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Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems.
Patch Tuesday is an unofficial term used to refer to when Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle and others regularly release software patches for their software products. It is widely referred to in this way by the industry. Microsoft formalized Patch Tuesday in October 2003. Patch Tuesday is known within Microsoft also as the "B" release, to distinguish it from the "C" and "D" releases that occur in the third and fourth weeks of the month, respectively.
A zero-day is a vulnerability or security hole in a computer system unknown to its owners, developers or anyone capable of mitigating it. Until the vulnerability is remedied, threat actors can exploit it in a zero-day exploit, or zero-day attack.
The Pwnie Awards recognize both excellence and incompetence in the field of information security. Winners are selected by a committee of security industry professionals from nominations collected from the information security community. Nominees are announced yearly at Summercon, and the awards themselves are presented at the Black Hat Security Conference.
A supply chain attack is a cyber-attack that seeks to damage an organization by targeting less secure elements in the supply chain. A supply chain attack can occur in any industry, from the financial sector, oil industry, to a government sector. A supply chain attack can happen in software or hardware. Cybercriminals typically tamper with the manufacturing or distribution of a product by installing malware or hardware-based spying components. Symantec's 2019 Internet Security Threat Report states that supply chain attacks increased by 78 percent in 2018.
Trellix is a privately held cybersecurity company that was founded in 2022. It has been involved in the detection and prevention of major cybersecurity attacks. It provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and analyze IT security risks.
Operation Aurora was a series of cyber attacks conducted by advanced persistent threats such as the Elderwood Group based in Beijing, China, with ties to the People's Liberation Army. First publicly disclosed by Google on January 12, 2010, in a blog post, the attacks began in mid-2009 and continued through December 2009.
Pwn2Own is a computer hacking contest held annually at the CanSecWest security conference. First held in April 2007 in Vancouver, the contest is now held twice a year, most recently in March 2023. Contestants are challenged to exploit widely used software and mobile devices with previously unknown vulnerabilities. Winners of the contest receive the device that they exploited and a cash prize. The Pwn2Own contest serves to demonstrate the vulnerability of devices and software in widespread use while also providing a checkpoint on the progress made in security since the previous year.
The Java platform provides a number of features designed for improving the security of Java applications. This includes enforcing runtime constraints through the use of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), a security manager that sandboxes untrusted code from the rest of the operating system, and a suite of security APIs that Java developers can utilise. Despite this, criticism has been directed at the programming language, and Oracle, due to an increase in malicious programs that revealed security vulnerabilities in the JVM, which were subsequently not properly addressed by Oracle in a timely manner.
Project Zero is a team of security analysts employed by Google tasked with finding zero-day vulnerabilities. It was announced on 15 July 2014.
JASBUG is a security bug disclosed in February 2015 and affecting core components of the Microsoft Windows Operating System. The vulnerability dated back to 2000 and affected all supported editions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows RT, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows RT 8.1.
EternalBlue is a computer exploit developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). It was leaked by the Shadow Brokers hacker group on April 14, 2017, one month after Microsoft released patches for the vulnerability.
China Chopper is a web shell approximately 4 kilobytes in size, first discovered in 2012. This web shell is commonly used by malicious Chinese actors, including advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, to remotely control web servers. This web shell has two parts, the client interface and the receiver host file on the compromised web server.
BlueKeep is a security vulnerability that was discovered in Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation, which allows for the possibility of remote code execution.
Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) is an international software vulnerability initiative that was started in 2005 by TippingPoint, a division of 3Com. The program was acquired by Trend Micro as a part of the HP TippingPoint acquisition in 2015.
In 2020, a major cyberattack suspected to have been committed by a group backed by the Russian government penetrated thousands of organizations globally including multiple parts of the United States federal government, leading to a series of data breaches. The cyberattack and data breach were reported to be among the worst cyber-espionage incidents ever suffered by the U.S., due to the sensitivity and high profile of the targets and the long duration in which the hackers had access. Within days of its discovery, at least 200 organizations around the world had been reported to be affected by the attack, and some of these may also have suffered data breaches. Affected organizations worldwide included NATO, the U.K. government, the European Parliament, Microsoft and others.
A global wave of cyberattacks and data breaches began in January 2021 after four zero-day exploits were discovered in on-premises Microsoft Exchange Servers, giving attackers full access to user emails and passwords on affected servers, administrator privileges on the server, and access to connected devices on the same network. Attackers typically install a backdoor that allows the attacker full access to impacted servers even if the server is later updated to no longer be vulnerable to the original exploits. As of 9 March 2021, it was estimated that 250,000 servers fell victim to the attacks, including servers belonging to around 30,000 organizations in the United States, 7,000 servers in the United Kingdom, as well as the European Banking Authority, the Norwegian Parliament, and Chile's Commission for the Financial Market (CMF).
On April 20, 2021, it was reported that suspected Chinese-state backed hacker groups had breached multiple government agencies, defense companies and financial institutions in both the US and Europe after the hackers created and used a Zero-day exploit for Ivanti Pulse Connect Secure VPN devices. A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency alert reported that the attacks using the exploited started in June 2020 or earlier. The attacks are believed to be the third major data breach against the U.S. in the past year behind the 2020 United States federal government data breach and the 2021 Microsoft Exchange Server data breach.
Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) is a zero-day vulnerability in Log4j, a popular Java logging framework, involving arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability had existed unnoticed since 2013 and was privately disclosed to the Apache Software Foundation, of which Log4j is a project, by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud's security team on 24 November 2021. Before an official CVE identifier was made available on 10 December 2021, the vulnerability circulated with the name "Log4Shell", given by Free Wortley of the LunaSec team, which was initially used to track the issue online. Apache gave Log4Shell a CVSS severity rating of 10, the highest available score. The exploit was simple to execute and is estimated to have had the potential to affect hundreds of millions of devices.
References
- ↑ "This Week In Security: Too Little Too Late, And Other Stories". Hackaday. 2020-10-23. Retrieved 2021-01-13.
- ↑ "What is Zerologon?". Trend Micro. 2020-09-18. Retrieved 2021-01-13.
- ↑ "New Windows exploit lets you instantly become admin. Have you patched?". Ars Technica. 2020-09-14. Retrieved 2021-01-13.
- 1 2 3 Hvistendahl, Mara; Lee, Micah; Smith, Jordan (December 17, 2020). "Russian Hackers Have Been Inside Austin City Network for Months". The Intercept. Archived from the original on December 17, 2020. Retrieved December 18, 2020.
- 1 2 "CISA orders agencies to quickly patch critical Netlogon bug". CyberScoop. September 21, 2020. Archived from the original on October 30, 2020. Retrieved December 18, 2020.
- ↑ "Microsoft: Attackers Exploiting 'ZeroLogon' Windows Flaw". Krebs on Security. 24 September 2020. Retrieved 2021-01-13.
- ↑ Osborne, Charlie (2020-11-18). "Hacking group exploits ZeroLogon in automotive, industrial attack wave". ZDNet. Retrieved 2021-01-13.
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