Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

10.93 million dollars USD. That’s the average cost of a healthcare breach in the U.S. It’s an alarming number that’s only continued to climb, increasing by over 53% in the past three years, according to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report. In fact, the healthcare industry has had the highest average cost of a breach for 13 years running. It’s not just the costs that are climbing, either.

On March 29, 2024, a security researcher disclosed the discovery of malicious code in the most recent versions of XZ Utils data compression tools and libraries. The code contained a backdoor, which a remote threat actor can leverage to break sshd authentication (the service for SSH access) and gain unauthorized access to the system, potentially leading to Remote Code Execution (RCE).

In the face of increasingly frequent and severe cyber attacks, organizations with strong cybersecurity maturity are working hard to manage and mitigate their risk, while recognizing that these may no longer be enough.

Vulnerabilities are a major risk for organizations, and a major attack vector for threat actors. There were over 29,000 vulnerabilities published in 2023, amounting to over 3,800 more common vulnerabilities and exposure (CVEs) identifiers being issued last year than in 2022. But that doesn’t mean these most recent vulnerabilities are the only ones in a threat actor’s toolbox.

On March 21, 2024, security researchers published a technical analysis along with a proof of concept (PoC) regarding the critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability, CVE-2023-48788, in Fortinet’s FortiClientEMS. This vulnerability enables an unauthenticated threat actor to achieve RCE through the manipulation of SQL commands. Fortinet has stated that this vulnerability is under active exploitation. PoC exploit code is also now publicly available.

It’s no secret that the manufacturing industry has found themselves in the crosshairs of threat actors in recent years. With a low tolerance for downtime, international operational footprints, and servers full of valuable information, these organizations represent riches for ransomware gangs and individual hackers alike.

Arctic Wolf has recently observed an uptick in detected password spraying for multiple Firewall and VPN appliances. This activity began on February 28, 2024. A variety of products are affected by this activity, including but not limited to devices from vendors such as Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, and WatchGuard. Further investigation revealed that authentication against web-based applications in general was being targeted as opposed to a selection of firewall vendors.

Active Directory (AD) is a mainstay for most organizations, especially as identity management grows for even small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and once on-premises organizations digitize. But this widely adopted tool comes with major security risks.

On March 3, 2024, JetBrains published a blog post describing two authentication bypass vulnerabilities affecting the On-Premises Servers of TeamCity. An unauthenticated threat actor with HTTP(S) access to a TeamCity Server can exploit these vulnerabilities to bypass authentication and gain administrative control of a TeamCity Server. CVE-2024-27198 (CVSS 9.8): Alternative path issue in the web component of TeamCity that can lead to remote code execution (RCE). CVE-2024-27199 (CVSS 7.3)

On March 1, 2024, SolarWinds published a security advisory reporting that SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) is vulnerable to a high severity vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated threat actor to achieve remote code execution (RCE), CVE-2024-0692. The vulnerability lies in the configuration of the AMF deserialization endpoints. Exploitation can occur due to insufficient validation of user-provided data, allowing untrusted data to be deserialized.