It’s mid-morning. You’re scanning the daily news while enjoying a coffee break. You come across yet another headline broadcasting a supply chain data breach. Your heart skips a quick, almost undetectable, beat. You have the technology in the headline in your stack. You set aside your coffee and begin furiously scanning through the overwhelming number of alerts triggered across all your technologies.

A new vulnerability, CVE-2021-342 has been discovered in the Splunk indexer component, which is a commonly utilized part of the Splunk Enterprise suite. We’re going to explain the affected components, the severity of the vulnerability, mitigations you can put in place, and long-term considerations you may wish to make when using Splunk.

For businesses utilising public clouds, choosing an open source platform offers considerable advantages. Open source solutions can help reduce costs, provide access to the most leading-edge enterprise-grade features, and eliminate risks such as vendor lock-in, lack of support, or long-term security maintenance.

rxdirs has provided a convenient default when setting permissions recursively. When enabled (the default prior to version 3.20.0) a promise to grant read access on a directory is extended to also include execution since quite commonly if you want to read a directory you also want to be able to list the files in the directory. However, the convenience comes with the cost of complicating security reviews since the state requested on the surface is more strict than what is actually granted.

In recent weeks, international headlines have been dominated by the Russia-Ukraine war and its potential to escalate into cyberspace due to punishing economic sanctions by the west. On March 21st, 2022, the Biden administration released a statement calling for the public and private sector to “accelerate efforts to lock their digital doors” in light of the Russian cyber threat.

2021 marked the fifth consecutive year of record-breaking security attacks. Zero-Day attacks skyrocketed, with 66 exploits found to be in use, more than any other year on record and almost double 2020’s figure. Meanwhile, a staggering 66% of organizations have suffered at least one ransomware attack in the last year, with the average ransom payment soaring by 63% to $1.79 million (USD).