No-one would lend or borrow money without expecting some form of agreement to be in place covering the term, the interest, the repayments and so on. Even lending the garden hose to a neighbour comes with an expectation of it being returned at some stage and being returned in the state that it was lent.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. WordPress is wonderful – it has transformed web site development for those without a good developer and a budget. However plugins continue to remain a problem and rather than actually going through with a serious attack, a spate of faked attacks via flaky plugins are on the rise once again.

Several malware families are distributed via Microsoft Office documents infected with malicious VBA code, such as Emotet, IceID, Dridex, and BazarLoader. We have also seen many techniques employed by attackers when it comes to infected documents, such as the usage of PowerShell and WMI to evade signature-based threat detection. In this blog post, we will show three additional techniques attackers use to craft malicious Office documents.

Passwords are everywhere. Sometimes they are obvious — hardcoded in the code or laying flat in the file. Other times, they take the form of API keys, tokens, cookies or even second factors. Devs pass them in environment variables, vaults mount them on disk, teams share them over links, copy to CI/CD systems and code linters. Eventually someone leaks, intercepts or steals them. Because they pose a security risk, there is no other way to say it: passwords in our infrastructure have to go.

The rules set forth by PCI-DSS can seem complicated. Four levels, 12 requirements, multiple credit card brands: it’s easy to get lost in the details of PCI-DSS requirements. However, merchants who fail to meet the PCI compliance standard face heavy consequences. Not only do these companies put their customer data at risk, they also may face hefty fines that can range from $5,000 to $100,000 per month.