Towards the end of 2020, a new vulnerability in MongoDB was found and published. The vulnerability affected almost all versions of MongoDB, up to v4.5.0, but was discussed and patched appropriately. The vulnerability, CVE-2020-7928, abuses a well-known component of MongoDB, known as the Handler, to carry out buffer overflow attacks by way of null-byte injections.

Electrical grid security has been getting a lot of attention recently. It started fairly quietly, and then when it was a featured story on a news program, it rose to the top of the collective consciousness. However, the news stories that followed were focused entirely on the physical vulnerabilities of the US power grids. Few, if any stories covered the cybersecurity angle of securing the grids.

It's early in the morning on an unseasonably warm Tuesday in October. You're checking your email as you enjoy your first cup of coffee or tea for the day, and you almost do a spit-take when you read that OpenSSL has a forthcoming release to fix a CRITICAL vulnerability. Immediately, visions of Heartbleed pop into your head.

Serialization is the process of converting a JavaScript object into a stream of sequential bytes to send over a network or save to a database. Serialization changes the original data format while preserving its state and properties, so we can recreate it as needed. With serialization, we can write complex data to files, databases, and inter-process memory — and send that complex data between components and over networks.