A new vulnerability was found in the Spring Core module of the Spring Framework. This was discovered by a Chinese security researcher, posting a Proof-of-Concept (POC) on GitHub (Figure 1), which later was deleted. This vulnerability is a zero-day, which currently wasn’t assigned a CVE, and was dubbed by security researchers as “Spring4Shell” or “SpringShell”, after the recent vulnerability in the Log4j Java package, discovered last December, and made waves worldwide.

The rise in cybercrime has accelerated 600% over the last three years, and shows no signs of slowing down. Even though the pandemic accelerated online services, data, and particularly vulnerable home networks, the truth is that cybercriminals are caught only 0.03 percent of the time. That rate, combined with the fact that the average cost of a data breach stands at $3.86 million makes for an attractive calculation for cybercriminals.

2022 saw several significant and historical cases in the ransomware industry, new players were introduced and some already have caused major damage to top-of-the-line organizations around the world. Although LAPSUS$ commenced its operations in December 2021, they have made its greatest impact in 2022, compromising major organizations such as NVIDIA, Vodafone, Samsung Microsoft, LG and Okta.

Within the context of the recent Conti leaks, we have seen the Jabber chats, indicating the size, scope, order, and structure of the Conti group. The subsequent leaks contained screenshots, documents, and the holy-grail – the source code itself.

There is a war going on. We see a twist in the cyber world considering recent events. While some groups take sides, whether in favor of Russia or Ukraine, some groups have gone MIA, and others are completely ignoring and continuing with their usual business model. And then we have Conti, which, as it appears, took the biggest tumble. Conti is one of the most popular ransomware groups of our era.