Ignore a vulnerability? That sounds like a paradox. Why would anyone want to ignore a vulnerability? While ignoring security issues should not be your default practice, it is still sometimes necessary. Development and security teams today face vulnerability backlogs consisting of thousands of issues. To maintain rapid development, they must be able to effectively prioritize their work.
When protecting an organisation against cyber attacks, the words security threats, vulnerabilities, risk exposure, and sometimes exploits are seen very commonly. Unfortunately, these terms are not used correctly or interchangeably and are often left undefined.
Call me David. As you might have heard, Log4Shell, “the single biggest, most critical vulnerability ever”1 was recently disclosed to the public. You may even have seen us make mention of it here, here, here, or even maybe here. Splunkbase was impacted by way of apps both made by Splunk and third-party developers.
The first few months of 2022 have brought with them plenty of breaches and vulnerabilities for threat experts to sink their teeth into; in March alone, Microsoft has patched 71 CVEs, two of which, CVE-2022-22006 and CVE-2022-24501, were deemed critical–but more on those later. Meanwhile, cloud-based software company Okta has suffered a cyber-attack, believed to be at the hands of threat actor “Lapsus$”, which has put thousands of its 15,000 customers on high alert.
In recent years, we’ve witnessed a constant increase in the number of malicious packages showing up in various ecosystems. Generally speaking, the vast majority of these packages are benign, as in, they collect information, but don’t do harm to the infected machine. Once in a while, however, we do encounter a truly malicious package that has a purpose, means, and is production-ready — this is a story about one of them.
In cybersecurity, a vulnerability is a weakness that can be exploited by cybercriminals to gain unauthorized access to a computer system. After exploiting a vulnerability, a cyberattack can run malicious code, install malware and even steal sensitive data. Vulnerabilities can be exploited by a variety of methods including SQL injection, buffer overflows, cross-site scripting (XSS) and open-source exploit kits that look for known vulnerabilities and security weaknesses in web applications.
While most developers — myself included — primarily write in higher-level languages like Python or JavaScript, sometimes you need to add in native elements to improve performance or other project aspects. Since these native extension invocations are typically written in C or C++, suddenly a project primarily using JavaScript or Python must also account for potential C/C++ transient dependencies.
