All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly looking out for interesting stories and developments in the infosec world. Here’s what cybersecurity news stood out to us during the week of January 17, 2022. We’ve also included the comments from a few folks here at Tripwire VERT. Root-Level RCE Vulnerability...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s January 2022 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-981 on Wednesday, January 12th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2022-21919 This vulnerability was a bypass to CVE-2021-34484, released by the same researcher, Abdelhamid Naceri. The...

Which Flavor of the Purdue Model Should You Follow? If you enter the term "Purdue Model" into your favorite search engine, the resulting images will vary considerably. There's almost no better way to stir up an Operational Technology (OT) security conversation than to begin debating what belongs on Level 1 or Level 3 of the model. You might even...

It seems that the most popular topics in cybersecurity for the last year have been zero trust as well as the convergence of Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT). These developments are good, as they signal some positive motion towards better overall security. Some of the current risks are worth noting, with a forward glance to...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s December 2021 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-978 on Wednesday, December 15th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-43890 Up first this month is a vulnerability in the Windows AppX Installer that could allow spoofing. This...

Word splitting is a function of BASH that I was unfamiliar with, but it is definitely one that impacted my recent research. From the bash(1) man page: IFS The Internal Field Separator that is used for word splitting after expansion and to split lines into words with the read builtin command. The default value is <space><tab>&lt...

The past few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time preparing for the OSCP exam, which means refreshing a lot of skills that I haven’t used in years. A large part of that is rebuilding muscle memory around buffer overflows, so that’s how I spent my four-day weekend. I logged about 70 hours compiling small programs, writing buffer overflows,...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s November 2021 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-972 on Wednesday, November 10th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-42292 Up first this month, we have a 0-day in Microsoft Excel that allows an attacker to bypass security features....

Web browsers and email clients are used to interact with external and internal assets. Both applications can be used as a point of entry within an organization. Users of these applications can be manipulated using social engineering attacks. A successful social engineering attack needs to convince users to interact with malicious content. A...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s October 2021 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-968 on Wednesday, October 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-40449 Up first this month, we have an elevation of privilege in Win32k that has been exploited in-the-wild via...

All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly reviewing the news for interesting stories and developments in the cybersecurity world. Here’s what stood out to us during the week of September 27, 2021. We’ve also included the comments from a few folks here at Tripwire VERT. REvil Ransomware Group Goes...

In this episode, Patrick Miller, Founder of Ampere Industrial Security, discusses what utilities and other industrial companies need to consider when it comes to the goldmines of data they're collecting from their machines and customers. He also explains why security and privacy needs to be incorporated in these operations by design. https://open...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s September 2021 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-964 on Wednesday, September 15th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-40444 This CVE describes a publicly exploited vulnerability in MSHTML that provides user level access upon...

Throughout this blog series, I have examined real-world ICS cyber-related incidents as a way of looking back to predict what the next attack may look like. The three categories of attacker that I have considered so far are disgruntled insiders, ransomware groups, and APT. Knowing about past events, their impact, and how they unfolded can be critical...

No discussion on ICS attacks could be complete without talking about what some would call, ‘the elephant in the room.’ Critical infrastructure has always been a target for warfare, and modern ICS are no exception. Several high-profile ICS disruptions have in fact been attributed to malicious hackers working at the behest of a military or...

OT networks often rely on Windows systems for various ICS applications including HMIs, historians, and data gateways. Beyond that, they also commonly rely on Windows systems to run associated IT-networks. A successful ransomware deployment into either of these networks may prevent engineers from controlling plant operations and lead to an unplanned...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s August 2021 Security Updates. VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-959 on Wednesday, August 11th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-36948 This privilege escalation vulnerability that affects the Windows Update Medic Service (WaasMedic) has been...

Often, the most critical threats come from within an organization itself. This is true for all sectors, but it is especially true for industrial control systems (ICS). Technicians in these environments already have access to plant controls and may have the deep knowledge of industrial processes needed to achieve specific goals. The damage caused by...

Faced with rows of empty gas pumps, many Americans on the East Coast may be wondering why this happened, whether it will happen again, or if there is anything we can do to avoid future catastrophe. The unpleasant truth of the matter is that this will certainly not be the last time society is disrupted due to attackers targeting critical industrial...