issue.

User credentials are the information required to authenticate a user's identity and grant them access to a system or application. Typically, this includes a username or email address and a password. While a username can be stored as plaintext in a database, sensitive information like email addresses or passwords should not. If a malicious actor gains access to your database where you store this information, you don't want to hand over this information to them easily.