2020 was a lot of things. Unexpected. Tough. Frightening. Frantic. It was also revealing. Most CIOs were asked to enable ways of working and doing business that they had not considered necessary before. Others had maybe always known such moves were wise, but had never been able to dedicate the time, resource or budget to such endeavours. Or, ironically, had never been able to prove the business case. Either way, too many were caught under-prepared.

We discussed in previous blogs the need for data protection for Kubernetes and what’s different about CloudCasa. CloudCasa was designed to address the gap in data protection and disaster recovery that exists in all the leading Kubernetes distributions and managed cloud services. Further, another pain point that CloudCasa addresses is that your cloud-based applications may well be hybrid and multi-cloud applications that use both container-based storage and serverless databases.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. The year kicks of with many strange events, and the continuing unraveling of the SolarWinds hack has moved on to other points in the supply chain. How far does this rabbit hole go?

In December 2020, the U.S government announced that it fell victim to what is believed to be the largest security breach in the nation's history. The breach occurred through an innocuous IT update from the Government's network monitoring vendor, SolarWinds. This monumental breach exposes a novel and powerful method of clandestinely penetrating even the most sophisticated security defenses through third-party vendors - supply chain attacks.

At Nightfall, we believe in the power of learning from those who have done it before. That’s why we created CISO Insider — a podcast interview series that features CISOs and security executives with a broad set of backgrounds, from hyper-growth startups to established enterprises. Through these interviews, we’ll learn how industry experts overcame obstacles, navigated their infosec careers, and created an impact in their organizations.

URL filtering is one of the most common types of web filtering techniques used by organizations to restrict the kinds of content that their users may access. URL filtering blocks users from loading questionable websites or hosted files via corporate device or network resources. The filter is triggered by comparing the URL address a user is trying to access against policy lists that specify whether to block, allow, and/or track visits to certain URL addresses.

Additionally, the Ezuri memory loader tool acts as a malware loader and executes its payload in memory, without writing the file to disk. While this technique is known and commonly used by Windows malware, it is less popular in Linux environments. The loader decrypts the malicious malware and executes it using memfd create (as described in this blog in 2018).

With many financially-motivated threat actors targeting cryptocurrency, it comes as no surprise that users of 'Stellar', an opensource blockchain payment network, have recently been targeted in a somewhat convincing attack in an attempt to steal their holdings of Lumen (XLM), an 'altcoin' cryptocurrency.

Today, Red Hat announced its intent to acquire Stackrox. This is a very exciting development in the world of cloud-native security! First and foremost, congratulations to Stackrox, an early participant in the container security space. This acquisition is a great outcome for Stackrox given their nascent scale and on-premises offering.

At Sumo Logic Illuminate 2020, The Energy Authority’s IT Director for Service Delivery and Support Scott Follick spoke about the TEA, how they do things, what they have learned in the process of searching for a SIEM solution, and why they chose Sumo.