A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. Cryptocurrencies are never far from the news, and with El Salvador making it an official currency many are jumping at the slightest news of an uptick in respectability. That thirst has not gone unnoticed and a fantastic coup played out in the last week.
For the past 10-plus years, cybersecurity solutions have been innovating rapidly to thwart new threats. But as they solved security challenges, new ones constantly emerged — especially as organizations continue to expedite their digital transformation efforts and shift to the cloud.
APTs (Advanced Persistent Threat) have more serious consequences than conventional cyberattacks. The explanation for this lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the perpetrators spend much more time and effort (often promoted by government organizations), and on the other, the victims are also more high profile.
The Splunk Threat Research Team recently evaluated ways to generate security content using native Windows event logging regarding PowerShell Script Block Logging to assist enterprise defenders in finding malicious PowerShell scripts. This method provides greater depth of visibility as it provides the raw (entire) PowerShell script output. There are three sources that may enhance any defender's perspective: module, script block and transcript logging.
Apple has issued an emergency software update after a cyber-surveillance company created invasive spyware that could infect any iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or Mac Computer. Toronto-based internet watchdog security group Citizen Lab said that NSO, the surveillance company which is an Israeli spyware company, developed the tool with a technique that could easily exploit Apple software.
Network segmentation is almost as old as computer networking. The evolution of network segmentation went through switches to routers and firewalls, and as modern networks evolved, the ability to better control traffic by operating system native functionality evolved as well. Native controls like IP Tables became lingua franca, alongside access control lists, process isolations, and more. Native controls are not a new concept.
When it comes to PHP, composer is without discussion, THE package manager. It’s fast, easy to use, actively maintained and very secure — or so most thought. On April 21, 2021, a command injection vulnerability was reported, which shook the PHP community. Fortunately it didn’t have a very big impact, but it could have. The problem with the vulnerability is that it affected the very heart of the Composer supply chain: Packagist servers.
On Tuesday, September 14, Apple announced its latest generation of products along with the major release of iOS 15. Unfortunately, this coincided with an earlier announcement of an emergency software update due to a critical software vulnerability discovered within a series of Apple products. This vulnerability was identified by researchers at Citizen Lab, who found a flaw capable of allowing attackers to install invasive spyware on affected devices without the interaction of the owner.
The typical process when scoping a penetration test is to get a list of targets from the client, which are typically a list of IP addresses and/or hostnames. But where does this information come from, and how accurate is it? Chances are the client has documentation that lists the devices they think they have, and what addresses or names they have been assigned. This documentation will form the basis of the scope when conducting testing or scanning against a target environment.
