APIs will continue to drive business and accelerate digital transformation this year to the extent that nearly no other technology can; according to the 19th Developer Economics survey by Slashdata, almost 90% of all developers use APIs. This makes them a target for attackers who aren’t afraid to engage in any tactic, especially tried-and-true methods like parameter tampering attacks - malicious API attack traffic surged 117% from 2021 to 2022.

If you’re a developer, devops or security engineer whose continuous integration (CI) systems rely on shared secrets for access management, you probably know firsthand the security risks that shared secrets present.

On February 14, 2023, Microsoft released a security advisory for CVE-2023-21716, a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Word. While CVE-2023-21716 was deemed to be of critical severity, Microsoft assessed at the time of publication that the vulnerability was “less likely” to be exploited, and no proof-of-concept exploit was available. Microsoft also noted that the vulnerability may be exploited through the Preview Pane in Microsoft Outlook.

How an Account Takeover vulnerability, discovered during a routine customer engagement, became a candidate for responsible disclosure, via the Microsoft Security Research Center Researcher Portal.