I recently volunteered as an AV tech at a science communication conference in Portland, OR. There, I handled the computers of a large number of presenters, all scientists and communicators who were passionate about their topic and occasionally laissez-faire about their system security. As exacting as they were with the science, I found many didn’t actually see a point to the security policies their institutions had, or they had actively circumvented them. A short survey heard reasoning like.

If you’re in your mid-twenties or beyond, you will be familiar with people at family gatherings saying ‘remember when we didn’t have all these gadgets, and we used to actually talk to each other?’ The answer to this is ‘no’ – the level of conversation has remained largely unchanged, it’s just now we have gadgets and gizmos to occupy our attention during these moments of strained silence. I put it down to the Mandela effect.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. A great example of (half) forgotten linked app this week via, quite unforgettably, from the Twitter CEO. I’m sure we all have linked services together as authentication of to bridge a data conduit just to do a trial or something and neglected to remove it afterwards. Well…. That lapse could come back to bite in the future.

Every year we survey visitors to our booth at Black Hat about trending topics. This year, we asked about ransomware and the ever-increasing complexity of our cybersecurity environment. The results are very interesting - things may be getting much better, or we may all be collectively in denial. Let's break it down.

The backend developer team at Detectify has been working with Go for some years now, and it’s the language chosen by us to power our microservices. We think Go is a fantastic language and it has proven to perform very well for our operations. It comes with a great tool-set, such as the tool we’ll touch on later on called pprof. However, even though Go performs very well, we noticed one of our microservices had a behavior very similar to that of a memory leak.

A man-in-the-middle attack (MITM attack) is a cyber attack where an attacker relays and possibly alters communication between two parties who believe they are communicating directly. This allows the attacker to relay communication, listen in, and even modify what each party is saying. Man-in-the-middle attacks enable eavesdropping between people, clients and servers. This can include HTTPS connections to websites, other SSL/TLS connections, Wi-Fi networks connections and more.

TechCrunch reports that a security researcher stumbled across an exposed server on the internet containing databases with a total of more than 419 million records related to Facebook users. According to TechCrunch’s reporting, each database record contains a user’s unique Facebook account ID (from which it’s possible to determine a user name) and phone numbers attached to the account.

Working as a cybersecurity analyst is incredibly challenging. It’s one of the only roles in IT that requires 24/7/365 availability. The constant stressors of the job can overload security analysts, which ultimately leads to burnout—affecting every factor of the job from performance to talent retention.