COVID-19 made moving agency employees and services off-premises essential. This move, however, has also sparked one of the biggest waves of cybercrime the internet has ever seen. Ransomware attacks have been particularly effective against government agencies and critical infrastructure.
Updated 12/20/21 On December 9, 2021, Apache published a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) for Apache Log4j being referred to as “Log4Shell”. This “critical” vulnerability (CVSS score: 10) allows a remote attacker to take control of an affected system. When exploited, this vulnerability allows an attacker to run arbitrary code on the device, giving full control over to the attacker.
As we look ahead to 2022, we should pause to reflect on the trends of the past year. Ransomware and supply chain attacks have become two of the top concerns for organizations following a series of high-profile attacks, such as those conducted against Colonial Pipeline, SolarWinds and Kaseya. In 2021, our Project Memoria revealed close to 100 different vulnerabilities in common TCP/IP stacks, affecting hundreds of operational technology (OT) vendors.
On November 10, 2021, Palo Alto Networks released advisories for eight different vulnerabilities affecting the company’s VPN firewall products. The vulnerabilities’ criticality ranges from ‘medium’ to ‘critical,’ with the most severe vulnerability, CVE-2021-3064 (CVSSv3.1 of 9.8), allowing for unauthenticated remote code execution, or RCE.
Project Memoria is the largest study on the security of TCP/IP stacks. The idea for this project emerged in May 2020 while collaborating with JSOF on Ripple20. Our researchers understood that the problem with TCP/IP stacks was much deeper and more widespread than initial research had suggested. We hypothesized that similar issues to those identified in Ripple20 could be present in other stacks as well.
Forescout Research Labs, with support from Medigate Labs, have discovered a set of 13 new vulnerabilities affecting the Nucleus TCP/IP stack, which we are collectively calling NUCLEUS:13. The new vulnerabilities allow for remote code execution, denial of service, and information leak. Nucleus is used in safety-critical devices, such as anesthesia machines, patient monitors and others in healthcare.
