Showing items from vulnerability research

WordPress Version? Make Sure You're Running the Latest Supported

Lari Huttunen
Date : October 11, 2022
Categories : Public exposure ,Vulnerability research ,Cyber threat ,External attack surface

It all started with Miles Davis in 2004, when WordPress 1.0 was released that is. Since then, the popular open source content management system’s releases have been named after a prominent Jazz musician. Researching this topic from a security perspective makes it quite clear why Jazz musicians are apt denominators for releases, since securing WordPress and keeping it secure over time must indeed feel like a jamming session at your local Jazz club. What does this mean in practice? Quoting WordPress Codex: The only current officially supported version is WordPress 6.1.1. Previous major releases before this may or may not get security updates as serious exploits are discovered. Which means that if you’re a WordPress admin, you should bookmark the WordPress Codex supported versions page to check which actual release contains the latest and greatest fixes. This is important, as from the project’s standpoint only the latest named release and its subsequent minor releases are guaranteed to get the appropriate security fixes.

Software Dependency Failures: jQuery, a Canary in the Coal Mine

Lari Huttunen
Date : September 13, 2022
Categories : Cyber threat ,Public exposure ,External attack surface ,Vulnerability research

Keeping dependencies up-to-date is challenging for any software development project and even more so from a systems administration point of view. Too often you see packaged web projects, which have been put together and then forgotten. They contain dependencies to third party libraries, which never get updated even if the application itself is maintained – at least to some extent. In my daily work I research the impact of vulnerabilities on the scale of the Internet. Most of the time, vulnerabilities in protocols, services and platforms keep me and other security professionals busy, whereas the upper layers and especially the web layer is often something of an afterthought. To find out whether there is a pink elephant in the room, I wanted to analyze a web application library which is ubiquitous and has had issues with vulnerabilities which are more or less persistent – which lead me to jQuery. My hypothesis was that software dependencies cause hidden vulnerabilities in applications considered secure, even if they are otherwise developed or maintained as they should.

Integrity Checking - an Integral Part of Cyber Security

Joona Hoikkala , Tomi Koski
Date : July 12, 2022
Categories : Public exposure ,Vulnerability disclosure ,Cyber threat ,Vulnerability research

During the last twenty years there has been endless talks and discussions regarding the importance of Transport Layer Security (TLS) and the potential threats emerging from failing to implement TLS correctly. Even with all the talk, the real life examples of impactful man-in-the-middle (MitM) exploitation are rare. This post aims to shed some light on one of these cases. A Prelude to a 0-Day It was a dark and stormy night normal workday for us working in an internal red team. A large part of our job is to map potential attack surfaces, and while large companies often have a huge external attack surface there’s still a lot of other things going on under the surface as well. One of these things are the employee devices and the installed enterprise software on them, typically provisioned by the company. Looking through the devices that are used daily by thousands of our colleagues we saw what we expected; reputable EDR solutions, inventory management software and so on.