Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

It’s been just over a year since open source Falco graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) during KubeCon EU 2024, and the momentum hasn’t slowed down. From advancements in real-time threat response and expanded audit event collection across cloud-native environments, to reaching 150 million downloads and even new open-source technologies like Stratoshark being built on Falco’s libraries, the project continues to evolve rapidly.

Containerization, a form of lightweight virtualization, lets applications inhabit their own self-contained environments. Each container packages everything an application needs to run – code, runtime, libraries – keeping it neatly separated from everything else. This isolation is a big deal because it means a problem in one container won’t bring down the whole environment.

We would like to recognize Amit Serper, Travis Lowe, Tony Gore, Adrian Godoy, Mihai Vasilescu, Suraj Sahu, Pablo Ramos, Raj Jammalamadaka, Lacie Griffin, and Josh Grunzweig for their contributions in authoring this publication. CrowdStrike is committed to protecting our customers from the latest disclosed vulnerabilities. We are actively monitoring activity surrounding “IngressNightmare,” the name given to recently identified vulnerabilities in the Kubernetes (K8s) ingress-nginx controller.

Kubernetes powers modern application deployments, yet safeguarding its secrets remains a formidable challenge. In a 2024 report, IBM estimated that 16% of data breaches stemmed from compromised credentials, resulting in significant financial losses. The recent attack involving a stolen API key at the U.S. Treasury Department highlights the vulnerability of even well-protected systems.

In the past year alone, the number of artificial intelligence (AI) packages running in workloads grew by almost 500%. Which is to say: AI is everywhere, and it’s settling in for the long haul. Naturally, as helpful as they are, these AI workloads come with security challenges, including data exposure, adversarial attacks, and model manipulation. So as AI adoption accelerates, security leaders must build an AI workload security program to protect their organizations while enabling innovation.

CVE-2025-1974 is a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Kubernetes’ Ingress-NGINX Controller that allows unauthenticated attackers with network access to inject arbitrary NGINX configuration directives, potentially leading to full cluster compromise. Ingress-NGINX is a software-only ingress controller provided by the Kubernetes project. Because of its versatility and ease of use, ingress-nginx is quite popular: it is deployed in over 40% of Kubernetes clusters.

When we first launched Project Calico in 2016, we set out to make Kubernetes networking easy, reliable, and scalable for all organizations. Our goal was to abstract away the complexity and performance overheads of other CNI plugins while simultaneously extending Kubernetes network policy to make it easier to secure your Kubernetes workloads.

On March 24, 2025, ingress-nginx maintainers released fixes for multiple vulnerabilities that could allow threat actors to take over Kubernetes clusters. Ingress is a Kubernetes feature that defines how workload Pods are exposed to the network, while an Ingress Controller implements those rules by configuring the necessary local or cloud resources. According to Kubernetes, ingress-nginx is deployed in over 40% of Kubernetes clusters.