I want to take some time to explain the importance of using a white-box approach when testing applications for vulnerabilities. To help in this endeavor, I will use a real-world example to demonstrate how researchers (in this case Karim El Ouerghemmi and Simon Scannell) *may* have found a vulnerability in WordPress (CVE-2022-21662 a 2nd order stored XSS) and how you, as a security researcher, can also use a white-box approach to find an exotic XSS vulnerability.
Two packages of well-known origin were found exfiltrating Windows SAM and SYSTEM files, apparently as part of internal security research rather than a targeted dependency confusion attack. On June 6th, 2022, the Mend research team used Supply Chain Defender to detect and flag two malicious packages from the same author that contained identical code. We alerted npm and the packages were removed within three hours of publication.
A few weeks ago, a new version for Fastjson was released (1.2.83) which contains a fix for a security vulnerability that allegedly allows an attacker to execute code on a remote machine. According to several publications, this vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass the “AutoTypeCheck” mechanism in Fastjson and achieve remote code execution. This Fastjson vulnerability only recently received a CVE identifier – CVE-2022-25845, and a high CVSS – 8.1.
The recently discovered Windows zero-day vulnerability continues to make news as threat actors across the globe are relentless in their efforts to exploit it. The vulnerability, dubbed Follina, can be exploited when the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) is called by a Microsoft Office application using the URL protocol.
In recent years more open source vulnerabilities have been discovered than ever before. This is all part of the natural evolution; it’s what we expect to see as the amount of open source usage grows within organizations. But there’s something that we missed in this equation: while identifying vulnerabilities, organizations haven’t found a way to block unwanted dependencies, which made them vulnerable to attacks like never before.