Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

LDAP Nom Nom is a recently discovered brute-force technique for enumerating valid usernames in Active Directory — anonymously and without leaving any log entries behind. It abuses LDAP Ping, a little-known mechanism in Active Directory normally used by computers to check whether a domain controller is alive. This blog post explains how LDAP Ping works and how adversaries can abuse it with LDAP Nom Nom.

SnakeYaml is a well-known YAML 1.1 parser and emitter for Java. Recently, a vulnerability — CVE-2022-1471 — was reported for this package. This vulnerability can lead to arbitrary code execution. The org.yaml:snakeyaml package is widely used in the Java ecosystem, in part because it is packaged by default with Spring Boot in the spring-boot-starter.

When the CrowdStrike Services team conducts a proactive security engagement, such as a Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment or Tabletop Exercise, it often uses CrowdStrike Falcon® Spotlight to identify what vulnerabilities exist in the environment. Unfortunately, this can be a disheartening experience, as many organizations we see have millions, even tens of millions, of unpatched vulnerabilities. It’s typical to see at least a quarter of those listed with a CVSS rating of Critical.

If I asked you what the common ways to exploit a cloud app for malicious purposes are, I bet your answer would probably be either to use it to distribute malicious content (such as malware or phishing pages), or to host the command and control (C2) infrastructure. In reality another frequent technique is the dead drop resolver, where a legitimate service is abused by threat actors to host the information related to the C2 infrastructure rather than the C2 infrastructure itself.

The JFrog Security Research team continuously monitors popular open-source software (OSS) repositories with our automated tooling, and reports any vulnerabilities or malicious packages discovered to repository maintainers and the wider community.