Ransomware raids aimed at specific targets with big pockets. Another Struts vulnerability — but scarier than last year’s. An Android spyware that records your phone calls. These are some of the security news that have caught our attention.

New Struts Bug Should Be Patched Yesterday

Apache patched a serious remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2018-11776) affecting all supported versions — 2.3 to 2.3.34 and 2.5 to 2.5.16 — of the widely used Struts Java application framework. The bug is considered more dangerous than the one disclosed last year in Struts that was exploited in the massive data breach at Equifax.

In the Apache security bulletin, the vulnerability is rated “Critical” and users are advised to immediately upgrade to Struts 2.3.35 or Struts 2.5.17.

The remote code execution becomes possible “when using results with no namespace and in same time, its upper action(s) have no or wildcard namespace” and “when using url tag which doesn’t have value and action set,” the bulletin reads.

Organizations should upgrade to the patched Struts versions even if their applications aren’t  vulnerable to this bug. “An inadvertent change to a Struts configuration file may render the application vulnerable in the future,” stated Semmle, whose security researcher Man Yue Mo discovered this vulnerability.

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A new remote code execution vulnerability in Apache Struts 2, CVE-2018-11776, was disclosed yesterday. While this vulnerability does not exist with a default configuration of Struts, it does exist in commonly seen configurations for some Struts plugins.

Update August 24, 2018: A dashboard for this vulnerability is now available to download.

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Watch the presentations from the Qualys booth at Black Hat USA 2018, available online now. Learn how your peers are securing their environments and see the breadth and depth of Qualys solutions.

Industry-Leading Best Practices

Qualys customers explain how they run their industry-leading security programs.

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In this month’s Patch Tuesday release there are 63 vulnerabilities patched with 20 Criticals. Out of the criticals, over half are browser-related, with the rest including Windows, SQL, and Exchange. Active exploits have been detected against CVE-2018-8373, one of the scripting engine vulnerabilities.

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For a complete web application security program, it’s important that all your web applications have some level of security testing.  Automated scans using Qualys Web Application Scanning (WAS) are perfect to meet this need given its cloud-based architecture and ability to scale.  However, performing manual penetration testing of your business-critical applications in addition to automated scanning is highly recommended.  Manual analysis complements automated scanning by identifying security holes such as flaws in business logic or authorization that an automated scanner would be incapable of detecting.

One of the most popular tools for manual testing of web apps is Burp Suite Professional. This month Qualys introduced a Burp extension for Qualys WAS to easily import Burp-discovered issues into Qualys WAS.  With this integration, Burp issues and WAS findings can be viewed centrally, and webappsec teams can perform integrated analysis of data from manual penetration testing and automated web application scans. The combined data set may also be programmatically extracted via the Qualys API for external analysis.

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WannaCry rears its ugly head again. Reddit gets hacked, despite using two-factor authentication. A cryptojacking campaign targets carrier-grade routers. Here are some recent security industry news that have caught our attention.

WannaCry hits Taiwan Semi

The notorious WannaCry ransomware re-appeared recently, when Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, a chip supplier to Apple and other smartphone makers, suffered an infection that dented its operations.

Specifically, the ransomware disrupted chip production to a point that will delay shipments and cut revenue in the third quarter, although no confidential data was compromised, the company said.

According to Sophos’ Naked Security blog, the chip maker, which is Taiwan’s largest company, blamed the incident on a careless supplier that installed software infected with a WannaCry variant on its network. “When the virus hit, it spread quickly, affecting production at semiconductor plants in Tainan, Hsinchu and Taichung,” Naked Security’s Lisa Vaas wrote.

Of course, WannaCry can be avoided altogether by patching vulnerable systems, as Ben Lovejoy reminds us in 9to5Mac.

That’s the major lesson from last year’s WannaCry global rampage, which infected 300,000-plus systems, disrupting critical operations globally. Long before WannaCry erupted in May of last year, organizations should have patched the vulnerability that the ransomware exploited. Now they’ve had more than a year to fix it.

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Qualys Malware Research Labs recently released the Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker Chrome Extension. We have seen enthusiastic adoption from users across the globe in the first week since its release, which has given us enough telemetry data to indicate success in protecting users from popular cryptojacking attacks. This blog post details these detection statistics and analyzes a few interesting cryptojacking campaigns uncovered by Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker.

About Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker

Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker protects users from browser-based coin-mining attacks. Along with blacklisting & whitelisting of domains, it also supports advanced JavaScript scanning to identify & block malicious JavaScript functions. The extension can also identify & block malicious coin-mining advertisements loaded inside iframes by third-party ads.

Download Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker for free!

Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker Detection Statistics

The world heat map below shows the geographical distribution of mining threats as a percentage of detections blocked by Qualys BrowserCheck CoinBlocker. The Top 5 countries where mining threats are detected and blocked are Bulgaria (33%) topped the list followed by India (18%), the United States (16%), Argentina (10%) and Thailand (9%).

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This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform version 2.34 includes updates and new features for Cloud Agent, EC2 Connector, Continuous Monitoring, Security Assessment Questionnaire, Web Application Scanning, and Web Application Firewall, highlights as follows.

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This new release of the Qualys Cloud Platform (VM, SCA, PC), version 8.15, includes several new improvements across the VM, PC, and SCA Apps including new IPv6 configuration options for the scanner, improvements to several VM reports including ability to display EC2 metadata, a new Policy Compliance report, and expanded platform support for VM, PC, and SCA.

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Qualys’ library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from OS and application vendors and other industry best practices.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

This release includes the following new policy and updates:

• New policies for Apple OS X, Splunk, and Windows 10 1709
• New versions of already supported CIS Benchmarks and DISA STIGs
• Updates to controls and technology coverage in existing library policies

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