A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Those of you of a certain age who frequented department stores during the 80’s and the emergence of home computing might remember the often used jape of writing a two line BASIC programme to fill the screen with text – often something silly. Such innocent times, and now though, we have this....

Executive Order 14028 on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity was released in May with nine sections outlining specific focus areas for security improvements. As we noted at the time, Netskope applauded the EO for how it placed significant emphasis on zero trust security adoption, mentioning it no fewer than 11 times, and insisting on proactive action.

2021 was the year businesses continued to adapt to new working patterns, digital transformation and battle the increasing threats from ransomware attacks. Here our panel of security experts share their predictions for the key security challenges and trends to look out for in 2022 ensuring you can beat the hackers at their own game.

This is the second in a two-part series discussing a still-unpatched userland Windows privilege escalation. The exploit enables attackers to perform highly privileged actions that typically require a kernel driver. Part 1 of this blog series showed how to block these attacks via ACL hardening. If you haven’t already, please read the first part of this series, because it lays an important foundation for this article. Interested readers can also check out the excellent Unknown Known DLLs...

In our 2021 Security Predictions, the WatchGuard’s Threat Lab team anticipated that authentication would be the cornerstone of strong security. “With billions of usernames and passwords ripe for the picking on the dark web and the prevalence of automated authentication attacks, we believe that any service without MFA enabled will be compromised in 2021,” said WatchGuard CSO Corey Nachreiner.

Following up on our Simulating Filesystem Tree with Billions of Files series, let's imagine that we want to create a filesystem with 1 billion inodes in memory. At this scale, every single byte used to represent the inode will use 1GB of memory. Just with the inode numbers, each with 8 bytes, will use at least 8GB of memory. If we consider, conservatively, that each inode will use approximately 50 bytes of space, it will not be feasible to store this information in memory.

The modern enterprise network is a complex, highly connected ecosystem of hardware, software, services, communication protocols, virtual resources, and people; who all work together to support business operations. IT networks are now the backbones of organizations everywhere, so cyberattacks aimed at breaking down network security are a huge threat for companies and stakeholders.

With the sharp increase in remote working worldwide, companies have endured a proliferation of cybersecurity risks — and, consequently, increased their spending to protect stakeholders. One factor that influences the level of corporate cybersecurity, and your effectiveness in mitigating cybersecurity threats, is the proper deployment of reactive and proactive cybersecurity measures.

Key risk indicators are important for every business. And while “KRIs” vary from one industry to the next — for example, what’s important for agribusiness is different from what’s important for pharmaceutical firms — no matter what the KRIs look like, they’re all instrumental for managing operational risk. Think of a key risk indicator as a pressure gauge measuring the amount of some risk your company has.

Enterprises have traditionally relied on perimeter network security to keep attackers out and protect their organizationally unique sensitive data and resources. This approach works on the principle “verify, always trust” wherein authenticated users inside the network are trusted by default and allowed unfettered access. With the shift to cloud-native architecture, perimeter-based defenses have become obsolete and leave systems inherently vulnerable to malicious actors.