Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

As we all learn how to practically apply the emerging technology of Secure Service Edge (SSE), here is a significant SSE use case—perhaps the most significant, at least in our immediate future. Looking ahead to 2022, many businesses will no doubt have return-to-office plans at the front of their minds. But coming back to the office brings its own unexpected risks that security leaders need to be ready for.

Just a few days after CVE-2021-45046 was released and fixed, a third zero-day vulnerability was discovered in Apache Log4j, tracked as CVE-2021-45105. The bug was reported on December 15, 2021, and disclosed on December 18, 2021. This third vulnerability has received a CVSS score of 7.5 out of 10, whereas the first one known as Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) received the maximum CVSS score of 10 due to its criticality.

During my time as a penetration tester, I’ve seen many IT teams storing server catalogs with respective IP addresses and passwords in a sharable Excel sheet. This is more so true in windows server infrastructure as many organizations resort to password-based auth for local and remote access. Of course, security-conscious organizations would use a password vault. But in any case, password storage in any form is often an Achilles heel in infrastructure security.

Indicators of Attack (IOAs) demonstrate the intentions behind a cyberattack and the techniques used by the threat actor to accomplish their objectives. The specific cyber threats arming the attack, like malware, ransomware, or advanced threats, are of little concern when analyzing IOAs. Instead, only the sequence of events leading to the deployment of a cyber threat are considered in this cybersecurity strategy.

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an open-source application protocol that allows applications to access and authenticate specific user information across directory services. LDAP is a lightweight version of Directory Access Protocol (DAP) LDAP works on both public networks and private intranets and across multiple directory services, making it the most convenient language for accessing, modifying, and authenticating information in any directory.

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) views securing the supply chain and the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) as one critical pillar in protecting national security. Dedicated security requirements exist for the protection of federal information systems as well as classified information based on the NIST 800-53 standard. However, several years ago, a gap was identified in the security requirements for the protection of non-federal systems and controlled unclassified information (CUI).