Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

June 2025 has seen WhatsApp back in the headlines—this time for all the wrong reasons. Earlier this month, The National broke the story: WhatsApp’s security is under renewed scrutiny following revelations that Israel remains the only known actor to have successfully exploited it. But if history has taught us anything, it’s this: if one nation-state can do it, others may follow. At Appknox, we decided to verify the current state of WhatsApp’s mobile app security for ourselves.

In June 2025, Israel carried out airstrikes against key Iranian military and nuclear facilities. Iran swiftly retaliated, escalating regional tensions to unprecedented levels. This military confrontation has not only unfolded in conventional warfare but also triggered a massive surge in cyber operations. Almost immediately after the kinetic attacks, numerous hacktivist groups began launching cyberattacks primarily targeting Israel and its international allies.

I recently discovered an interesting race condition vulnerability in the eCommerce software nopCommerce, during a manual pen test as part of the SWAT service (SWAT is Outpost24’s Pen Testing as a Service solution). This vulnerability (CVE-2024-58248) involves nopCommerce, an open-source eCommerce platform written in C#, which aids developers in building online stores. When exploited, it allows an attacker user to redeem a gift card multiple times by using a technique called a single-packet attack.

Vulnerability management has hit a wall. Exposure management is how forward-looking teams break through it. According to Gartner, by 2026, organizations that adopt a continuous exposure management approach to guide security investments will be three times less likely to experience a breach. a more advanced and iterative approach to vulnerability management. Despite growing interest, confusion remains around what exposure management is and how it differs from vulnerability management.

Organizations waste enormous amounts of time chasing down security alerts that turn out to be nothing. Recent research from May 2025 shows that 70% of a security team's time is spent investigating alerts that are false positives, wasting massive amounts of time in the investigation rather than working on proactive security measures to improve organizational security posture.

In the age of remote working, businesses and freelancers enjoy the freedom of working from anywhere, but this freedom could also come at a cost. Phishing, hacking, and ransomware are all potential problems businesses and individuals face. To prevent these threats, it's crucial to have awareness of remote access security, the vulnerabilities we face in the age of remote work, and what tools are available to prevent these threats.

Traditional IT environments remain vulnerable when scans are done infrequently or manually. Static scanning misses shadow IT ignores transient devices, and often overlooks systems not regularly scheduled for scans. Take the example of a remote office server that was deployed temporarily for a project. If it’s not included in regular scanning schedules, it might run unpatched and unnoticed for months—an easy target for attackers.

For any cloud service provider (CSP) aiming to work with the U.S. federal government, understanding the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is due diligence. This government-wide initiative standardizes the assessment, authorization, and monitoring of cloud products for security.