On April 14, 2024, Palo Alto Networks (PAN) released hotfixes to address the maximum severity (CVSS: 10) vulnerability, CVE-2024-3400, affecting the GlobalProtect Feature of PAN-OS. An unauthenticated remote threat actor can exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall. Volexity identified CVE-2024-3400 as a zero-day vulnerability and found that the threat actor UTA0218 was implanting a custom Python backdoor on firewall devices.

Threat actors looking to maximize the amount of money they can make and chaos they can cause have once again chosen the supply chain as their target of attack. On Thursday, April 11, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Agency (CISA) warned customers of Sisense, a company that provides data analytics services to thousands of international companies, that they should reset their credentials for Sisense services and look out for suspicious activity involving their services.

On April 11, 2024, CISA issued an cybersecurity advisory disclosing a compromise of customer data from Sisense. The previous day, cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs had published an email sent to Sisense customers by the company’s CISO. The specific details of the compromise have not been made public at this time. Furthermore, Arctic Wolf has not observed any malicious activities conducted by threat actors using compromised credentials from Sisense.

10.93 million dollars USD. That’s the average cost of a healthcare breach in the U.S. It’s an alarming number that’s only continued to climb, increasing by over 53% in the past three years, according to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report. In fact, the healthcare industry has had the highest average cost of a breach for 13 years running. It’s not just the costs that are climbing, either.

On March 29, 2024, a security researcher disclosed the discovery of malicious code in the most recent versions of XZ Utils data compression tools and libraries. The code contained a backdoor, which a remote threat actor can leverage to break sshd authentication (the service for SSH access) and gain unauthorized access to the system, potentially leading to Remote Code Execution (RCE).

There were nearly 29,000 vulnerabilities published in 2023, amounting to over 3,800 more common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) being issued last year than in 2022. More troubling than the sheer volume of vulnerabilities in 2023 is that over half of them were given a CVSS score indicating high or critical severity — an increase of 57% YoY.

When 23andMe, the popular genetic data gathering and sharing organization, was breached in November of 2023, the threat actors responsible gained initial access by launching a credential stuffing attack. The attack, which involved hackers using credential stuffing, or entering known passwords and emails to see if a combination would work, only succeeded due to a lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA) in place in the compromised account.

In the face of increasingly frequent and severe cyber attacks, organizations with strong cybersecurity maturity are working hard to manage and mitigate their risk, while recognizing that these may no longer be enough.

Vulnerabilities are a major risk for organizations, and a major attack vector for threat actors. There were over 29,000 vulnerabilities published in 2023, amounting to over 3,800 more common vulnerabilities and exposure (CVEs) identifiers being issued last year than in 2022. But that doesn’t mean these most recent vulnerabilities are the only ones in a threat actor’s toolbox.