Website security should be a concern for any business owner because attackers are becoming much more sophisticated and are always looking for ways to get into customer databases even without exploiting the victim directly. In this blog, we are sharing a website security checklist to help website owners improve their websites against the most common cyber attacks.

In the wake of the pandemic, airlines are fighting back against challenges from all directions this year. Many have banded together to protest government orders around banned routes, Covid testing and post-travel quarantine periods. International holiday-going in 2021 has become an unappealing prospect for many, due to the added expense and inconvenience imposed by Covid restrictions.

When it comes to cybercrime, cybercriminals are constantly changing their tactics. Think back to 10 years ago; malware sites — malicious sites that attempt to install malware on a device – were a common attack vector. At the same time, sophisticated ransomware attacks on organizations were rare. Often, ransomware was used to target individuals, sometimes blackmailing them for having been on unsavory sites and asking for a few hundred dollars in ransom.

Faced with rows of empty gas pumps, many Americans on the East Coast may be wondering why this happened, whether it will happen again, or if there is anything we can do to avoid future catastrophe. The unpleasant truth of the matter is that this will certainly not be the last time society is disrupted due to attackers targeting critical industrial control systems (ICS). The impact of such an attack is amplified by the growing reliance on automation and antiquated protocols throughout many OT networks.

The right-to-left override attack may be unassuming but incredibly malicious. Most people have heard about phishing attacks, but they think that opening a file with the ".txt" extension is harmless.

Last month we hosted a webinar dedicated to discussing the issue of codebase security. As trends like secrets and credential exfiltration continue to be of concern within systems like GitHub, threats, such as cryptojacking and supply side attacks, have become more of a problem. This makes understanding key aspects of codebase security very important. That’s why we pulled out 4 lessons from our recent session that developers and security engineers must know.

SQL injection (SQLi) is one of the most common code-injection techniques used to get information from one’s database. Generally speaking, this is malicious code placing in one’s database via a page input, most often a registration form. SQL injection usually occurs when you ask a user for input, like their username/user ID, and instead of a name/id, the user gives you an SQL statement that you will unknowingly run on your database.

The United States Department of State is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification of anyone, working for a foreign government, who participates in a cybercriminal attack against American critical infrastructure. The news of the reward comes at the same time as the White House announced it was setting up a ransomware task force following a series of high-profile attacks in the United States.

LDAP is a way for organisations to store user credentials and use them later. It provides access control as well as mechanisms to read and modify data. If the LDAP server isn’t properly configured or secured with another layer of protection, then it could be vulnerable to an attack called LDAP injection. However, you can only protect your applications if you: 1) know what LDAP is and 2) understand what can go wrong with it.

An Advanced Persistent Threat is a sophisticated (rarely) multi-staged attack carried out by skilled and well-organised threat actors such as organised cybercrime syndicates and nation-state actors. The majority of the times, Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) are nothing more than a fancy name with much more media frenzy around the topic of cyber attacks.

Kroll experts have noticed an increase in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by cybercriminals seeking to turn a profit in two distinct incident types. First, many ransomware operators are now threatening and conducting DDoS attacks as an additional pressure tactic during the ransom negotiation process. Second, also known as ransom denial of service (RDoS), attackers threaten DDoS attacks that will take down an organization’s public-facing services unless a ransom is paid.

On the afternoon of July 2, 2021, Kaseya reported that it had been impacted by a ransomware attack affecting its Virtual System Administrator (VSA) product and advised users to shut down VSA servers immediately. Initial reporting indicates this was a well-orchestrated supply chain attack impacting about 60 managed services providers (MSPs) and up to 1,500 client organizations by leveraging a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2021-30116).

IndigoZebra is a Chinese state-sponsored actor mentioned for the first time by Kaspersky in its APT Trends report Q2 2017, targeting, at the time of its discovery, former Soviet Republics with multiple malware strains including Meterpreter, Poison Ivy, xDown, and a previously unknown backdoor called “xCaon.” Now, security researchers from Check Point have discovered a new campaign by Indigo Zebra, targeting the Afghan National Security Council via a new version of the xCaon backdoor, dubbed

On July 3, 2021, Kaseya reported1 a potential attack against its Virtual System/Server Administrator (VSA) that apparently had been limited to a small number of on-premises customers. Kaseya recommended an immediate shutdown of the VSA server until further notice. The small number of affected customers grew to thousands in just a few hours.

On, July 2nd, a massive ransomware attack was launched against roughly 60 managed services providers (MSPs) by criminals associated with the REvil ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group. The attack leveraged the on-premises servers deployed by IT Management Software vendor Kaseya. It was initially thought that Kaseya might have been compromised themselves as a root cause -- similar to the compromises associated with SolarWinds software in December of 2020.

The REvil ransomware (a.k.a Sodinokibi) is a threat group that operates in the RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) model, where the infrastructure and the malware are supplied to affiliates, who use the malware to infect target organizations. On July 2, the REvil threat group launched a supply chain ransomware attack using an exploit in Kaseya’s VSA remote management software. REvil claims to have infected more than one million individual devices around the world.

Lethal unauthorized code injections like XXS (cross site scripting) attacks are some of the most dynamic cyber-attacks. They are often very difficult to detect and can result in credit card theft, fraud, and endpoint data breaches, having a huge impact on small to medium sized businesses. In a recent AT&T cybersecurity survey, 88% of respondents reported that they had experienced at least one security incident within the past year.

Throughout July and August, Kaseya released a slew of patches for this vulnerability. Bitdefender released a universal decryption key that they developed by working with law enforcement. That key, with instructions, is available to organizations that have been impacted by the attack. Although REvil popped back online after nearly two months of silence, this vulnerability is no longer a threat due to vendor patches and a widely available decryption key.

In the world of cybersecurity, there are no holidays and days off as proven by the ransomware attacks that began during the Fourth of July weekend, impacting users of the Kaseya VSA remote management and monitoring software.

When Splunk told me we would have a “breach holiday” theme for the summer, I didn’t think it would be quite so on the nose… For those of you who have been working on this Kaseya REvil Ransomware incident over the weekend, I salute you. We’ve been doing the same. As usual, my team here at Splunk likes to make sure that we have some actionable material before posting a blog, and this time is no different.