Over the last decade, the internet has undergone significant changes. While in the past the internet was primarily used for accessing information, in recent years it has become a connectivity tool, providing access to critical business SaaS and IaaS. These cloud-based services have enabled businesses to be more agile and flexible, supporting remote work and vastly improving collaboration with colleagues across the globe.
I have been watching Secureworks for a long time—ever since Dell bought the company back in February of 2011. The company’s reputation as a leader in managed security services was well-known, and this purchase represented one of the first big bets by Dell in the cybersecurity space. Secureworks could analyze and remediate the ever-evolving threat landscape for Dell customers.
Legitimate cloud storage services are increasingly being exploited for cyber espionage, so the discovery of a similar operation in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine was just a matter of time.
With many financial institutions continuing to feel an impact from The Great Resignation, and seeing tighter budgets across the board in 2023, security leaders are being asked to do more with less. So far in 2023, many organizations are hesitant to hire additional staff or even backfill open positions—forcing many security leaders to make do with fewer people than in the past.
The last decade has seen a notable step in the evolution of network security and operations as companies move to a Software Defined Network (SDN) model, centralising control of switches, routers, VPN concentrators, load balancers and SD-WAN devices. This simplifies the management and operation of the network, driving down operational costs and reducing risk through better patch and update management.
In the February 2023 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft fixed a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Word, tracked as CVE-2023-21716. The vulnerability is critical, having a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10, and could allow an attacker to execute code with the same privileges as the victim through rich text format (RTF) documents.
Emotet is undoubtedly a very resilient botnet. Even though its operation was disrupted by Europol in January 2021, Emotet came back a few months later and continues to spread. In May 2022, shortly after Microsoft released new controls related to malicious macros, Netskope Threat Labs analyzed an Emotet campaign where they were testing a new delivery method, by using LNK files.
Late last year, the EU Parliament formally adopted a new Directive, NIS2, updating and superseding the existing NIS Directive which helped the organisations responsible for Europe’s critical national infrastructure to better understand, manage, and reduce their cybersecurity risk.
Netskope Threat Labs publishes a monthly summary blog post of the top threats we are tracking on the Netskope platform. The purpose of this post is to provide strategic, actionable intelligence on active threats against enterprise users worldwide.
A now fixed zero-day elevation of privilege (EoP) vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook (CVE-2023-23397) allows attackers to send craft emails to exploit Outlook. The vulnerability does not require user interaction to be exploited and runs even before the email is visualized in the preview pane of Outlook, which makes this vulnerability even more dangerous.
