On November 18, 2024, Palo Alto Networks (PAN) fully disclosed two serious vulnerabilities in PAN-OS software that had previously been partially disclosed on November 8th. The first vulnerability, CVE-2024-0012, is a critical severity (9.3) authentication bypass in the PAN-OS management web interface. It allows unauthenticated attackers with network access to gain administrator privileges by bypassing the authentication check entirely, essentially telling the server not to check for authentication at all.

An authentication bypass in Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software enables an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the management web interface to gain PAN-OS administrator privileges and perform administrative actions, tamper with the configuration, or exploit other authenticated privilege escalation vulnerabilities like CVE-2024-9474.

On November 19, 2024, Arctic Wolf began observing active exploitation of the recently-disclosed CVE-2024-0012 and CVE-2024-9474 vulnerabilities impacting Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software. When chained together, these vulnerabilities allow an unauthenticated threat actor with network access to the management web interface to gain administrator privileges.

I’ve been working as an Application Security Auditor in Oupost24’s web application security testing team for almost three years now. Our team have shared several pieces of research over the past year, on topics including cross-site request forgery, cross-site scripting attacks, and weaponizing permissive Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) configurations.

There is no doubt about the value of conducting Managed Vulnerability Scanning. Trustwave has posted multiple blogs on the topic, (just check here, here, and here) for a look at how Trustwave approaches this very important cybersecurity procedure. One point we have not covered is exactly what kind of vulnerabilities Trustwave SpiderLabs’ analysts find during a scan. Are they truly dangerous? What would happen if the client had opted to give a pass to an MVS occurrence?

When it comes to vulnerability management, many security teams opt for a simple strategy that involves tracking the number of vulnerabilities. Counting vulnerabilities produces a straightforward metric that can be monitored and reported, making it easy to compare an organization’s security posture to peers or industry benchmarks. It's also useful for compliance purposes, as some standards require reporting the number of discovered vulnerabilities.

A critical vulnerability, CVE-2024-9264, has been discovered in Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization platform widely used by organizations worldwide. According to Netlas.io, over 100,000 Grafana instances may be vulnerable globally, with nearly 19,000 in the U.S. alone. This vulnerability poses significant risks, enabling remote code execution (RCE), allowing attackers to execute arbitrary system commands and access sensitive files.

Blind Cross-Site Scripting is a type of Cross-Site Scripting attack in which the injected script is executed in the context of another page and different circumstances compared to the page in which it was inserted. Blind XSS differs from regular XSS attacks as the attacker cannot see the effect of the injected script in his or her browser since the script is executed in a place that the attacker can not access.

A critical authentication bypass vulnerability has been identified in the WordPress plugin Really Simple Security (formerly known as Really Simple SSL), affecting both its free and Pro versions.