Security News
CISA and the NSA shared guidance on securing cloud-native 5G networks from attacks seeking to compromise information or deny access by taking down cloud infrastructure. The two federal agencies issued these recommendations for service providers and system integrators that build and configure 5G cloud infrastructure, including cloud service providers, core network equipment vendors, and mobile network operators.
Much is made of shared responsibility for cloud security. Some of this migration is to public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Russia's Nobelium group - fingered as being a Russian state actor by both the United States and Britain - has massively ramped up phishing and password spraying attempts against managed service providers and cloud resellers, Microsoft's security arm has warned. The Windows maker said the group's targeted attacks against "Resellers and other technology service providers that customize, deploy and manage cloud services and other technologies on behalf of their customers" had trebled over the past three months.
An out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the Squirrel programming language lets attackers break out of sandbox restrictions and execute arbitrary code within a Squirrel virtual machine, thus giving a malicious actor complete access to the underlying machine. Given where Squirrel lives - in games and embedded in the internet of things - the bug potentially endangers the millions of monthly gamers who play video games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Portal 2, as well as cloud services such as the Twilio Electric Imp IoT platform, with its ready-to-use open-source code library.
Researchers have disclosed an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the Squirrel programming language that can be abused by attackers to break out of the sandbox restrictions and execute arbitrary code within a SquirrelVM, thus giving a malicious actor complete access to the underlying machine. Tracked as CVE-2021-41556, the issue occurs when a game library referred to as Squirrel Engine is used to execute untrusted code and affects stable release branches 3.x and 2.x of Squirrel.
Human hacking - phishing attacks across all digital channels - has dramatically increased in 2021. "The cybersecurity industry has done a good job of protecting machines, but those efforts leave the most porous and vulnerable parts of any network - the humans using it - unprotected," said Patrick Harr, SlashNext CEO. "Today's hyper-targeted spear phishing attacks, coming at users from all digital channels, are simply not discernable to the human eye. Add to that the increasing number of attacks coming from legitimate infrastructure, and the reason phishing is the number one thing leading to disruptive ransomware attacks is obvious."
MEC buildouts are being carried out by a broad cross-section of edge stakeholders, and cloud providers) to deliver latency-sensitive edge network services. Beyond connectivity, MEC buildouts will also provide opportunities for organizations to host applications both on premises and in edge cloud sites.
A new version of a Linux crypto-mining malware previously used to target Docker containers in 2020 now focuses on new cloud service providers like the Huawei Cloud. The analysis of the new campaign comes from researchers at TrendMicro, who explains how the malware has evolved with new features while retaining its previous functionality.
Spending on compute and storage infrastructure products for cloud infrastructure, including dedicated and shared environments, decreased 2.4% year over year in the second quarter of 2021 to $16.8 billion, according to IDC. This decrease comes after six quarters of year-over-year growth, and most notably compares to the 39.1% annual growth seen by the market in 2Q20, when the world just entered the pandemic with the first wave of business and country closures causing a spike in investments in cloud services and infrastructure. Investments in non-cloud infrastructure increased 3.4% year over year in 2Q21 to $13.4 billion recovering from a 7.2% decline in 2Q20. Spending on shared cloud infrastructure decreasing too.
While there is a time and place for onboarding additional cloud security solutions, it can also be easy to fall prey to the shiny object syndrome surrounding emerging solutions that are created in response to new security threats. Before rushing to invest in a new solution remember that matching additional solutions to emerging threats in a one-to-one game of whack-a-mole is not a sustainable strategy.