Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

On December 8th, Clinton Herget and Simon Maple, Field CTOs at Snyk, had the opportunity to chat with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, podcast host, curator of “Last Week in AWS”, and snarky Twitter personality. Their conversation took a lot of fun turns, from ranting about the hour-long line to get coffee at AWS re:Invent, to Corey proclaiming that “SBOMs are a fantasy” (there’s more context to that… keep reading).

ChatGPT has been available to the public since November 30, 2022. Since then, it has made headlines – from being temporarily banned from Stack Overflow because, “while the answers ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good, and the answers are very easy to produce,” .

The shift towards hybrid work models has expanded the perimeters of work, adding to the burden on IT teams as they fight to stay resilient in the face of increased attack surfaces. All it takes for an invasion into an enterprise’s IT infrastructure is one compromised identity. So, what are enterprise identities? These are the user names, passwords, networks, endpoints, applications, etc., that act as gateways to business-sensitive information.

Threat actors exploiting cloud services are keeping me very busy in these final days of this troubled 2022. The main character of this Cloud Threats Memo is MuddyWater (also known as Earth Vetala, MERCURY, Static Kitten, Seedworm, and TEMP.Zagros), one of the most prolific cyber espionage groups, active since at least 2017, and believed to be a subordinate element within Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).

As the need for a new security strategy grows, we use cloud-native security platforms (CNSP). Cloud services like containers, serverless security, platform as a service (PaaS), and microservices are the building blocks of cloud-native architectures. Because these services are loosely coupled- that is, they are not hardwired to any infrastructure components developers can frequently make changes without harming other parts of the application or other team members’ projects.

CrackMapExec is an open-source tool that leverages Mimikatz to enable adversaries to harvest credentials and move laterally through an Active Directory environment. This blog post details how this tool works and offers a solution for defending against it.

In our latest Snyk in 30, Jason Lane (Director of Product Marketing) and I (Marco Morales, Partner Solutions Architect) showcased Snyk Open Source with a focus on our integration with Bitbucket Cloud. They covered why open source security is vital for modern app development, along with tips on taking a holistic approach to application security that goes beyond just shifting left.