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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Web applications and REST APIs can be susceptible to a certain class of vulnerabilities that can’t be detected by a traditional HTTP request-response interaction.  These vulnerabilities are challenging to find but provide a way for attackers to target otherwise inaccessible, internal systems.  An attacker can potentially use this to their advantage.  Essentially, a vulnerable application (or API) can be used as a proxy for an attack against a separate internal application, a cloud service, or other protected system.

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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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Qualys Research Labs discovered a local privilege escalation vulnerability in OpenBSD’s dynamic loader. The vulnerability could allow local users or malicious software to gain full root privileges. OpenBSD developers have confirmed the vulnerability and released security patches in less than 3 hours.

Qualys Research Labs also provided proof-of-concept exploits in the security advisory.

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Multiple authentication vulnerabilities in OpenBSD have been disclosed by Qualys Research Labs. The vulnerabilities are assigned following CVEs: CVE-2019-19522, CVE-2019-19521, CVE-2019-19520, CVE-2019-19519. OpenBSD developers have confirmed the vulnerabilities and also provided a quick response with patches published in less than 40 hours.

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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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Despite the huge advantages that containers offer in application portability, acceleration of CI/CD pipelines and agility of deployment environments, the biggest concern has always been about isolation. Since all the containers running on a host share the same underlying kernel, any malicious code breaking out of a container can compromise the entire host, and hence all the applications running on the host and potentially in the cluster.

That fear of container isolation failing to hold up turned out to be true yesterday when a vulnerability in runC was announced. runC is the key and most popular software component that most container engines rely on for spinning up containers on a host. The announced vulnerability allows an attacker to break out of the container isolation through a well-crafted attack (technical details of the vulnerability and the exploit are at https://seclists.org/oss-sec/2019/q1/119) and compromise the entire host. The vulnerability is particularly nasty because it is not covered by the default AppArmor or SELinux kernel-enforced sandboxing policies.

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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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