Microsoft disclosed a zero-day vulnerability impacting Office and Windows on July’s Patch Tuesday. This vulnerability has an “important” severity level, and can allow attackers to perform remote code execution with the same privileges as the target. As of this writing, there is no patch available to mitigate the vulnerability, but Microsoft has provided mitigation steps.
Software vulnerability patching plays a critical role in safeguarding your code base, software, applications, computer systems, and networks against potential threats, and ensuring they’re compliant, and optimized for efficiency. Organizations’ codebases have become increasingly complex, involving sophisticated relationships between components and their dependencies.
AI has become a hot topic thanks to the recent headlines around the large language model (LLM) AI with a simple interface — ChatGPT. Since then, the AI field has been vibrant, with several major actors racing to provide ever-bigger, better, and more versatile models. Players like Microsoft, NVidia, Google, Meta, and open source projects have all published a list of new models. In fact, a leaked Google document makes it seem that these models will be ubiquitous and available to everyone soon.
An insecure direct object reference (IDOR) is a security vulnerability that occurs when a system’s implementation allows attackers to directly access and manipulate sensitive objects or resources without authorization checks. For example, an IDOR can arise when an application provides direct access to objects based on user-supplied input, allowing an attacker to bypass authorization.
PCI version 4.0 was released in March 2022, and all organizations that must be compliant with the regulation have a deadline of March 31, 2024 to do so. So, what does the new version say about pen testing? According to Requirement 11 of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), pen testing is required for organizations and entities that store, process, and/or transmit cardholder data.
An application’s attack surface is the sum of points where it might be vulnerable to bad actors. It consists of all the paths in and out of the application. Identifying vulnerabilities is vital to mitigating threats because any access point is a potential entry point for an attack. An attack surface analysis, which is critical to this mitigation strategy, is the process of identifying and assessing the potential vulnerabilities and risks in a software system or network.
Deserialization is the process of converting data from a serialized format, such as JSON or binary, back into its original form. Swift provides multiple protocols allowing users to convert objects and values to and from property lists, JSON, and other flat binary representations. Deserialization can also introduce unsuspecting security vulnerabilities in a user’s codebase that attackers could exploit.
The discipline of vulnerability management has been around for decades and the way we assess risk, based on severity and likelihood of exploitation, has remained fairly constant. However, there are challenges in how this formula is usually applied that narrow our perspective on risk and our mitigation strategies.
