A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. A great example of (half) forgotten linked app this week via, quite unforgettably, from the Twitter CEO. I’m sure we all have linked services together as authentication of to bridge a data conduit just to do a trial or something and neglected to remove it afterwards. Well…. That lapse could come back to bite in the future.
The phone numbers associated with over 400 million Facebook accounts were exposed online in the latest privacy dilemma for the social media giant. TechCrunch reported on Wednesday that an exposed server storing 419 million records was found online - 133 million belonging to U.S. users, 50 million Vietnamese users, and 18 million U.K. users. This server was not protected with a password, meaning anyone could access the database up until late yesterday evening once the host took down the site.
Every year we survey visitors to our booth at Black Hat about trending topics. This year, we asked about ransomware and the ever-increasing complexity of our cybersecurity environment. The results are very interesting - things may be getting much better, or we may all be collectively in denial. Let's break it down.
The backend developer team at Detectify has been working with Go for some years now, and it’s the language chosen by us to power our microservices. We think Go is a fantastic language and it has proven to perform very well for our operations. It comes with a great tool-set, such as the tool we’ll touch on later on called pprof. However, even though Go performs very well, we noticed one of our microservices had a behavior very similar to that of a memory leak.
AquaSec’s Daniel Sagi recently authored a blog post about DNS spoofing in Kubernetes. TLDR is that if you use default networking in Kubernetes you might be vulnerable to ARP spoofing which can allow pods to spoof (impersonate) the IP addresses of other pods. Since so much traffic is dialed via domain names rather than IPs, spoofing DNS can allow you to redirect lots of traffic inside the cluster for nefarious purposes.
TechCrunch reports that a security researcher stumbled across an exposed server on the internet containing databases with a total of more than 419 million records related to Facebook users. According to TechCrunch’s reporting, each database record contains a user’s unique Facebook account ID (from which it’s possible to determine a user name) and phone numbers attached to the account.
A man-in-the-middle attack (MITM attack) is a cyber attack where an attacker relays and possibly alters communication between two parties who believe they are communicating directly. This allows the attacker to relay communication, listen in, and even modify what each party is saying. Man-in-the-middle attacks enable eavesdropping between people, clients and servers. This can include HTTPS connections to websites, other SSL/TLS connections, Wi-Fi networks connections and more.
Working as a cybersecurity analyst is incredibly challenging. It’s one of the only roles in IT that requires 24/7/365 availability. The constant stressors of the job can overload security analysts, which ultimately leads to burnout—affecting every factor of the job from performance to talent retention.
Okta is a cloud-based identity management service that provides authentication and authorization tools for your organizations’ employees and users. You can use Okta to incorporate single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and user management services right into your applications.
The numbers are shocking. According to the 2019 The State of Work Report, employees spend just 40% of their workday on primary tasks. A Gallup poll showed that disengaged employees cost companies in the United States between $450 and $550 billion per year, and highly engaged teams are 21% more profitable than others. So how can an organization find out what employees are doing when they are on the clock so they can take steps to increase engagement and boost productivity?
