With governments across the globe gearing up for major elections, experts have been predicting an increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks from nation-states and, so far, those predictions have paid off. According to Forbes, a recently thwarted DDoS attack found hackers sending traffic at 3.8 terabytes per second to a target server, peaking at 2.14 billion packets per second, making it the largest DDoS attack ever recorded.

On October 29, 2024, QNAP issued a security advisory regarding a critical OS command injection vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-50388. Discovered by researchers at the Pwn2Own conference, this vulnerability affects HBS 3 Hybrid Backup Sync, a backup and disaster recovery solution used by organizations for secure data protection across multiple locations. The flaw allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands.

When security information and event management (SIEM) tools came to the market over a decade ago, many practitioners considered the combination of information management and event management groundbreaking. Since then, the technology has gone through iterations to improve and enhance its capabilities, including the incorporation of user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), machine learning and AI capabilities, and “out-of-the-box” configurations for smaller organizations to rely on.

In early August, Arctic Wolf Labs began observing a marked increase in Fog and Akira ransomware intrusions where initial access to victim environments involved the use of SonicWall SSL VPN accounts. Based on victimology data showing a variety of targeted industries and organization sizes, we assess that the intrusions are likely opportunistic, and the threat actors are not targeting a specific set of industries.

On October 23, 2024, Fortinet published an advisory disclosing an actively exploited vulnerability (CVE-2024-47575) affecting FortiManager and FortiManager Cloud. The critical-severity vulnerability can be exploited on FortiManager instances exposed to the internet via port 541. Successful exploitation could allow a remote, unauthenticated threat actor to execute arbitrary code or commands via specially crafted requests.

One of the most challenging elements of securing an organization from cyber threats is ensuring that their employees aren’t placing themselves or their colleagues at risk. But as Arctic Wolf’s new Human Risk Behavior Snapshot shows, even security practitioners and IT leaders aren’t always model citizens when it comes to mitigating their own cyber risk.

On October 21, 2024, Broadcom released updated fixes for the critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability CVE-2024-38812 in vCenter Server and Cloud Foundation, as the initial patch from September did not fully resolve the issue. This vulnerability is a heap-overflow flaw in the implementation of the DCERPC protocol that a remote attacker can use to send specially crafted network packets to vCenter Server, potentially leading to RCE.

On October 15, 2024, SolarWinds released a hotfix for CVE-2024-28988, a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting Web Help Desk (WHD). WHD is an IT service management software widely used across various industries for tracking and managing support tickets. This vulnerability arises from a Java deserialization flaw, which could enable a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable hosts.

On October 9, 2024, GitLab released patches for a critical vulnerability affecting various versions of GitLab EE, identified as CVE-2024-9164. This flaw allows a remote attacker to run pipelines on arbitrary branches within a repository, which could potentially lead to code execution. A GitLab pipeline consists of a series of automated processes that execute in stages to build, test, and deploy code.

An employee at a large organization is doing research for a client and clicks on what they believe is a legitimate website. What they don’t realize is, while they’re browsing, malware in the form of a Trojan virus is swiftly downloading onto their endpoint. The Trojan jumps from the endpoint into the organization’s network, and suddenly, their cybersecurity system rings alarms as ransomware takes hold in the environment.

On April 12, 2024, Palo Alto Networks published a security advisory detailing an actively exploited maximum severity zero-day vulnerability affecting the GlobalProtect feature of PAN-OS. Dubbed CVE-2024-3400, it was assigned the maximum critical severity score of 10.0 through the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), meaning the potential for damage was large and the path to exploit was easy for cybercriminals.

On September 24, 2024, Rackspace, a managed cloud computing company providing cloud hosting, dedicated servers, and multi-cloud solutions, reported an issue with their Rackspace Monitoring product in the ScienceLogic EM7 (ScienceLogic SL1) Portal. Rackspace utilizes the ScienceLogic application as a third-party tool for monitoring certain internal services.

A ransomware attack is underway. The threat actor has gained initial access to an endpoint and executed malicious code on it. As far as the threat actor is concerned, things are going well. However, the next stage is critical to a ransomware attack’s success. Without the ability to spread throughout the entire environment, encrypting or locking up all systems, threat actors are unlikely to be able to extort payment from an organization.