Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Snyk has been a long-time active participant in and sponsor of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). We’re there because we believe in supporting its mission of securing the open source ecosystem. A recent summit meeting convened by the OpenSSF with the White House brought together various US Government departments for a chat about open source security.

On October 3, 2023, Daniel Stenberg, the long-time curl maintainer and original author, published a note on both LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) regarding the shipping of curl version 8.4.0, which will contain a fix for "probably the worst security problem found in curl in a long time." This issue should be taken seriously as curl maintainers have been vocal about downplaying the risk associated with most vulnerabilities reported against curl in the past (a recent example is the article CVE-2020-1990

The infostealer malware Rhadamanthys was discovered in the last quarter of 2022. Its capabilities showed a special interest in crypto currency wallets, targeting both wallet clients installed in the victim’s machine and browser extensions. The main distribution methods observed for this threat are fake software websites promoted through Google Ads, and phishing emails, without discriminating by region or vertical.

Designing and maintaining secure infrastructure configurations from code to cloud is a complex process involving multiple technical teams and security stakeholders. The first challenge is writing secure infrastructure configurations pre-deployment.

The use of artificial intelligence in every area of life — from writing papers to maintaining critical infrastructure to manufacturing goods — is a controversial topic. Some are excited about the possibilities that come with AI/ML tech, while others are fearful and reticent. These differing opinions raise a fundamental question: will AI turn our modern-day society into a utopia or a dystopia?

On September 7, 2023, Apple released emergency security updates to fix a buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2023-41064) impacting macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS products that was used in a zero-click exploitation chain by the NSO Group. Shortly after, on September 11, 2023, Google released an update to fix a buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2023-4863) in Google Chrome, which was reported by Apple’s Security Engineering and Architecture (SEAR) and Citizen Lab.

On September 27, 2023, Progress Software released a security advisory detailing multiple vulnerabilities in their WS_FTP Server product, including two with a critical severity rating. CVE-2023-40044 (CVSS 10) is a deserialization vulnerability that affects the Ad Hoc Transfer module and could allow a threat actor to obtain remote code execution if successfully exploited.

On October 2, 2023, Exim released security fixes for an out-of-bounds write remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2023-42115, CVSS: 9.8). This vulnerability affects the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) service and is caused by improper validation of user input. A threat actor can remotely exploit CVE-2023-42115 by writing data beyond the boundaries of a buffer, which leads to the execution of arbitrary code.

The widespread success and influence of Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) Code can be largely credited to its extensibility. While it's often categorized as a code editor, with the right knowledge and extensions, it can be so much more. For instance, it can also be used as a web browser, word processor, or file-management system. Microsoft also encourages developers to take advantage of VS Code's extensibility by making the VS Code API as accessible as possible.

WebP is an open-source image format developed by Google. WebP enables higher quality images in smaller file sizes. The package, released by Google, encodes and decodes images in WebP format and is used widely across the internet for lossless image compression.