2021 has been an incredible year for RapidSpike. We’ve produced some brilliant features and made platform changes to help our clients produce faster, safer and more reliable websites. Additionally, we’ve had some great successes as a company. Here are some of the highlights in the RapidSpike Roundup 2021.

I’m probably dating myself, but I used to love the television show The A-Team when I was little. Every week, the team would be put into the middle of a problem and work together to overcome some challenge. Plus, they had Mr. T and a really cool van.

Yes, you read that right – in the comfort of your own laptop, as in, the entire environment running inside your laptop! Why? Well, read on. It’s a bit of a long one, but there is a lot of my learning that I would like to share. I often find that Calico Open Source users ask me about BGP, and whether they need to use it, with a little trepidation. BGP carries an air of mystique for many IT engineers, for two reasons.

Recent news about Log4j has enterprises and vendors scrambling for information and answers, including customers of messaging middleware and Integration Infrastructure Management (i2M) products. Nastel Technologies customers will not be exposed to any risks from this vulnerability, but enterprises are encouraged to check with their Cloud and other solution vendors to protect themselves and their data.

When the Nobel Prize for physics was announced in October 2021, one of the winners was Italian theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi, whose groundbreaking research helped decode complex physical systems, opening the door for breakthroughs in mathematics, science, and artificial intelligence. Decoding complex physical systems? If the science thing didn’t work out, Parisi could have pursued a career in security operations.

With news breaking re: Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) and exploitation attempts becoming widespread, MSPs and IT teams have been working nonstop to scope their exposure, scan for potential IoCs, apply mitigations, and patch.

Not all data is destined to be public. Moving workloads that handle secret or private data from an on-premise setup to a public cloud introduces a new attack surface with different risks. As the public cloud environment shares its hardware infrastructure, a flaw in the clouds’ isolation mechanisms can be detrimental to the protection of sensitive data. The major public cloud environments tackle this by building their security following a defense-in-depth approach.

Tl;dr: Log4j is a mess, if you’re chasing down the applications, services and servers that use Java; consider the suggestions below to make zero day patching easier.

If you run an interactive website or application, JavaScript security is a top priority. There’s a huge array of things that can go wrong, from programmatic errors and insecure user inputs to malicious attacks. While JavaScript error monitoring can help you catch many of these issues, understanding common JavaScript security risks and following best practices is just as important.

If you are currently running the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2), this piece is especially relevant to the security of your robots. A few weeks ago, a group of security researchers reported 13 security vulnerabilities affecting some of the most used implementations of DDS, the default middleware used by ROS 2.