Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Ethical hacking refers to the practice of using hacking techniques to identify and expose vulnerabilities in computer systems, networks, and applications. Unlike malicious hackers, ethical hackers use their skills and knowledge to help organizations and businesses identify security weaknesses before they can be exploited by malicious actors. Ethical hacking can include a range of activities, from scanning and penetration testing to social engineering and physical security testing.

Ethical hacking is used to find potential security issues in computer systems and networks. In this post, we’ll cover a collection of techniques and procedures commonly used by ethical hackers to find vulnerabilities before malicious users can take advantage.

A zero-day vulnerability, denoted by the CVE identifier CVE-2023-30777, exposes a dangerous reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw. This high-severity vulnerability has been discovered within the WordPress plugin (Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and Advanced Custom Fields Pro). The CVE-2023-30777 exposes over 2 million installations to security risks, triggering widespread concern and anxiety among website owners and administrators.

The Smashing Security podcast recently invited our Director of Product Management, John Stock, on to discuss our Vulnerability Prediction Technology (VPT) tool, the security challenges brought by remote work, and the importance of balancing risk management with business goals.

On May 31, 2023, Progress released a security advisory warning customers of a critical zero-day vulnerability being actively exploited in MOVEit Transfer, a managed file transfer (MFT) solution. The exploitation of this vulnerability could lead to escalated privileges and potential unauthorized access to an environment, allowing threat actors to steal data and extort organizations.

On May 31st, 2023, a working exploit has been publicly released for a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2023-33733), impacting ReportLab PDF Toolkit python libraries of versions prior to 3.6.13. The researcher of the POC has previously contacted ReportLab in April 2023, detailing this vulnerability and ReportLab has released a fix on April 27th, 2023, through ReportLab 3.6.13.

A new critical zero-day vulnerability in the MOVEit Transfer software is being actively exploited by attackers to exfiltrate data from organizations. MOVEit Transfer is a managed file transfer (MFT) software, developed by Progress, designed to provide organizations a way to securely transfer files, which can be implemented on-premise or as a cloud SaaS platform. According to BleepingComputer, attackers have been actively exploiting MOVEit Transfer to download data from organizations.

On May 31, threat actors were discovered targeting a critical zero day in MOVEit Transfer software resulting in escalated privileges and unauthorized data access. The vulnerability being exploited is an SQL injection and has since been patched. Resources links, including one for the patch, are at the bottom of this post. MOVEit Transfer is a managed file transfer (MFT) solution developed by Ipswitch (a subsidiary of Progress Software).

Jetpack, an extremely popular WordPress plugin that provides a variety of functions including security features for around five million websites, has received a critical security update following the discovery of a bug that has lurked unnoticed since 2012. Jetpack's maintainers, Automattic, announced on Tuesday that it had worked closely with the WordPress security team to push out an automatic patch for every version of Jetpack since 2.0.