Never have I been so compelled to help educate small businesses on the need for cybersecurity. On Saturday morning, March 6, 2021, I awoke to the Wall Street Journal article describing the Hafnium attack. This attack on Microsoft Exchange Servers was shared publicly on March 2nd with a patch for the issue released on Wednesday, March 3rd. This patch appeared to spark action from the hacker who ramped up and automated their attack for maximum scale.

Medical devices, subway car doors, severe weather warnings, heavy machinery, car alarms, software security alerts. They all notify you to indicate that something is wrong so that you can take action to prevent harm. Hospital monitors can detect a wide range of issues, from an incorrect dose of medication to an irregular heartbeat and beyond. They can quite literally save a life. The same goes for severe weather alerts that warn of impending tornadoes or hurricanes.

If COVID-19 pandemic has made anything obvious to the business community, it is that riding the digital wave is no longer an option for businesses to thrive in the long-run. While several giant enterprises have already switched to a completely remote set up, laggards are still trying to figure their way around justifying such a move. For smaller organizations, however, investing in a digital-first future might not be as easy.

At the beginning of 2021, I noted that Snyk was ready to soar. And soar we have…the rocket ship’s next stop? Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ). I would like to welcome Shaun McLagan, our new Vice President of APJ Sales, and our new partners Temasek, an investment company headquartered in Singapore, and Geodesic Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in helping technology companies expand into Asia, to the Snyk family.

On this one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic declaration from the World Health Organization (WHO), let’s check back in on the remote work stats for the past year.

Leaky cloud services are a major concern these days. As more and more organizations move their data and applications to the cloud, ensuring new forms of collaboration and agility for their workforce, setup errors and misconfigurations (or even the lack of understanding of the shared responsibility model) pose a serious risk for the new, enlarged corporate perimeter. So far, in 2021, I have collected 12 major breaches fueled by cloud misconfigurations, and I wonder how many flew under the radar.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks allow an attacker to forge and submit requests as a logged-in user to a web application. CSRF exploits the fact that HTML elements send ambient credentials (like cookies) with requests, even cross-origin. Like XSS, to launch a CSRF attack the attacker has to convince the victim to either click on or navigate to a link.

A few weeks ago Seattle-based financial services and data management firm Automatic Funds Transfer Services (AFTS) suffered a serious ransomware attack. A gang called “Cuba” hacked and stole approximately 20 months’ worth of AFTS data, including financial documents, correspondence with bank employees, account movements, balance sheets, and tax documents. The compromised data then was offered for sale on the dark web.

The Elastic Common Schema (ECS) provides an open, consistent model for structuring your data in the Elastic Stack. By normalizing data to a single common model, you can uniformly examine your data using interactive search, visualizations, and automated analysis. Elastic provides hundreds of integrations that are ECS-compliant out of the box, but ECS also allows you to normalize custom data sources. Normalizing a custom source can be an iterative and sometimes time-intensive process.

On March 2, 2021, Microsoft announced it had detected the use of multiple 0-day exploits in limited and targeted attacks of on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange Server. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) attributes this campaign—with high confidence—to HAFNIUM, a group assessed to be state-sponsored and operating out of China, based on observed victimology, tactics and procedures.