Section 889 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 prohibits the procurement or use of Huawei, ZTE, Hytera, Hikvision, or Dahua telecommunication and video surveillance products and services by federal agencies, government contractors, and the recipients of any federal grants or loans (this latter category includes many state and local governments).
Insufficiently protected open ports can put your IT environment at serious risk. Threat actors often seek to exploit open ports and their applications through spoofing, credential sniffing and other techniques. For example, in 2017, cybercriminals spread WannaCry ransomware by exploiting an SMB vulnerability on port 445. Other examples include the ongoing campaigns targeting Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) service running on port 3389.
According to Wappalyzer, PHP powers over twelve million websites. Not bad for a 28-year-old language! Despite its age, PHP has kept up with modern development practices. With support for type declarations and excellent frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, PHP is still a great way to develop web apps. PHP works well in containerized environments. With an official image available on Docker Hub, developers know they can access well-tested PHP container images to build on.
Ruby, much like other programming languages, has an entire ecosystem of third-party open source libraries which it refers to as gems, or sometimes Ruby gems. These gems are authored by the community, and are available from RubyGems.org which is the official registry for Ruby libraries. Similarly to other open source ecosystems, threat actors may publish deliberate malicious code or such which includes backdoors or credentials harvesting.
In recent years, there has been increasing amounts of ransomware attacks on colleges and universities due to poor cybersecurity practices, a higher likelihood of ransom payment, and the value of information involved. The entire education sector performs poorly as a whole compared to other sectors when it comes to data security, and hackers are quickly taking notice.
