This quick blog is the first in a two-part series discussing a userland Windows exploit initially disclosed by James Forshaw and Alex Ionescu. The exploit enables attackers to perform highly privileged actions that typically require a kernel driver.

As per UK DCMS’s data breaches survey, about 32% of businesses in the UK have faced a form of cybersecurity threat between 2018 and 2019. As a result of these network security vulnerabilities, these businesses incurred costs on lost data and many other damages that totalled £4,180.

In previous posts we explored the potential for intent-based Android security vulnerabilities and then used Snyk Code to find exploits in popular apps on the Google Play store. If you know Snyk, you also know there’s no way we can just point out vulnerabilities and not recommend fixes. Analyzing such an extensive dataset enabled us to review a lot of code.

We sat down with our customer - Deputy Group CISO at ITV, Jaspal Jandu who offers a practical view of today’s cybersecurity challenges including digital transformation, vulnerability management, risk prioritization and building a security culture from within.

We have been witnessing an ever growing amount of supply chain security incidents in the wild. Everything from open source package managers security flaws being exploited to continuous integration systems being compromised to software artifacts being backdoored. And now, those incidents are starting to extend to the place where developers spend most of their time: their integrated development environment, and specifically the Visual Studio Code IDE.

To stay ahead of attackers, we constantly monitor various security threats. One of these threats — supply chain attacks — aims to compromise an organization through its software development process. Recently, a huge spike in supply chain attacks was observed — dependency confusion was discovered, the SolarWinds breach was reported and more malicious packages were flagged. This certainly drew our attention (as well as the rest of the world’s)!