This past year was a banner year for cybercriminals. By the end of September, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITCR) reported that the number of breaches that had taken place over the first three quarters of 2021 had exceeded the total number of breaches in 2020.
The last week has been a wild ride for just about everyone in the technology world due to the public disclosure of the Log4Shell vulnerability. As a developer security company, Snyk has built our business around proactive automation to identify and fix security issues in applications. To say we’ve been busy this week would be an understatement.
Malicious actors always try to be creative and find new ways to trick people into a scam. In this case a new website is offering 75% discount on all Timberland shoes. The information looks almost identical to the original page, but when looking closer questions start to pop.
The notorious Log4Shell vulnerability CVE-2021-45046, has put Log4j in the spotlight, and grabbed the entire Java community’s attention over the last couple of weeks. Maintainers of Java projects that use Log4j have most probably addressed the issue. Meanwhile, non-java developers are enjoying relative peace of mind, knowing that they are unaffected by one of the major vulnerabilities found in recent years. Unfortunately, this is an incorrect assumption.
Recently, we observed a malware spam campaign leveraging the current COVID-19 situation. The emails were sent from a compromised mailbox using a mailer script. The message contains a link leading to a Word document. The email takes advantage of a COVID-19 test mandate as a pretext to lure the unsuspecting user into clicking the link and downloading the document. Figure 1. COVID-19 themed malspam with link to the malicious document.
As technology continues to change rapidly, and so do the tactics cybercriminals use. Responding to these changes requires adapting your security operations center (SOC), or eventually, you may encounter a security incident. Security is a journey, not a destination. You don’t just become secure and move on to another project. Instead, you continuously observe, adapt, and improve.
I am writing this from my home office in Texas. Texas isn’t just my home. It is the home of the best brisket on the planet, some of the most iconic high tech brands in the world, and energy production that powers the global economy. In the morning, I might meet with one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the country about achieving the rigorous FedRAMP certification so they can sell to federal agencies.
Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, recently published the 2021 Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) report. The report, which is Europol’s flagship strategic product that provides a law enforcement focused assessment of evolving threats and key developments in the area of cybercrime, highlights the expansion of the cyber threat landscape due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerated digitization.
Protecting our critical infrastructure against the threat of ransomware remains a top priority for both the private sector and the federal government. In fact, a recent survey from Tripwire found that security professionals in both sectors still identify ransomware as a top security concern. More than half (53%) of respondents in that study said they were most concerned about ransomware, for instance.
If you have access to the internet, it’s likely that you have already heard of the critical vulnerability in the Log4j library. A zero-day vulnerability in the Java library Log4j, with the assigned CVE code of CVE-2021-44228, has been disclosed by Chen Zhaojun, a security researcher in the Alibaba Cloud Security team. It’s got people worried—and with good reason.
