Imagine you have a backpack with a granola bar buried at the bottom and a tenacious tiny dog who loves snacks. Even though the dog shouldn’t be able to reach that granola bar stored away carefully, it managed to open a zipper and snoop through the contents to eat the snack. From an IT environment standpoint, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the backpack carrying sensitive – but appealing to attackers – data.

In a security bulletin on February 19, ConnectWise announced critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-1708 & CVE-2024-1709) to its on-premises ScreenConnect product (identified and responsibly reported by one of Kroll’s SOC analysts), allowing attackers to takeover an organization’s ScreenConnect. The vulnerability, trivial to exploit, allows anonymous individuals to a create system admin account on publicly exposed instances of the product.

Developers and cybersecurity have an interesting relationship. Developers have no problem with security operations just as long as they’re not involved or adding security doesn’t slow down their development cycle. Thankfully, well-documented security operations — known as DevSecOps — assist with the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and perform mostly invisibly from the developer’s perspective.

As the threat landscape continues to develop, ransomware and data brokerage groups constantly emerge, develop, and disband. Cyjax observed a relatively high level of data-leak site (DLS) emergence in July 2024, with a total of nine new sites. For reference, the highest observed number of ransomware groups that have emerged in a single month is ten (September 2022).

Endpoints are a continuous target for threat actors. They serve as gateways to the overall network, meaning an attack that starts on a single endpoint can quickly spread across the attack surface. They offer a valuable entry point into an organization’s environment that can be used to launch sophisticated cyber attacks.

Attention: a new Kubernetes vulnerability was uncovered by André Storfjord Kristiansen (@dev-bio on GitHub) and it demands immediate attention from security professionals and DevOps teams. CVE-2024-7646, affecting the popular ingress-nginx controller, allows malicious actors to bypass annotation validation and potentially gain unauthorized access to sensitive cluster resources. This vulnerability has been assigned a CVSS v3.1 base score of 8.8 (High).

A review of AI-generated malware, and how a SOC might deal with the ever-increasing threat… Theofanis Dimakis, SOC Officer, and Nikolaos Tsompanidis, Threat Detection & Response Expert at Obrela, speaking during the recent CRESTCon Europe event, shared insights from their perspective into detecting malware, including the rising tide of AI variants.

Being a bad guy on the Internet is a really good business. In more than 90% of cybersecurity incidents, phishing is the root cause of the attack, and during this third week of August phishing attacks were reported against the U.S. elections, in the geopolitical conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, and to cause $60M in corporate losses.

On August 13, 2024, SolarWinds released a hotfix for CVE-2024-28986, 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 attacker to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable hosts.