David Dworken, a Google security researcher, presented a recent Defcon talk about how he found over 30 vulnerabilities in various Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) over the course of a few months of research. Many believe that source code on its own is benign as long as you don’t compile and run it, but as Dworken proved, simply loading code into an IDE can cause … [Read more...]
ProxyShell, Exchange Servers Under Attack Again
With the 2021 editions of the BlackHat and DEF CON security conferences all wrapped up, one of the presentation that made the biggest waves was the latest research from Orange Tsai of Devcore Security Consulting. Tsai was the researcher responsible for identifying and disclosing CVE-2021-26855, better known as ProxyLogon, to Microsoft back in January 2021, well before threat … [Read more...]
Defcon Talk Timeless-Timing-Attacks
A recent Defcon talk by Tom Van Goethem and Mathy Vanhoef, "Timeless Timing Attacks" made significant progress on ways to create timing attacks over a network. Timing attacks work by extracting data form devices based on how long it takes to respond. To successfully run a timing attack, the attacker usually must be directly connected to the computer since the smallest … [Read more...]
What to Make of the Biden Administration’s New ICS Cybersecurity Initiative
Yesterday, the Biden Administration unveiled a new initiative to help improve the cybersecurity stance of the industrial control systems (ICS) that manage the nation’s critical infrastructure. As recent events (like the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident) have shown, disruptions to critical infrastructure can have serious, potentially even fatal consequences. In short, this … [Read more...]
REvil Hasn’t Gone Anywhere (Probably)
Many of the recent high-profile ransomware attacks like those against Acer, JBS and more recently, customers of Kaseya, have been the work of the ransomware as a service group REvil. After the most recent attack that exploited multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in Kaseya’s VSA software and left thousands of organizations encrypted, REvil appears to have gone dark. The ransomware … [Read more...]