Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On January 8, 2022, the open source maintainer of the wildly popular npm package colors, published colors@1.4.1 and colors@1.4.44-liberty-2 in which they intentionally introduced an offending commit that adds an infinite loop to the source code. The infinite loop is triggered and executed immediately upon initialization of the package’s source code, and would result in a Denial of Service (DoS) to any Node.js server using it.

Earlier this week, the FTC issued a warning to companies regarding the Log4j vulnerability. Given the rampant exploitation of the recently discovered vulnerabilities in this ubiquitous open source logging package, it’s encouraging to see the agency take this rare step, beginning to form a firm stance on software supply chain security. Although this increased scrutiny from the FTC may at first seem daunting, violations can be remediated with the right practices.

As 2022 begins, it’s a great time to set resolutions for the coming year. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to become a CrossFit guru or break world records on your Peloton. Instead, how about you set goals to improve your abilities as a secure developer? All too often, we choose resolutions that set ourselves up for failure. A better approach is to set realistic goals.

If you attended SnykCon 2021, you may remember our inaugural CTF: Fetch the Flag. In this CTF, TopLang was a web challenge of medium difficulty that we received a lot of positive feedback about. So for those of you that loved it, this write-up explains how our team internally approached tackling and solving this challenge. This challenge was a pretty typical example of what is known as an “oracle attack” using blind SQL injection.

Development teams are frequently under the gun to deliver software quickly, which is difficult to do without modern tools to build, test, and deploy applications efficiently. That’s why Atlassian’s Bitbucket Cloud — a Git-based source code repository service in the cloud that streamlines software development for collaborative teams — was built for both speed and efficiency. The challenge nearly all organizations face is ensuring development speed and security at the same time.

No matter your role in tech, you’ve probably already heard about, or dealt with, the ubiquitous Log4Shell vulnerability impacting a large number of Java applications. To help spread the latest info on this critical, zero-day vulnerability, we recently hosted a webinar to get everyone up to speed.

As previously predicted to unfold, at approximately 7:35 PM GMT, 28th of December 2021, another security vulnerability impacting the Log4j logging library was published as CVE-2021-44832. This new CVE-2021-44832 security vulnerability is affecting versions up to 2.17.0, which was previously thought to be fixed. This vulnerability is similar in nature to CVE-2021-4104 which affected the 1.x branch of Log4j.