CrowdStrike’s Cloud Threat Research team discovered a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2022-0811) in CRI-O (a container runtime engine underpinning Kubernetes). Dubbed “cr8escape,” when invoked, an attacker could escape from a Kubernetes container and gain root access to the host and be able to move anywhere in the cluster.

SSH has always been the default mechanism to get remote shell access into a running Unix or Linux operating system from a terminal client to execute commands. While SSH is familiar, Docker provides more lightweight and easier-to-use methods that don’t require running your container with an SSH server. This post will explore two methods to get shell access into a Docker container using OpenSSH and the docker exec command.

While the last two years accelerated digital transformation across a wide range of industries, this has been a long time coming for healthcare. Healthcare has been undergoing a massive shift to improve security, streamline operations, and enhance the patient experience—and much of that shift centers around the movement to the cloud. Cloud-native ostensibly offers a better, more accessible user experience marked by enhanced uptime, reliability, and efficiency.

There has been a huge uptick in microservices adoption in the data analytics domain, primarily aided by machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) projects. Some of the reasons why containers are popular among ML developers is the ease of portability, scalability, and quick access to data using services—specifically network services. The rise of cloud-native applications, especially for big data in the analytics sector, makes these applications a prime target for cyber crime.

Organizations have moved business-critical apps to the cloud and attackers have followed. 2020 was a tipping point; the first year where we saw more cloud asset breaches and incidents than on-premises ones. We know bad actors are out there; if you’re operating in the cloud, how are you detecting threats? Cloud is different. Services are no longer confined in a single place with one way in or one way out.

Right on the heels of CVE-2022-4092, another local privilege escalation flaw in the Linux Kernel was disclosed on Monday, nicknamed “Dirty Pipe” by the discoverer. MITRE has designated this as CVE-2022-0847. Similar to the “Dirty COW” exploit (CVE-2016-5195), this flaw abuses how the Kernel manages pages in pipes and impacts the latest versions of Linux.

The most beautiful and inspiring aspect about open source code is, well, that it’s open source. We can look at open source packages like gifts that are exchanged between developers across the engineering world, allowing them to learn from the work other people do, contribute their own expertise, and grow their professional capabilities. Contributing to open source is much appreciated, and it is important to remember not only to benefit from these projects, but also to contribute back.

Kubernetes is a valuable resource and a leading container management system in development pipelines across the world, but it’s not exempt from malicious attacks. Using Kubernetes requires a deep understanding of Kubernetes’ environment—including the different vulnerabilities you can be exposed to while creating, deploying, or running applications in your clusters.