This week’s data breaches contained significant impact figures from around the world. Malware on a vendor’s computer inadvertently breached Japan’s Line Messenger. New York’s East River Medical Imaging suffered the loss of employee and patient record information. The Pan-American Life Insurance Group faces a 105k record data breach through MOVEit.

We are well aware of the devastating effect insiders can have when using their legitimate access and knowledge to target their own organization. These incidents can result in significant monetary and reputational damages. Entities small and large, across all sectors, can fall victim to insider threats.

Atlassian has released software fixes to address four critical flaws in its software that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution. In late October 2023, Atlassian issued a warning about a critical security flaw, CVE-2023-22518 (CVSS score 9.1), impacting all versions of Confluence Data Center and Server. This improper authorization issue poses a significant risk of data loss if exploited by an unauthenticated attacker.

On Tuesday, December 5, 2023, Atlassian published fixes for four critical-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities impacting a variety of Atlassian products, including Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center. The vulnerabilities were discovered by Atlassian as part of a security review and have not been actively exploited by threat actors. Additionally, we have not observed a public proof of concept (PoC) exploit published for any of the vulnerabilities.

On November 21, 2023, ownCloud published advisories on three security vulnerabilities. The most severe of these vulnerabilities is an information disclosure vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-49103 (CVSS: 10). The vulnerability is within the “graphapi” extension and is due to a library it relies on. The library provides a URL that when accessed discloses configuration details regarding the PHP environment including environment variables.

December 9 marks two years since the world went on high alert because of what was deemed one of the most critical zero-day vulnerabilities ever: Log4Shell. The vulnerability that carried the highest possible severity rating (10.0) was in Apache Log4j, an ubiquitous Java logging framework that Veracode estimated at the time was used in 88 percent of organizations.

On December 5th, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released an advisory that confirmed the exploitation of CVE-2023-26360 at a Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agency by unknown threat actors. Exploiting this vulnerability allowed threat actors to gain access to the FCEB agency network on two separate occasions in June 2023.

During a recent penetration test on a customer application, I noticed weird interactions between the web front-end and back-end. This would eventually turn out to be a vulnerability called HTTP request smuggling, enabled by the fact that the front-end was configured to downgrade HTTP/2 requests to HTTP/1.1. With the help from my colleague Thomas Stacey, we were able to construct an exploit chain with response queue desynchronization along with traditional HTTP/1.1 request smuggling techniques.