Since the end of the year is quickly approaching, it is undoubtedly a good time to look back at what the past twelve months have brought to us… And given that the entire cyber security profession is about protecting various systems from “bad things” (and we’ve all correspondingly seen more than our share of the “bad”), I thought that it might be pleasant to look at a few positive background trends that have accompanied us throughout the year, without us necessarily noticing…

I have already talked about various React2Shell exploit attempts we have observed in the last weeks. But new varieties of the exploit are popping up, and the most recent one is using this particular version of the exploit:

Last year, Kubernetes fixed a command injection vulnerability in the Kubernetes NodeLogQuery feature (%%cve:2024-9042%%) [1]. To exploit the vulnerability, several conditions had to be met:

This release addresses 57 vulnerabilities. 3 of these vulnerabilities are rated critical. One vulnerability was already exploited, and two were publicly disclosed before the patch was released.

AutoIT3[1] is a powerful language that helps to built nice applications for Windows environments, mainly to automate tasks. If it looks pretty old, the latest version was released last September and it remains popular amongst developers, for the good… or the bad! Malware written in AutoIt3 has existed since the late 2000s, when attackers realized that the language was easy to learn (close to basic) but can also compiled into standalone PE files! From a malware point of view, such executables make an extended use of packed data, making them more stealthy.

Currently, in order to provide basic DDoS protection and filter aggressive bots, some form of Content Delivery Network (CDN) is usually the simplest and most cost-effective way to protect a web application. In a typical setup, DNS is used to point clients to the CDN, and the CDN will then forward the request to the actual web server. There are a number of companies offering services like this, and cloud providers will usually have solutions like this as well.

We continue to encounter high-profile vulnerabilities that relate to how URL mapping (or "aliases") interac|zsh:1: parse error near `&' ts with URL-based access control. Last week, we wrote about the Oracle Identity Manager vulnerability. I noticed some scans for an older vulnerability with similar roots today:

From time to time, it can be instructive to look at generic phishing messages that are delivered to one’s inbox or that are caught by basic spam filters. Although one usually doesn’t find much of interest, sometimes these little excursions into what should be a run-of-the-mill collection of basic, commonly used phishing techniques can lead one to find something new and unusual. This was the case with one of the messages delivered to our handler inbox yesterday…

When people discuss the security implications of Unicode, International Domain Names (IDNs) are often highlighted as a risk. However, while visible and often talked about, IDNs are probably not what you should really worry about when it comes to Unicode. There are several issues that impact application security beyond confusing domain names.

The finger.exe command is used in ClickFix attacks.