Despite the tight security services provided by Microsoft, we know how frequently SMEs' Office 365 is breached, either intentionally by hackers or inadvertently by carelessness. In such a scenario, it makes us wonder, can we fully trust Microsoft to protect us from mal actors in 2022?? The simple answer is yes. The complicated answer is: Microsoft is as secure as WE configure it. Does that make you uneasy?

The introduction of mobile devices has rapidly changed the world as we know it, as these small gadgets that are intended to fit into the palm of our hands rapidly gained dominance over our day-to-day activities. Thanks to these portable devices, we now have access to an abundance of information available to us on demand with minimal effort.

Lateral movement refers to the techniques that a cyber attacker uses. Once getting access to a corporate network, the attackers don’t stop there. They move around throughout the entire network, owning more computers and user accounts while exfiltrating data at the same time. They escalate their privileges to gain access to higher permissions and eventually access more confidential, critical and sensitive data.

Application developers have always had a tricky balance to maintain between speed and security, two requirements that may often feel at odds with each other. Practices that increase speed also pressure development teams to ensure that vulnerable code is identified and remediated without slowing development. As companies embrace digital transformation initiatives, the need to weave better security into developers’ workflows has only grown clearer.

In a perfect world, software developers would not only have an innate understanding of security but be able to create bulletproof code from the get-go.

Globally, the cyber threat level to organizations remains high and the current situation only serves to highlight this further. To this point, any organization that has substantial gaps in its cybersecurity capabilities is operating at risk, and when the threat landscape changes, as it has now, so we become more aware of the vulnerabilities that we have carried for some time and the need for better Cyber Threat Intelligence.

During many recent security incidents, we hear a lot of messages about the lack of knowledge of the code dependencies, attacks to the software supply chain, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), digital signatures, provenance, attestation, etc. The fact is, every time a new vulnerability appears in the landscape, we usually need to spend a lot of time and effort to detect the real impact on the applications and services that are running in our environment.

Drupal is a popular content management system (CMS) that leading corporations and government agencies use for mission-critical applications. With a supportive community of developers, robust security, multilingual support, compliance with WCAG guidelines, and ease of integration, Drupal is a go-to CMS.

One of the main goals for this research was to explore how it is possible to execute arbitrary commands even when using a safe API that prevents command injection. The focus will be on Version Control System (VCS) tools like git and hg (mercurial), that, among some of their options, allow the execution of arbitrary commands (under some circumstances). The targets for this research are web applications and library projects (written in any programming language) that call these commands using a safe API.