In this post, we’ll look at the security blindspots of lockfile injection that a Ruby gem might expose via its Gemfile.lock. As a prelude to that, we will open up with a brief introduction to Ruby and third-party dependencies management around RubyGems and Bundler. Web developers often work on Ruby projects, but are mostly referring to them as the popular open source web application framework Ruby on Rails.

Snyk security researchers continually monitor open source ecosystems for malicious packages, utilizing static analysis techniques to identify and flag suspicious packages. Each malicious package is identified upon publication to the package manager and swiftly added to the Snyk Vulnerability Database. During recent research, the team found 12 unique pieces of malware belonging to the same actor.

C++ offers many powerful capabilities to developers, which is why it’s used in many industries and many core systems. But unlike some higher-level languages that offer less direct control over resources, C++ has a variety of security concerns that developers must be keenly aware of when writing code to avoid introducing vulnerabilities into projects. As developers, we build applications with our end-users in mind. They trust us with their data, time, and device access.

Kubernetes provides an interface to run distributed systems smoothly. It takes care of scaling and failover for your applications, provides deployment patterns, and more. Regarding security, it’s the teams deploying workloads onto the Kubernetes cluster that have to consider which workloads they want to monitor for their application security requirements.

Snyk has officially launched Snyk Training, a free online resource to help developers and security teams learn how to implement, configure, and use Snyk on their own. The initial content in Snyk Training focuses on three learning needs: The platform is an easy way for teams to get an introduction to Snyk tools and user best practices. Most courses take between 3 and 10 minutes, and have been described by a customer as, a “very good overview on how to get started with the Snyk journey!”

Creating and running an application in your favorite language is usually pretty simple. After you create your application, deploying it and showing it to the world is also quite straightforward. The last thing you need is someone to take over your system and fully control your brand new application. In this article, I’ll explain how this can happen with a reverse shell attack. Note that the code examples in this article are for educational purposes only.