Security News

Industrial cybersecurity firm OTORIO this week announced the availability of a new open source tool designed to help organizations secure their GE CIMPLICITY systems. OTORIO has worked with GE Digital to develop a free and open source tool that can be used to harden CIMPLICITY systems by ensuring that they are configured in accordance with the vendor's guidelines for security best practices.

Otorio, a provider of OT security and digital risk management solutions, released an open-source tool designed for hardening the security of GE Digital's CIMPLICITY, one of the most commonly used HMI/SCADA systems. Over the past several months, Otorio's researchers worked closely with GE Digital engineers to deliver a first of its kind open-source tool designed to identify GE CIMPLICITY misconfigurations.

A team from Google has now posted at length about the issue in the hope of "Sparking industry-wide discussion and progress on the security of open source software." The post - called "Know, Prevent, Fix" - is co-authored by Eric Brewer, VP of infrastructure at Google, distinguished engineer Rob Pike; principal software engineer Abhishek Arya; program manager, Open Source Security, Anne Bertucio; and product manager Kim Lewandowski.

Some of this just comes down to numbers: The more dependencies enterprises take on open source software, the more open source software will show up in audits like these. While Orion isn't open source, it shows how supply chain attacks have become increasingly critical to combat, and reflect what we've known since Heartbleed: As open source becomes a critical part of nearly all software, we need to improve how we secure it.

The TeamTNT threat group has added a new detection-evasion tool to its arsenal, helping its cryptomining malware skirt by defense teams. The new tool is delivered within a base64-encoded script, hidden in the TeamTNT cryptominer binary, or via its Internet Relay Chat bot, called TNTbotinger, which is capable of distributed denial of service attacks.

TeamTNT now further upgraded their malware to evade detection after infecting and deploying malicious coinminer payloads on Linux devices. "The group is using a new detection evasion tool, copied from open source repositories," AT&T Alien Labs security researcher Ofer Caspi says in a report published today.

FireEye Mandiant on Tuesday announced the release of an open source tool designed to check Microsoft 365 tenants for the use of techniques associated with UNC2452, the name currently assigned by the cybersecurity firm to the threat group that attacked IT management company SolarWinds. The SolarWinds supply chain attack has made hundreds of victims, and potentially impacted entities should check their systems for signs of an intrusion associated with this attack.

Figure A. As mentioned, cost remains a driver for open source adoption, but the number one driver of open source today was the number one inhibitor of open source adoption 10 years ago: Security. This, despite things like Heartbleed and other well-publicized open source security breaches.

The Open Source Security Foundation announced on Wednesday at the Black Hat Europe conference the availability of an open source tool designed for evaluating the ability of static analysis security testing products to detect vulnerabilities. The developers pointed out that less than 200 lines of code are typically required to create a new security tool integration, and they believe it can be easily integrated with not only open source tools, but also commercial products.

A new survey of the free and open-source software community conducted by the Linux Foundation suggests that contributors spend less than 3% of their time on security issues and have little desire to increase this. A report based on the answers of nearly 1,200 FOSS contributors carried out by the Linux Foundation and Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard highlighted a "Clear need" for developers to dedicate more time to the security of FOSS projects as businesses and economies become increasingly reliant on open-source software.