Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The CVE-2021-33909, named Sequoia, is a new privilege escalation vulnerability that affects Linux’s file system. It was disclosed in July, 2021, and it was introduced in 2014 on many Linux distros; among which we have Ubuntu (20.04, 20.10 and 21.04), Debian 11, Fedora 34 Workstation and some Red Hat products, too. This vulnerability is caused by an out-of-bounds write found in the Linux kernel’s seq_file in the Filesystem layer.

In December 2020, we blogged about security issues in Go’s encoding/xml with critical impact on several Go-based SAML implementations. Coordinating the disclosure around those issues was no small feat; we spent months emailing the Go security team, reviewing code, testing and retesting exploits, coming up with workarounds, implementing a validation library, and finally reaching out to SAML library maintainers and 20 different companies downstream.

Picture this: It’s a normal day of working from home as usual since the COVID-19 outbreak. After that satisfying cup of coffee, you log in. But something is wrong. No matter how many times you click, your files don’t open. Your screen is frozen and refuses to budge. And then, you see one of the worst nightmares any IT admin can imagine: “Oops, your files have been encrypted. But don’t worry, we haven’t deleted them yet.

The challenges involved in deploying and managing microservices have led to the creation of the service mesh, a tool for adding observability, security, and traffic management capabilities at the application layer. While a service mesh is intended to help developers and SREs with a number of use cases related to service-to-service communication within Kubernetes clusters, a service mesh also adds operational complexity and introduces an additional control plane for security teams to manage.

Covid made the hypothetical necessity of IT risk planning a reality. Many organizations responded to the immediate need for remote workforces by adding more VPN licenses. But while adding more VPN capacity solved the problem of resource access, it also led to network bottlenecks and application latencies.

The 2010 Stuxnet malicious software attack on a uranium enrichment plant in Iran had all the twists and turns of a spy thriller. The plant was air gapped (not connected to the internet) so it couldn’t be targeted directly by an outsider. Instead, the attackers infected five of the plant’s partner organizations, hoping that an engineer from one of them would unknowingly introduce the malware to the network via a thumb drive.

Detecting and preventing malicious activity such as botnet attacks is a critical area of focus for threat intel analysts, security operators, and threat hunters. Taking up the Mozi botnet as a case study, this blog post demonstrates how to use open source tools, analytical processes, and the Elastic Stack to perform analysis and enrichment of collected data irrespective of the campaign.

SeriousSAM or CVE-2021-36934 is a Privilege Escalation Vulnerability, which allows overly permissive Access Control Lists (ACLs) that provide low privileged users read access to privileged system files including the Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database. The SAM database stores users' encrypted passwords in a Windows system. According to the Microsoft advisory, this issue affects Windows 10 1809 and above as well as certain versions of Server 2019.