The Open Web Application Security Project (aka OWASP) recently announced its latest updates to the venerable OWASP Top Ten list. This publication is meant to bring attention to the most common classes of software-related security issues facing developers and organizations in the hopes of helping them to better plan for and address potential high-severity issues in their codebases.
Often, penetration testing (or pen testing) and vulnerability scanning are used interchangeably. In doing so, the importance of each method of testing gets lost in the confusion. Both of these are significant in protecting your data and infrastructure for different reasons. In the age of digitally storing information and companies having an online network presence, it’s easy for hackers to find their way in. This is why both pen testing and vulnerability scanning are important.
If every vulnerability seems to be equally critical, engineers would get overwhelmed and probably waste time on the wrong issues. This is why it’s important for developer security tools to provide clear and simple prioritization functionality. As you’ve likely noticed, Snyk Code provides a Priority Score on the top right corner of the overview panel. When hovering over it, an explanation is shown how the priority score was calculated.
Forescout Research Labs, with support from Medigate Labs, have discovered a set of 13 new vulnerabilities affecting the Nucleus TCP/IP stack, which we are collectively calling NUCLEUS:13. The new vulnerabilities allow for remote code execution, denial of service, and information leak. Nucleus is used in safety-critical devices, such as anesthesia machines, patient monitors and others in healthcare.
Embedded devices with limited memory and storage resources are likely to leverage a tool such as BusyBox, which is marketed as the Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux. BusyBox is a software suite of many useful Unix utilities, known as applets, that are packaged as a single executable file. Within BusyBox you can find a full-fledged shell, a DHCP client/server, and small utilities such as cp, ls, grep, and others.
ProxyShell is a massive new exploit campaign that is targeting vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers. The servers are publicly available and the campaign is directly responsible for a number of breaches and subsequent ransomware attacks. There have been thousands of compromised Exchange servers to date. Ransomware is simply the byproduct of unauthorized access and privilege escalation and typically has to start with something like ProxyShell providing an attacker remote access.
As the world increasingly moves to a digital format, cybersecurity is becoming more important than ever. It’s especially significant since, according to a recent survey by Sophos, 51% of businesses in America experienced a ransomware attack in 2020. That’s a staggering number of security vulnerabilities that truly shouldn’t exist in the modern day and age. Yet, it’s relatively understandable.
According to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the number of new security vulnerabilities increases steadily over the past few years. Image source: NVD The consistent rise in the number of security vulnerabilities along with headline-catching exploits like the SolarWind supply chain attack earlier this year has organizations doubling down on vulnerability management programs to ensure that they are not exposed to malicious attacks.
