On March 22, the hacking group Lapsus$ published a Twitter post with a number of screenshots taken from a computer showing “superuser/admin” access to various systems at authentication firm Okta that took place in January this year. Okta is a platform in the #1 platform in Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) category, which means that it manages access to internal and external systems with one login.
On March 21st, President Biden released a warning about the possibility of Russian cyber warfare attacks against targets in the West as a response to sanctions. This is apparently backed by “evolving intelligence” and specifically mentions American companies and critical infrastructure.
A new vulnerability CVE-2022-0811, alias cr8escape, with CVSS 8.8 (HIGH) has been found in the CRI-O container engine by Crowdstrike. This vulnerability can lead to arbitrary code execution. The container engines affected are: Any containerized infrastructure that relies on these vulnerable container engines is affected as well, including Kubernetes and OpenShift (version 4.6 to 4.10).
Recently, IBM announced the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center1 for the acceleration of hybrid cloud and to help IBM Z clients accelerate the modernization of their applications, data, and processes in an open hybrid cloud architecture. By combining IBM Z systems built for transactional integrity, throughput, reliability, and availability with hybrid cloud development, IBM is combining the best of both worlds.
Organizations have moved business-critical apps to the cloud and attackers have followed. 2020 was a tipping point; the first year where we saw more cloud asset breaches and incidents than on-premises ones. We know bad actors are out there; if you’re operating in the cloud, how are you detecting threats? Cloud is different. Services are no longer confined in a single place with one way in or one way out.
Right on the heels of CVE-2022-4092, another local privilege escalation flaw in the Linux Kernel was disclosed on Monday, nicknamed “Dirty Pipe” by the discoverer. MITRE has designated this as CVE-2022-0847. Similar to the “Dirty COW” exploit (CVE-2016-5195), this flaw abuses how the Kernel manages pages in pipes and impacts the latest versions of Linux.
Linux maintainers disclosed a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux Kernel. The vulnerability has been issued a Common Vulnerability and Exposures ID of CVE-2022-0492 and is rated as a High (7.0) severity. The flaw occurs in cgroups permitting an attacker to escape container environments, and elevate privileges. The vulnerable code was found in the Linux Kernel’s cgroup_release_agent_write in the kernel/cgroup/cgroup-v1.c function.
Recently, we have been facing a recurring problem related to cloud security – breaches based on credentials leak or breakage. Users tend to log into their accounts using a single factor system, such as a user and password combination. This introduces a single point of failure in your account’s security. Weeks ago, we read a tweet about a person dealing with a huge AWS bill due to a stolen key that was taken by attackers to use AWS Lambda functions for crypto mining.
Malicious Docker containers are a relatively new form of attack, taking advantage of an exposed Docker API or vulnerable host to do their evil plotting. In this article, we will walk through the triage of a malicious image containing a previously undetected-in-VirusTotal (at the time of this writing) piece of malware! Leaving a Docker API endpoint exposed to the world can have a variety of negative consequences.
The “agents or no agents” debate is ancient and eternal. Every decade or so, we go through another round of “agents are terrible, let’s end them” and “we need more visibility and control to secure the system, maybe we’ll call it a ‘sensor’ this time.” We ultimately always land on the same conclusion. There are no silver bullets. Today, the debate is alive and well because cloud is the new frontier, so surely agents are dead this time?
