Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Classrooms have never been more connected. Many students are issued laptops or tablets instead of textbooks, while teachers and administrators rely on dozens of apps and connected devices like Smartboards to provide instruction, track grades, manage bus schedules, create budgets, and orchestrate countless other school-related activities.

A law firm can only be successful if it can meet the needs of its clients, and few components put that success at risk more than the rising danger and repercussions of a cyber attack. In addition to the time, effort, and money a firm must spend responding to a successful breach, employees may find themselves unable to access the firm’s technology and, therefore, unable to bill hours.

On April 24, 2024, Cisco Talos and several government security agencies published details on a sophisticated threat campaign focused on espionage and gaining unauthorized access to sensitive information from targeted government entities and organizations in critical infrastructure. As part of that publication, Cisco disclosed CVE-2024-20353 and CVE-2024-20359, affecting Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) devices, which were actively exploited in the documented campaign.

On April 16, 2024, Cisco Duo informed affected customers of a breach involving their SMS and VOIP multi-factor authentication (MFA) service provider. The breach occurred on April 1st due to a phishing attack, allowing unauthorized access to the provider’s systems, including SMS and VoIP MFA message logs for specific Duo accounts between March 1st and March 31st, 2024. Though the threat actor accessed message logs, they did not obtain message content.

On April 12, 2024, Delinea issued an advisory to address a critical authentication bypass vulnerability identified in the SOAP API component of its Secret Server product, available in both Cloud and On-Premises solutions. A threat actor could exploit this vulnerability to bypass authentication, gain administrative access, and extract sensitive information.

On April 16, 2024, Ivanti disclosed two critical vulnerabilities within its Avalanche Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution. These vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2024-29204 and CVE-2024-24996, are heap overflow issues in the WLInfoRailService and WLAvalancheService components, respectively. Both vulnerabilities have been assigned a CVSS score of 9.8, indicating their critical nature due to the potential for unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) in low-complexity attacks.

In April of 2024, the FBI released a warning that threat actors are sending SMS phishing, also known as smishing, messages to individuals pretending to be toll road operators messaging about unpaid toll fees. This kind of attack is a common one, and targets more than just individuals –— think the MGM resorts breach of 2023 that started with a phishing call to an IT professional and ended up costing the casino millions.

Over the past decade, cybercrime has become a big business — a $1.5T industry with an entire ecosystem of criminal organizations run like legitimate organizations. Some even offer technical leadership, step-by-step instructions, and robust customer service via ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), and the most brazen threat actors have even taken out pop-up ads selling their products.

On April 12, 2024, Palo Alto Networks published a security advisory detailing an actively exploited maximum severity vulnerability (CVE-2024-3400, CVSS: 10.0) affecting the GlobalProtect feature of PAN-OS. This vulnerability affects PAN-OS 10.2, PAN-OS 11.0, and PAN-OS 11.1 firewalls when configurations for both GlobalProtect gateway and device telemetry are enabled. An unauthenticated remote threat actor can exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall.

On April 14, 2024, Palo Alto Networks (PAN) released hotfixes to address the maximum severity (CVSS: 10) vulnerability, CVE-2024-3400, affecting the GlobalProtect Feature of PAN-OS. An unauthenticated remote threat actor can exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall. Volexity identified CVE-2024-3400 as a zero-day vulnerability and found that the threat actor UTA0218 was implanting a custom Python backdoor on firewall devices.