In this series, we examine how the reality of a security program differs from the perception some security practioners hold. To do this, we’re focusing on four specific gaps that can weaken security defenses and instigate security incidents. For example, consider the rising number of cloud breaches caused by engineers disabling basic access control, either…

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Injection Detection Injection vulnerabilities can be detected during development but are more difficult to detect in deployed systems. Because injection flaws can be exploited in any stage of an attack, finding and evaluating their impact depends on context. Often attackers use lower-priority vulnerabilities such as cross site scripting (XSS) to gain an initial foothold to…

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Comparing ports targeted in Canada versus the US, Europe, or Australia, Canada was the only region where DNS port 53 and the UPnP port 37215 were on the top 20 targeted port list. The UPnP port relates to Huawei small office home office (SOHO) routers with a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2017-17215 and Exploit…

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At the beginning of this year, we invited security leaders to talk about their past failures and the lessons they wanted to pass on. We called it If we had to do it again, and people really liked it. A number of folks approached me wanting to tell their stories as well; so a month…

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(We wanted to give an assessment of JS redirection content, but it was not reachable at the time of writing; we can assume by script name it had an output of a blank page response or other misleading action.) Conclusion Gootkit remains active by maintaining this campaign of redirection. We’ve noticed multiple configurations targeting the…

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This struck me as a problem: the ability to embed an iframe into an email is already a vulnerability. Even worse, as the iframe was not affected by the block external images setting that prevents tracking pixels and web beacons. But if an attacker could gain the ability to run JavaScript in an email, there…

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At RSA Conference 2019, F5 Labs’ Preston Hogue sat down with Information Security Media Group to give a video interview on the importance of actionable threat intelligence to DevSecOps professionals. In particular, Hogue explores the challenge presented by DevSecOps itself, and the rise of application-focused threat intelligence. You can see the full video article published…

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Advanced Attackers Like criminal actors, state-sponsored actors or APTs often initiate their illicit access campaigns with spear phishing. However, advanced actors have more time and resources on their hands, and can fashion something of value even from apparently useless data. Large caches of innocuous information, such as email addresses, can be used to look for…

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Security researchers at F5 Networks constantly monitor web traffic at various locations throughout the world. This allows us to detect “in the wild” malware, and to get an insight into the current threat landscape. Here’s an overview of what we saw in May 2019. Throughout the month of May, the team detected 10 new attack…

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As we’ve seen in this series, security defenders’ perception of a security program can differ from the reality. Part 1 examined three key gaps that lead to incomplete risk management processes. Part 2 explored the gap in critical areas of perception of risk and defense between security leadership and security technicians, and how it can…

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