Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s April 2019 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-825 on Wednesday, April 10th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2019-0803 This CVE describes a privilege escalation vulnerability in Win32k that could allow an attacker to execute code in...

Thanks for playing along! By now, you’ve probably seen that the winner of our tournament is Shellshock. I long felt that this was the expected winner of Patch Insanity given the competition and I wasn’t expecting any major upsets, but there were definitely one or two. The big one that came to mind for some of us was GHOST defeating EternalBlue....

Last time, I spoke with Ashanti, a Rust developer who’s always mindful of security. She explained how Rust is a more secure language, and she explained holochain to me. This time, I spoke to Nicola Whiting. As the Chief Strategy Officer of Titania, she works on how AI can be implemented to prevent cyber threats caused by poor cyber hygiene. Kim...

MITRE Corporation’s ATT&CK framework is a living, curated repository of adversarial tactics and techniques based on observations from actual attacks on enterprise networks. It’s a valuable trove of information for security analysts, threat hunters and incident response teams. Today, I’m going to look at a particular method for evading detection, often...

Vulnerability Management is a much-talked-about practice in the IT security industry. Whether it is the debate on vulnerability scoring, how to implement a suitable vulnerability management program based on your own resources or even trying to convince leadership a vulnerability management solution alone won't solve all your cybersecurity issues,...

You would be hard-pressed these days to remain ignorant of the growth of ransomware incidents experienced by organizations large and small. We’ve seen a ton of press around these events, from CryptoLocker to WannaCry. The impact of this type of malware is newsworthy. The landscape of malware is changing, however. While ransomware is still a...

Bad actors are leveraging a new file hosting service in order to launch attack campaigns involving FormBook and other malware. Near the end of March, researchers at Deep Instinct observed a new FormBook attack. The infection chain for this campaign began with a phishing email that contains a malicious attachment. In the sample analyzed by Deep...

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at some of the metrics that an executive team would want to see to identify how the business risk is trending. It is very important to keep in mind that if the business does not see the information security program as effective and efficient, they will not continue to invest in information security projects. In this...

Tripwire's March 2019 Patch Priority Index (PPI) brings together the top vulnerabilities for March 2019. First on the patch priority list this month are patches for Microsoft's Browser, Scripting Engine and VBScript. These patches resolve 23 vulnerabilities, including fixes for Memory Corruption, Elevation of Privilege, Security Feature Bypass and...

One of the main issues I find across the information security industry is that we constantly need to justify our existence. Organizations have slowly realized they need to spend on IT to enable their businesses. Information security, on the other hand, is the team that is constantly preventing the business from freely doing as they please. IT is seen...

*UPDATE: Padcheck source is now available on GitHub: https://github.com/Tripwire/padcheck* Since August, I’ve spent countless hours studying CBC padding oracle attacks toward the development of a new scan tool called padcheck. Using this tool, I was able to identify thousands of popular domains which could be targeted by an active network adversary ...

This post is one in a series of posts describing TLS CBC padding oracles I have identified on popular web sites. The other posts in this series include an overview of CBC padding oracles, a walkthrough of how I came to develop a new CBC padding oracle scanner, and a write-up on the Zombie POODLE attack. GOLDENDOODLE is the name I’ve given for...

When Shelley published his famous poem in 1816, he was telling us that the only constant in life is change. This was not a new concept, even then. Heraclitus proposed the same concept around 500 BCE with ‘Panta rhei’ (Life is Flux or everything changes). Even though we all know and understand this ancient concept, people still have difficulty with...

Welcome to Tripwire Patch Insanity! Comprised of 26 vulnerabilities divided into two conferences and four divisions, the goal of this tournament is to declare which named vulnerability is king of Patch Insanity! The original list of named vulnerabilities was taken from Hanno Böck’s named vulnerabilities repo. Any entries that did not have published...

A data breach remains a common headline in the news cycle. A different company, website or social network reports a security issue almost daily. If it feels like using the internet has become a risky endeavor, the feeling is accurate. But what exactly classifies an event as a data breach? The world wide web is littered with different security gaps and...

“The best defense is a good offense.” History credits Revolutionary War hero George Washington with being among the first to vocalize this concept, later famously echoed by heavyweight boxing champ Jack Dempsey and football god Vince Lombardi. And it’s easy to see what they mean. The idea is that being proactive—going on the offense instead of...

Digital attackers are sending out fake flu warnings that appear to come from the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) in order to distribute GandCrab ransomware. An attack begins when a user receives a fake CDC email. The sender field claims that the email came from "Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." But a closer look reveals the sender...

Understanding vulnerability scoring can be a daunting task, but a good starting point is first understanding risk and being able to distinguish risk from a vulnerability. Both have been used interchangeably throughout the years. A vulnerability is some aspect of a systems functioning, configuration or architecture that makes the resource a target of...

Tripwire has been in the business of providing vulnerability management solutions with IP360 for about 20 years. With over 20,000 vulnerabilities discovered last year alone, vulnerability management continues to be an important part of most security plans. And most organizations agree. In a recent survey, 89 percent of respondents said that their...