A popular joke among technologists says that it’s always DNS, even when it initially didn’t seem that way. DNS issues come in many shapes and forms, including some often-overlooked security issues. DNS (short for the Domain Name System) continues to be described as “the phonebook of the Internet,” but many people, including most readers of this blog, will be more familiar with the basic workings of DNS than with the outdated phenomenon of paper phonebooks.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. More than ever, now is the time for organizations to prioritize data security. This week we look at some data security trends that are shaping the industry today. Illustration by Balaji KR A recent study conducted by RiskBased Security has labeled 2020 the worst year for data security with a shocking 36 billion records compromised, twice the number from 2019.

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.

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).