Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On Tuesday, February 8, 2022, SAP patched a critical memory corruption vulnerability (CVE-2022-22536) in the SAP Internet Communication Manager (ICM) component that could lead to full system takeover without authentication or user interaction. The ICM component is present in most SAP products and is an important component in SAP NetWeaver application servers.

-On February 23, 2022, multiple security vendors with a business presence in Ukraine identified a new wiper malware primarily impacting Ukrainian organizations in at least the aviation, defense, financial, and IT services industries. In at least one intrusion, Symantec observed the wiper malware impact devices in Lithuania. -Researchers identified HermeticWiper shortly after a DDoS attack targeted Ukrainian websites earlier that day.

There is already a well-documented history of cyber attacks targeting organizations in Ukraine - including the attack attributed to members of the Russian military intelligence group GRU - NotPetya. This threat actor has previously conducted attacks known as NotPetya, BlackEnergy, and has targeted high-profile events such as the Olympics, as well as perpetrated destructive attacks against Georgia.

Adversaries are becoming more adept and sophisticated in their attacks. Taking advantage of vulnerabilities present in major software is often an attractive entry point for establishing a campaign within an enterprise environment. The CrowdStrike 2022 Global Threat Report highlights how adversaries continue to shift tradecraft and weaponize vulnerabilities to evade detection and gain access to critical applications and infrastructure.

S3 buckets without encryption can leave sensitive data exposed and at risk. As a best practice and to meet a number of industry and governmental regulations, it’s important to ensure that S3 server side bucket encryption has been properly applied at all times. To do this, many security teams rely on their Cloud Posture Security Management (CSPM) platform and/or AWS GuardDuty to monitor their AWS resources and provide alerts when an S3 bucket is found unencrypted.

As security operations leaders, we are burdened with a large responsibility. The expectation is that we can respond to alerts as soon as possible and be able to investigate immediately. It sounds simple, but in today’s cyber threat landscape we are faced with growing threat vectors and a sheer volume increase in overall alerts or notifications. Failure to respond quickly enough or investigate the right areas could result in huge impacts to the organizations we are responsible for.

By now it’s become clear—hybrid and remote work are here to stay. This goes for employees in the government sector as much as it does for those in other industries. Along with increased flexibility, however, comes increased attack surfaces for security professionals to defend.

The state of cybersecurity today is, in a word, catastrophic. Breaches have become endemic. Not only do they continue at dizzying rates, but they are actually increasing in frequency by the month. Why are things so bad? And why do businesses seem so helpless to make them better? Those are complicated questions without simple answers, of course – but I believe that a major part of the answer has to do with the fact that, at most organizations, security remains the domain of elite security teams.

Late last year, The Canadian Center for Cyber Security published an in-depth threat bulletin declaring it had knowledge of 235 ransomware incidents against Canadian victims from in 2021, with more than half of these victims being critical infrastructure providers. The report also explains that most ransomware events remain unreported to the Center, and—based on past findings—once targeted, ransomware victims are often attacked multiple times.

Today, anyone can contribute to some of the world’s most important software platforms and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, the Linux kernel or Python. They can do this because these platforms are open source, meaning they are collaboratively developed by global communities. What if we applied the same principles of democratization and free access to cybersecurity?