Media Coverage

Zero trust is a trending security paradigm being adopted by some of the world’s biggest and technically advanced organizations, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The technology finds its fit in virtually every technology platform and infrastructure, and Kubernetes is no exception. The Kubernetes community has been actively discussing zero trust for several years as a vital component of an end-to-end encryption strategy. Service mesh providers are promoting essential practices (such as mTLS and certificate key rotation) to make it easier to implement zero-trust architectures. As a result, organizations today are working towards implementing robust zero trust in applications at scale. While Kubernetes is a powerful solution for IT organizations to deliver their software efficiently and at scale, it is not without its security challenges and vulnerabilities. For one, Kubernetes is a relatively new system, which makes it attractive prey for cyberattackers. This is compounded by its operating model’s dynamic nature, which can easily leave room for bad actors to infiltrate if proper security measures are not taken. According to a recent report by the Shadowserver Foundation, 380,000 open Kubernetes API servers were found exposed on the internet this year alone. While these servers were only identified as exposed and not attacked, the figures indicate the severity of the vulnerability and its potential danger to API servers.

There have been many attacks on Fortinet’s newly patched vulnerabilities. At the same time, the company first notified specific users to update the mitigation, but the news spread out and attracted attention. What is more noteworthy is that the Shadowserver Foundation recently released a report stating that more than 17,000 Fortinet devices are exposed to the Internet and should be patched.

In August 2021, researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Colorado Boulder published an award-winning paper detailing a potential DDoS attack vector that takes advantage of flaws within the middleboxes of TCP protocols and can be abused to launch massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In March 2022, security researchers at Akamai Security Operations Command Center detected and analysed a series of TCP reflection attacks, peaking at 11Gbps at 1.5 million packets per second (Mpps). Upon examining the TCP packets used in the attack, they realized the attackers were leveraging the technique outlined in the above paper, which they termed TCP Middlebox Reflection attack. In this attack, the attacker abuses vulnerable firewalls and content filtering systems to reflect and amplify TCP traffic to a victim’s machine, creating a powerful DDoS attack. A middlebox is a computer networking device that transforms, inspects, filters, and manipulates traffic for purposes other than packet forwarding. Firewalls, NAT devices, load balancers, and deep packet inspection (DPI) devices are common examples of middleboxes. The researchers who first detailed the attack described two methods to detect potentially vulnerable middleboxes. Using these scanning methods, Shadowserver researchers found that more than 18.8 million IPs are vulnerable to Middlebox TCP Reflection DDoS attacks, which can also be leveraged to launch TCP-based DDoS Reflection attacks. You can get check if any of your IPs are on this list by subscribing to the Shadowserver ‘Vulnerable DDoS Middlebox Report’.

Fortinet is urging customers to address the recently discovered CVE-2022-40684 zero-day vulnerability. Unfortunately, the number of devices that have yet to be patched is still high. The company urges customers of addressing this critical vulnerability immediately due to the risk of remote exploitation of the flaw. The Shadowserver Foundation reported that more than 17K Fortinet devices exposed online are vulnerable to attacks exploiting the CVE-2022-40684 flaw, most of them in Germany and in the US. Users can track CVE-2022-40684 exploitation activity on the Dashboard provided by the organization.

Fortinet is concerned that many of its customers’ devices are still unprotected against attacks exploiting the recently disclosed zero-day vulnerability and the company has urged them to take action. Fortinet was initially aware of a single instance where the vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-40684 had been exploited. However, now that technical details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits are publicly available, the security hole is being increasingly targeted. The cybersecurity company has released patches and workarounds for the vulnerability, as well as indicators of compromise (IoCs) that can be used to detect signs of an attack. The Shadowserver Foundation reported on Friday that it had seen more than 17,000 internet-exposed devices vulnerable to attacks involving CVE-2022-40684, including thousands in the United States and India. Shadowserver has seen exploitation attempts coming from more than 180 IPs.

Researchers from Shadowserver recommended isolating servers to reduce attacks, saying that millions of MySQL website database servers are vulnerable. Then the researchers from Volexity said that the attackers exploited the vulnerabilities of the Zimbra servers, which, combined, have already helped to hack more than a thousand servers.

The Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (Mitic), makes a new alert service available to State Organizations and Entities. This is the “Proactive Cybersecurity Report”, which consists of sending notices regarding security problems in systems or digital assets. Through the Cyber ​​Incident Response Center (CERT-PY), Mitic enabled this new cybersecurity reporting service for public institutions, so that they are immediately aware and apply corrective measures in a timely manner. How does it work? The CERT-PY receives a large volume of free and public cybersecurity threat intelligence information (threat intelligence feeds) daily, which can be identified through patterns, from various sources, such as Shadowserver, OAS CsirtAmericas, other CSIRTs, among others. This data set includes information on signs of compromise and attacks (IoC / IoA) and vulnerabilities, misconfigurations and/or exposures involving Paraguayan IPs and/or domains. These types of clues are detected in a variety of ways and shared across organizations around the world with national CSIRTs, including CERT-PY. These reports are automatically received and sent by CERT-PY through its Incident Management System, on a daily basis to each subscribed organization, which only receives reports about events involving its own range of IPs and domains that were declared.

The Shadowserver Foundation today launched its new Alliance to continue to build a safer, more secure Internet. The new Shadowserver Alliance partner program will accelerate growth and scale up delivery of no cost cybersecurity and cyber threat intelligence services to internet defender organizations and law enforcement.

The Shadowserver Foundation has launched a new dashboard with “threat data”. The dashboard provides information about honeypots, DDoS ​​attacks, brute force attempts, sinkholes, online scans and vulnerable systems. Shadowserver collects large amounts of information about botnets, malware and other criminal networks and shares it with providers and government services, such as Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs). In recent years, the Shadowserver Foundation has played an important role in the take-down of several large botnets. Every day, the organization scans four billion IP addresses for possible abuse and analyzes more than 700,000 malware copies. That information is now partly shared via the dashboard. For example, it appears that in the Netherlands seven thousand infected systems connect to a “sinkhole”. Traffic from an infected machine is redirected to a server of, for example, a security company, authority or provider, in order to prevent further damage and identify infected machines. There is also an overview of vulnerable Zimbra servers. There are still about three hundred of these in the Netherlands. Via the new dashboard, which is financed with money from the British government, it is possible to follow certain trends or compare figures from countries. Shadowserver hopes the data from the dashboard can help security researchers, policy makers, journalists, computer security incident response teams (CSIRTs), and others research and raise awareness about cyber threats.