In late March 2024, the cybersecurity community was shaken by the revelation of a critical vulnerability in XZ Utils, a popular open source compression tool integral to many Linux systems. The discovery was made by Andres Freund, a developer at Microsoft, who reported that versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 had a backdoor that could potentially allow unauthorised remote code execution.

The role of a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is critical in an interconnected business environment. A modern CISO will ensure that their organization is well-prepared to handle the myriad of cybersecurity challenges it faces. It is multifaceted, extending beyond traditional IT security to encompass various responsibilities to protect an organization's information assets.

Ever lost sleep over possible hidden attack routes lurking in your organization’s attack surface? You’re not alone. The concept of ‘unknown-unknowns’ is a recurring nightmare for many IT professionals – but there are ways to mitigate the risks. We’ll explore the problem of unknown-unknowns and provide some practical strategies to help your organization uncover these hidden threats.

Generative AI is an exciting technology that is now easily available through cloud APIs provided by companies such as Google and OpenAI. While it’s a powerful tool, the use of generative AI within code opens up additional security considerations that developers must take into account to ensure that their applications remain secure. In this article, we look at the potential security implications of large language models (LLMs), a text-producing form of generative AI.

On Friday April 12, Palo Alto disclosed that some versions of PAN-OS are not only vulnerable to remote code execution, but that the vulnerability has been actively exploited to install backdoors on Palo Alto firewalls. A patch is expected to be available on April 14th. The advisory from Palo Alto is here. Palo Alto has marked this vulnerability as critical and NVD has scored it a 10.0 with CVSSv3. Wallarm currently detects attacks against this vulnerability with no additional configuration required.

Welcome to the Threat Context Monthly blog series where we provide a comprehensive roundup of the most relevant cybersecurity news, and threat information from KrakenLabs, Outpost24’s cyber threat intelligence team.

On April 12, 2024, Palo Alto Networks published a security advisory detailing an actively exploited maximum severity vulnerability (CVE-2024-3400, CVSS: 10.0) affecting the GlobalProtect feature of PAN-OS. This vulnerability affects PAN-OS 10.2, PAN-OS 11.0, and PAN-OS 11.1 firewalls when configurations for both GlobalProtect gateway and device telemetry are enabled. An unauthenticated remote threat actor can exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall.