It was an exceptionally hot July in many parts of the world, and cyberspace was no exception. High profile hacks in July affected people in all walks of life, from casual gamers and social media posters to air travelers and medical patients. Still, we hate to be the bearers of exclusively bad news, so we’ve included one silver lining amongst our usual bank of dark clouds.

The data in the new Verizon “Data Breach Investigations Report” (DBIR) offers critical insights into the current state of cybersecurity. After a year of data breaches and cyberattacks consistently dominating headlines, this year’s report closely examines what adversaries are looking for when they’re trying to infiltrate businesses and organizations.

When you hear the term “chatbot,” your mind may at first turn to things like robotic customer support services on retail websites – a relatively mundane use case for chatbots, and one that is probably hard to get excited about if you’re a security engineer. But, the fact is that chatbots can do much more than provide customer support.

The FBI published their 2021 Internet Crime Report with data from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). This report shows that Business Email Compromise (BEC) / Email Account Compromise (EAC) attacks far exceed the volume and losses of Ransomware attacks. Organizations need to be prepared and know who they are going to call when they experience BEC/EAC, as well as ransomware, or other high-severity incidents.

Discovering security threats is good and well. But, in many cases, simply knowing that a threat may exist is not enough. Instead, you also need threat intelligence enrichment. Threat enrichment plays a critical role in helping to evaluate and contextualize threats, root out false positives and gain the insights necessary to mitigate risks as efficiently and quickly as possible.

The Arctic Wolf team is having a great time in Boston at AWS re:Inforce 2022. What a wonderful show! It has been thrilling to connect with industry leaders and AWS experts from across the world–and it was equally thrilling for us to announce that Arctic Wolf has achieved the newly introduced Level 1 MSSP specialization in Digital Forensics Incident Response (DFIR).

On Thursday, July 21, 2022, SonicWall disclosed a critical severity vulnerability – CVE-2022-22280 – impacting their Analytics On-Prem and Global Management System (GMS) products, which are used for central management and deployment of SonicWall firewalls, email security, remote access, and other solutions.

On Wednesday, July 20, 2022, Cisco disclosed a critical severity vulnerability – CVE-2022-20857 – impacting Cisco Nexus Dashboard, an integrated dashboard used for visibility and provisioning data center and cloud network infrastructure. If successfully exploited, the vulnerability could allow an unauthenticated, remote threat actor to execute arbitrary commands as the root user in any pod on a node.

On Wednesday, July 20, 2022, Atlassian released patches to remediate two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-26136 and CVE-2022-26137) that impact how Atlassian products implement Servlet Filters and could lead to unauthenticated authentication bypass, cross-site scripting (XSS), or cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) bypass depending on the filters used by each impacted product.