Modern applications log vast amounts of personal and business information that should not be accessible to external sources. Organizations face the difficult task of securing and storing this sensitive data in order to protect their customers and remain compliant. But there is often a lack of visibility into the sensitive data that application services are logging, especially in large-scale environments, and the requirements for handling it can vary across industries and regions.

On March 29, 2022, a critical vulnerability targeting the Spring Java framework was disclosed. This vulnerability was initially confused with a vulnerability in Spring Cloud, CVE-2022-22963. However, it was later identified as a separate vulnerability inside Spring Core, now tracked as CVE-2022-22965 and canonically named Spring4Shell.

The situation with Dirty Pipe is rapidly evolving. We will update the information in this blog as it is released publicly. On March 7, 2022, Max Kellermann publicly disclosed a vulnerability in the Linux kernel, later named Dirty Pipe, which allows underprivileged processes to write to arbitrary readable files, leading to privilege escalation. This vulnerability affects kernel versions starting from 5.8.

Many modern applications are regularly accessed by countless users from all over the world, which makes it difficult to identify anomalous patterns in login activity indicative of a security breach. This challenge is compounded by the fact that people travel often and regularly access their accounts from new locations. To detect this common attack vector, the Datadog Cloud SIEM now provides the impossible travel detection rule type which helps you spot suspicious logins with confidence.

Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) management presents some unique challenges for organizations that deploy a myriad of cloud resources, services, and accounts. Simple misconfigurations in any of these assets can lead to a serious data breach, and compliance issues become even more prevalent as organizations try to inventory and manage assets across multiple cloud platforms and security and auditing tools.

Cloud-based Kubernetes applications have become the standard for modernizing workloads, but their multi-layered design can easily create numerous entry points for unauthorized activity. To protect your applications from these threats, you need security controls at each layer of your Kubernetes infrastructure.

Securing modern-day production systems is expensive and complex. Teams often need to implement extensive measures, such as secure coding practices, security testing, periodic vulnerability scans and penetration tests, and protections at the network edge. Even when organizations have the resources to deploy these solutions, they still struggle to keep pace with software teams, especially as they accelerate their release cycles and migrate to distributed systems and microservices.

On January 25, 2022, Qualys announced the discovery of a local privilege escalation vulnerability that it identified as PwnKit. The PwnKit vulnerability affects PolicyKit’s pkexec, a SUID-root program installed by default on many Linux distributions. The same day of the announcement, a proof of concept (PoC) exploit was built and published by the security research community.