Security News

SniperPhish is an all-in-one open-source phishing toolkit that pentesters and other security professionals can use for setting up and executing email and web-based spear phishing campaigns. "The idea to develop SniperPhish came to me in a period during which the company I previously worked with did many social engineering assessments. Most of the assessment included phishing campaigns, which means creating and hosting phishing websites and crafting email campaigns. The available tools had certain limitations and were not very effective at simultaneously tracking data from the phishing emails and websites," security consultant Gem George, the tool's creator, told Help Net Security.

The open source community delivered vital help to companies affected by the SolarWinds attack. One underappreciated facet of the wide-ranging scandal that has engulfed much of the U.S. government and hundreds of major companies involves the powerful role the open source community played in helping enterprises respond to the crisis, according to Greg Bell, co-founder and CSO of cybersecurity company Corelight.

Guardicore unveiled new zero trust assessment capabilities in Infection Monkey, its open source breach and attack simulation tool. Available immediately, security professionals will now be able to conduct zero trust assessments of AWS environments to help identify the potential gaps in an organization's AWS security posture that can put data at risk.

The Linux Foundation announced Linux Foundation Research, a new division that will broaden the understanding of open source projects, ecosystem dynamics, and impact, with never before seen insights on the efficacy of open source collaboration as a means to solve many of the world's pressing problems. Through a series of research projects and related content, Linux Foundation Research will leverage the Linux Foundation's vast repository of data, tools, and communities across industry verticals and technology horizontals.

The report highlights trends in open source usage within commercial applications and provides insights to help commercial and open source developers better understand the interconnected software ecosystem they are part of. It also details the pervasive risks posed by unmanaged open source, including security vulnerabilities, outdated or abandoned components, and license compliance issues.

Logz.io announced its support for the OpenSearch project, the new fork of the Elasticsearch and Kibana codebases recently unveiled by AWS. Logz.io has been working closely with AWS and several other partners to help define the future path and roadmap for the project. Logz.io is confident that the community-based nature of the project will ensure users continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source based search and analytics suite with a rich roadmap of new and innovative functionality.

How do such products fare on security? Though the community-based approach toward open source means that security flaws should be identified quickly, patching those flaws and applying the patches is another matter. In a report released Tuesday, design automation company Synopsys looked at commercial applications that use open source code to see how they dealt with security flaws.

Designed to help advance artificial intelligence and machine learning, the experimental research project was designed to aid in the analysis of how "Autonomous agents operate in a simulated enterprise environment using high-level abstraction of computer networks and cybersecurity concepts." Reinforcement learning, Microsoft explains, is a type of machine learning that teaches autonomous agents to make decisions based on the interaction with the environment: agents improve strategies through repeated experience, similarly to playing a video game over and over to become better at it.

Microsoft has open-sourced software that pits machine-learning-powered network intruders against automated defenders inside virtual networks. The tech, dubbed CyberBattleSim by its creators at the Microsoft 365 Defender research team, is a Python-based OpenAI Gym affair, and sets up pretend networks loaded with vulnerabilities and other weaknesses.

Microsoft has open-sourced software that pits machine-learning-powered network intruders against automated defenders inside virtual networks. The tech, dubbed CyberBattleSim by its creators at the Microsoft 365 Defender research team, is a Python-based OpenAI Gym affair, and sets up pretend networks loaded with vulnerabilities and other weaknesses.