A guest post by James Berthoty the founder of Latio Tech. The shift to cloud has meant an explosion in cloud security-related acronyms – so many that it can be difficult to know what you currently have versus what’s missing or available. First we bought CSPMs (Cloud Security Posture Management), then CWPPs (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms), then CNAPPs (Cloud Native Application Protection Platform), then CDRs (Cloud Detection Response), and now KDRs (Kubernetes Detection Response).

Seccomp, short for Secure Computing Mode, is a noteworthy tool offered by the Linux kernel. It is a powerful mechanism to restrict or log the system calls that a process makes. Operating within the kernel, seccomp allows administrators and developers to define fine-grained policies for system call execution, enhancing the overall security posture of applications and the underlying system.

A contributor to the liblzma library (a compression library that is used by the OpenSSH project, among many others) submitted malicious code that included an obfuscated backdoor. Since the maintainers had no reason to suspect foul play, they accepted and merged the contribution. The malicious code made it into the compression library release, and later on to the OpenSSH server, which relies on the library in question.