Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In the last week, The U.S. House of Representatives ordered its staff and lawmakers to delete TikTok from any government-issued mobile device due to security concerns with the popular video-sharing app. But, it’s not just the government taking action for a potential security vulnerability. A handful of college campuses announced that they are banning access to TikTok from campus WiFi in accordance with their respective governors’ executive orders.

There are currently over 24 billion exposed credentials circulating the dark web, according to a 2022 report by Photon Research Team. In fact, the markets selling compromised credentials are even offering cybercriminals subscription services for purchasing these usernames and passwords. No wonder there has been a 65% increase in exposed credentials on the dark web since the last time this report was conducted in 2020.

No single organization can master all trades, which is why their success hinges heavily on their vendors. And if vendors are crucial for your business operations, it’s necessary to manage them as if your success depended on it–because it does. Yet, until recently (2016), only a third of companies knew how many vendors accessed their systems each week.

On Thursday, December 22, 2022, LastPass updated their security incident notice to include additional details around the data breach they began investigating in November 2022. According to their notice, the threat actor used information obtained in an earlier, August 2022, data breach to target an employee and obtain credentials and keys used to decrypt storage volumes within their cloud-based storage service.

As 2022 comes to an end, I’m prouder than ever of the steps that every team member at Arctic Wolf has taken to protect and delight our customers as we steadily advance toward our mission of ending cyber risk.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations to temporarily transition to remote work environments. Two years have passed, but the remote work trend is still with us, with over 75% of people worldwide working remotely at least once a week. As telecommuting concerns more cybersecurity experts around the world, some security officers still make drastic mistakes in configuring and managing remote environments.

Microservices offer significant advantages compared to monoliths. You can scale the development more easily and have precise control over scaling infrastructure. Additionally, the ability to make many minor updates and incremental rollouts significantly reduces the time to market. Despite these benefits, microservices architecture presents a problem — the inability to access its services externally. Fortunately, an API gateway can resolve this issue.

LastPass, a competitor, recently announced that password hashes were included in an August 2022 breach of their cloud storage. Their notice claimed that if users had followed default settings, “it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology.” That claim is highly misleading.

Although it’s the holiday season, the festive spirit doesn’t extend to cyber attackers, who consider this a great opportunity to cause havoc. But the Mend research team doesn’t rest, and remains alert for threats and vulnerabilities. Our vigilant team has detected an attack on npm packages that utilized typosquatting to compromise nearly 300 NPM packages. Let’s take a look at the nature of the attack and what we did to protect our systems and our users.