For just under 90 minutes last Thursday, hackers were able to compromise the systems of cryptocurrency lending platform BlockFi, and gain unauthorised access to users’ names, email addresses, dates of birth, address and activity history.

Change is hard—and during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s happening at breakneck speed. Your employees and business partners need to know now, more than ever before, that they can trust you to be honest and transparent with them. This is the essence of ethical leadership. We’re standing on shaky ground as the virus sweeps through our nation and upends our economy. People are losing their jobs, their health insurance, and perhaps even their savings.

A friend that can’t keep a secret isn’t one you’ll rely on. The same is true for your mission critical CI/CD tool that you have to entrust with credentials for each integrated component. Keeping your secrets safe can be a challenge for CI/CD tools, since they need to connect to such a variety of other services. Each one needs its own password or token that must be kept hidden from prying eyes.

Recently we came across an interesting case that demonstrates just how important it is to monitor the behaviour of your network as even simple software components can be deceptive in nature. Our analysts were alerted to suspicious network activity originating from Microsoft Edge running on a Windows 10 machine. The browser in this instance was making a large number of web requests even though the machine was locked and not in use. There was one notable long running connection.

We’ve had an exciting past six months at Styra, from a Series A funding announcement to tremendous growth in the Open Policy Agent (OPA) community to new enhancements to our commercial product, Styra’s Declarative Authorization Service (DAS). All of this great momentum maps to our overarching vision of unifying authorization and policy for the cloud-native environment.

A new kind of spam is being observed in the field that uses the browser notification feature to trick users into subscribing to sites that will in turn bombard users with notifications usually related to click or add profit schemes. Subscription notification request seen below: Browser notification subscription requests are a legitimate feature that allows visitors of a site to be notified when there is new content available. It saves users the need to constantly refresh or keep open browser tabs.

As one of the engineers on the Gravity team here at Gravitational, I was tasked with adding SELinux support to Gravity 7.0, released back in March. The result of this work is a base Kubernetes cluster policy that confines the services (both Gravity-specific and Kubernetes) and user workloads. In this post, I will explain how I built it, which issues I ran into, and some useful tips I’d like to share. Specifically, we will look at the use of attributes for the common aspects of the policy.

Vulnerability assessment is the process of identifying, classifying, and prioritizing security vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure. A comprehensive vulnerability assessment evaluates whether an IT system is exposed to known vulnerabilities, assigns severity levels to identified vulnerabilities, and recommends remediation or mitigation steps where required.

The Collection tactic outlines techniques an attacker will undertake in order to find and gather the data they need to meet their actions on objectives. I see most of these techniques as being useful for describing what a piece of malware or threat actor is up to rather than looking to them for guidance on how to mitigate and detect their actions.

It’s DBIR season! Put down your pens, stop watching “The Last Dance” and get to reading the key findings of the 13th edition of the annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report!