With the average cost of a data breach exceeding $3.5 million as per Cost of a Data Breach Report, almost all organizations these days adopt stringent policies in order to safeguard their confidential business and customer information. Strong RBAC-driven systems have certainly made it difficult for attackers to gain unauthorized access. However, malicious programs masked as genuine ones can compromise your environment, sneak their way into your databases, and can even allow unauthorized parties to access and/or view information.

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Qualys is actively tracking threats which target containers. In our recent analysis, we have identified a few docker instances executing a malware which we term as “LibMiner”. This malware has the capability to deploy and execute Cryptominer. It uses a unique technique for lateral movement across the containers as well as Linux systems, executing on unprotected Redis servers and initiating mining on them. The malware has the ability to protect its termination, thus making it impossible to gain control over it. This blog post uncovers the unique techniques and tactics used by LibMiner.

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Update January 27, 2020: Client testing is now available at clienttest.dev.ssllabs.com.

Update January 15, 2020: Detection dashboard now available.

Today, Microsoft released patch for CVE-2020-0601, aka Curveball, a vulnerability in windows “crypt32.dll” component that could allow attackers to perform spoofing attacks. This was discovered and reported by National Security Agency (NSA) Researchers. The vulnerability affects Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/2019 systems.

This is a serious vulnerability and patches should be applied immediately. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using a spoofed code-signing certificate, meaning an attacker could let you download and install malware that pretended to be something legit, such as software updates, due to the spoofed digital signature. Examples where validation of trust may be impacted include:

• HTTPS connections
• Signed files and emails
• Signed executable code launched as user-mode processes

Exploits/PoC:

There are no reports of active exploitation or PoC available in public domain at this point of time. However, per NSA advisory “Remote exploitation tools will likely be made quickly and widely available.”

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Update January 17, 2020: A new detection in Qualys Web Application Scanning was added. See “Detecting with Qualys WAS” below.

Citrix released a security advisory (CVE-2019-19781) for a remote code execution vulnerability in Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Citrix Gateway products. The vulnerability allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the system. Once exploited, remote attackers could obtain access to private network resources without requiring authentication.

During the week of January 13, attacks on Citrix appliances have intensified. Because of the active attacks and the ease of exploitation, organizations are advised to pay close attention.

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Recent reports this year revealed nearly 1 million computer systems are still vulnerable and exposed to BlueKeep in the wild. These systems are still easy targets for an unauthenticated attacker (or malware) to execute code leveraging this patchable vulnerability. Because so many systems are still vulnerable, Qualys has added its BlueKeep dashboard directly into the product, so you can more easily track and remediate this vulnerability.

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There are seemingly countless regulatory and industry frameworks out there that organizations have to navigate and comply with. SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), and many others that require maintaining a specified baseline of security. Compliance is a challenge in and of itself, but it is increasingly difficult to maintain compliance with accelerated DevOps lifecycles and complex, hybrid cloud environments.

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Qualys Security Conference 2019 kicked off this morning at the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. The event actually began on Monday with training sessions over the first two days, but this morning hundreds of attendees filled a conference room to listen to keynote presentations about the state of cybersecurity and the vision for the future of the Qualys Cloud Platform.

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Update Nov 19, 2019: This blog post was updated with additional detail about the new features in 8.21.6.

The 8.21.6 release adds several new features in Qualys Cloud Platform, Policy Compliance, and Vulnerability Management. Apart from various other new features, this release adds support for Apple Safari 11.x/12.x in compliance scans for Unix hosts, and extends UDC support for multiple new technologies for Qualys PC; whereas, new features for VM includes added support for HashiCorp vaults in DB Auth Records and Sybase authentication for vulnerability scanning.

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This week saw news of self-propagating worms in the container landscape to perform unsanctioned computation tasks such as cryptojacking. This blog post is intended for Qualys customers and partners to understand how such container attacks work, provide security best practice recommendations & walkthrough related Qualys product portfolio functionality.

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This new release of the Qualys Cloud Platform (VM, PC), version 8.21.2, includes Virtual Scanner Appliance support for Alibaba Cloud Compute, scheduling of EC2 scans with no scannable EC2 assets in Asset Tags in Qualys Vulnerability Management, expanded support for instance discovery and auto record creation in Qualys Policy Compliance, compliance support for Oracle 19c, and more.

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