Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

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In 2013, a group of ethical hackers started penetration testing to make the Internet a safer place. After hacking companies such as Google, Facebook among others, they realized they could automate their findings to help companies monitor their attack surface and founded Detectify. Fast forward a few years and Detectify’s Crowdsource network boasts of 400+ elite ethical hackers.

Limited data retention resulting from financial or technological constraints makes it hard for security teams to see the complete history of an attack. This lack of full context about a threat — or a potential threat — eventually catches up with organizations, leading to longer dwell times and increased risk of a breach.

On August 4, 2022, Advanced – a major software provider for the UK’s National Health System (NHS) and other healthcare customers – suffered a ransomware attack from a group that is still unknown to the public. The attack disrupted NHS services including ambulance dispatch, appointment bookings, patient referrals and emergency prescriptions.

Observing the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, we can clearly see that cyberattacks leveraging malware are an important part of modern hybrid war strategy. While conventional warfare is conducted on the battlefield and limited by several factors, cyber warfare continues in cyber space, offering the chance to infiltrate and damage targets far behind the frontlines. Russia utilized cyberattacks during the initial phase of the invasion in February.

In this post, we’ll look at the security blindspots of lockfile injection that a Ruby gem might expose via its Gemfile.lock. As a prelude to that, we will open up with a brief introduction to Ruby and third-party dependencies management around RubyGems and Bundler. Web developers often work on Ruby projects, but are mostly referring to them as the popular open source web application framework Ruby on Rails.

It seems like every week another household brand announces that they’ve been the victim of a data breach. Recently, cloud communications company Twilio announced that its internal systems were breached after attackers obtained employee credentials using an SMS phishing attack. Around the same time, Cloudflare, a content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, reported that its employees were also targeted but their systems were not compromised.