Network segmentation is almost as old as computer networking. The evolution of network segmentation went through switches to routers and firewalls, and as modern networks evolved, the ability to better control traffic by operating system native functionality evolved as well. Native controls like IP Tables became lingua franca, alongside access control lists, process isolations, and more. Native controls are not a new concept.
When it comes to PHP, composer is without discussion, THE package manager. It’s fast, easy to use, actively maintained and very secure — or so most thought. On April 21, 2021, a command injection vulnerability was reported, which shook the PHP community. Fortunately it didn’t have a very big impact, but it could have. The problem with the vulnerability is that it affected the very heart of the Composer supply chain: Packagist servers.
On Tuesday, September 14, Apple announced its latest generation of products along with the major release of iOS 15. Unfortunately, this coincided with an earlier announcement of an emergency software update due to a critical software vulnerability discovered within a series of Apple products. This vulnerability was identified by researchers at Citizen Lab, who found a flaw capable of allowing attackers to install invasive spyware on affected devices without the interaction of the owner.
The typical process when scoping a penetration test is to get a list of targets from the client, which are typically a list of IP addresses and/or hostnames. But where does this information come from, and how accurate is it? Chances are the client has documentation that lists the devices they think they have, and what addresses or names they have been assigned. This documentation will form the basis of the scope when conducting testing or scanning against a target environment.
Co-authored by James Robinson and Jeff Kessler As rapidly as wide-area networking (WAN) and remote access strategies with associated technologies are changing, we’re always surprised by the amount of time some security professionals and auditors dedicate to the either/or debate between split tunnel and full tunnel connectivity.
In April 2021, I discovered an attack vector that could allow a malicious Pull Request to a Github repository to gain access to our production environment. Open source companies like us, or anyone else who accepts external contributions, are especially vulnerable to this. For the eager, the attack works by pivoting from a Kubernetes worker pod to the node itself, and from there exfiltrating credentials from the CI/CD system.
The events of 2020 helped to accelerate the convergence between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) for many organizations. As reported by Help Net Security, for instance, two-thirds of IT and OT security professionals said in a 2020 survey that their IT and OT networks had become more interconnected in the wake of the pandemic.
Tripwire Enterprise (TE) is at its heart a baselining engine. It’s been built to take information, create a baseline of it, and show when that baseline has changed. (It’s called a “version” in TE terms.) TE starts with a baseline version designated by an organization’s security teams. At some point, a change version with new information (file, registry entry, RSoP, command output, or data captured in some other way) emerges.
