Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Several malware families are distributed via Microsoft Office documents infected with malicious VBA code, such as Emotet, IceID, Dridex, and BazarLoader. We have also seen many techniques employed by attackers when it comes to infected documents, such as the usage of PowerShell and WMI to evade signature-based threat detection. In this blog post, we will show three additional techniques attackers use to craft malicious Office documents.

Passwords are everywhere. Sometimes they are obvious — hardcoded in the code or laying flat in the file. Other times, they take the form of API keys, tokens, cookies or even second factors. Devs pass them in environment variables, vaults mount them on disk, teams share them over links, copy to CI/CD systems and code linters. Eventually someone leaks, intercepts or steals them. Because they pose a security risk, there is no other way to say it: passwords in our infrastructure have to go.

The rules set forth by PCI-DSS can seem complicated. Four levels, 12 requirements, multiple credit card brands: it’s easy to get lost in the details of PCI-DSS requirements. However, merchants who fail to meet the PCI compliance standard face heavy consequences. Not only do these companies put their customer data at risk, they also may face hefty fines that can range from $5,000 to $100,000 per month.

In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how easy it is to redact sensitive data and give you a more in-depth look at various redaction techniques, how Nightfall works, and touch upon use cases for redaction techniques. Before we get started, let’s set our Nightfall API key as an environment variable and install our dependencies for our code samples in Python.