Sudden, unexpected, and potentially very damaging. Zero-day attacks are the perfect storm for malicious actors and one of the worst-case scenarios for developers, security professionals, and DevOps teams. Yet it’s not all bad news for those charged with protecting your code, software, and applications, as long as you expect the unexpected and prepare for it. Building a fast, effective mitigation response for zero-day attacks starts with these three tactics.

In early November, a new authorization bypass vulnerability was found in Spring Security 5. Now, before we panic let’s look into this problem to see if you are vulnerable. Although the vulnerability is classified as high, there is only a specific set of use cases that are vulnerable. This means that not everyone is vulnerable, and I will show that in a second. Regardless, the advice is to upgrade to the newer version of the Spring Security.

On Tuesday, December 13, a joint announcement from the United States NSA and Citrix announced a zero-day vulnerability in Citrix ADC. The vulnerability (CVE-2022-27518) is a critical unauthenticated Remote Code Execution (RCE) issue currently rated as CVSS 9.8. Patches are already available from Citrix. The NSA attributes the zero-day to APT5, a Chinese hacking collective. There is currently no guidance for how widespread the campaign has been or how long it's been ongoing.

In a coordinated disclosure with Microsoft on December 13th, 2022, security researchers with Mandiant, SentinelOne, and Sophos published evidence of a threat actor technique where malicious crafted drivers were invoked using a valid cryptographic signature. The malicious drivers were observed attempting to terminate a list of security products and evade detection.

In our latest Snyk in 30, Jason Lane (Director of Product Marketing) and I (Marco Morales, Partner Solutions Architect) showcased Snyk Open Source with a focus on our integration with Bitbucket Cloud. They covered why open source security is vital for modern app development, along with tips on taking a holistic approach to application security that goes beyond just shifting left.

Live conferences are finally back, and the 11th annual AWS re:Invent did not disappoint. After a virtual 2020 and an in-person reduced-sized edition in 2021, there were more than 52,000 (yes — 52,000!) smiling faces milling about this year’s conference in Las Vegas. As per usual, re:Invent was full of exciting product news and updates. Here are the major announcements that got our attention and some of the things Snyk was up to in Vegas.

On December 13th, 2022, Citrix disclosed a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2022-27518) affecting several versions of Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway. Citrix strongly advises affected customers to update to a supported version as soon as possible. While no public proof-of-concept exploit code is available for this vulnerability, Citrix has observed several instances of targeted exploitation.

As part of Microsoft’s September 2022 Security Update, Microsoft released security updates to remediate CVE-2022-37958–an information disclosure vulnerability in SPNEGO NEGOEX that impacted all Windows versions 7 or newer. On December 13, Microsoft reclassified the vulnerability as Critical severity after security researchers discovered that the vulnerability could allow threat actors to remotely execute code pre-authentication.

Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise Kubernetes container platform. It lets you build Docker images and use them to deploy your applications on a cloud-like environment (even if it’s not really on the cloud, rather a simulated cloud environment). Images built in OpenShift can be easily pushed into JFrog Artifactory – JFrog’s leading universal repository manager.

On December 9, 2021, Apache upended the cybersecurity industry by publishing a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) for its ubiquitous Log4j logging utility. Dubbed Log4Shell, the remote code execution flaw (CVSS score:10) allows an attacker to take control of a connected device and run malicious code, access sensitive data or alter its configuration. Because Logj4 is free and easy-to-use, it’s embedded (often deeply) in Java applications used by IT and OT platforms worldwide.