Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued a new perspective on password management policies, recognizing that many traditional practices used to ensure password security are no longer effective. The suggested practices to eliminate include not requiring periodic password changes, reducing restrictions on special characters, and discontinuing the use of security questions for account recovery.

On December 3, 2024, Veeam disclosed a critical vulnerability within the Veeam Service Provider Console (VSPC), tracked as CVE-2024-42448, which was discovered during internal testing. VSPC is a management tool designed for service providers to manage customer backups. The vulnerability allows a remote threat actor to perform Remote Code Execution (RCE) on the VSPC server machine from an authorized VSPC management agent machine.

Since the early days of the World Wide Web, automated scripts known as bots have been crawling cyberspace, collecting data for various purposes. Initially, these bots were designed to be helpful, cataloging information much like search engines such as Google and Bing do today. However, the volume of automated requests has grown significantly. Today, bots account for a substantial portion of web traffic, costing businesses considerable resources to handle unwanted or malicious requests.

A year ago, Bitsight TRACE published a blog post on Socks55Systemz,a proxy malware with minimal mentions in the threat intelligence community at the time. In that post, we correlated a Telegram user to the botnet operation and estimated its size at around 10,000 compromised systems. After a year-long investigation, we are shedding new light on these conclusions.

In 2024, Thanksgiving (November 28), Black Friday (November 29), and Cyber Monday (December 2) significantly impacted Internet traffic, similar to trends seen in 2023 and previous years. This year, Thanksgiving in the US drove a 20% drop in daily traffic compared to the previous week, with a notable 33% dip at 15:45 ET. In contrast, Black Friday and Cyber Monday drove traffic spikes. But how global is this trend, and do attacks increase during Cyber Week?

Cloud computing is no longer just a choice—it’s a necessity for modern organizations aiming to thrive in today’s business environment. Infrastructure scalability, cost management, and multi-layered security are driving organizations toward cloud solutions. But finding the right partner to guide this transition is often the biggest challenge. High Point Networks, an established IT services provider, successfully tackled this challenge by partnering with 11:11 Systems. The result?

Trust is the foundation of the open source community — but what happens when that trust is betrayed? When a backdoor vulnerability was found in a widespread Linux-based data compression tool, it nearly created an opportunity for malicious actors to seize control of countless computers worldwide. The vulnerability was introduced by a trusted contributor who, after years of building rapport with maintainers, ultimately exploited that trust.

The old adage “knowledge is power” holds especially true in the realm of AppSec. By remaining aware of the potential threats to applications and closing gaps in coverage, AppSec teams can demonstrate to leaders that they are in a solid position to protect vital assets. However, visibility is riddled with challenges, not the least of which are highly productive developers racing to market, often using AI-generated code that contains potential security issues.

Cyjax has continued to observe the emergence of data-leak sites (DLSs) for extortion and ransomware groups, with ContFR, Argonauts, Kairos, Chort, and Termite, appearing November 2024 alone. Cyjax has identified the emergence of a Tor-based DLS belonging to a new, self-called “cybercrime group” named ‘Funksec’. This group has claimed 11 victims so far and advertises a free Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) tool.

This blog article summarizes a talk given by David Melamed, Jit CTO, at Pycon DE & PyData 2022 in Berlin. In every software development project, before even writing the first line of code, you gotta pick an architecture for your repo. Picking an architecture is not easy. There are many tradeoffs that need to be considered and this choice will impact future development.