A critical patch for GitLab.
Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Monday, July 1, 2024. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for TechNewsday.com.
Happy Canada Day to listeners in this country. Thanks for tuning in on this long weekend.
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GitLab has released 14 security fixes for both the community and enterprise editions of its devops platform. Of those patches one is rated critical and three are rated high severity. The company strongly recommends all GitLab installations be upgraded immediately. For developers who don’t realize, GitLab patches are issued twice a month — on the second and fourth Wednesdays.
Personal data of more than 6 million people was stolen last November in a ransomware attack on Infosys McCamish Systems. It’s a division of the Infosys IT consulting giant that provides employee insurance services for organizations. Data stolen included names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, email addresses and passwords, medical treatment information and more. The precise number of victims was filed with the Maine attorney general’s office last week.
By contrast Ticketmaster last week wasn’t specific about the total number of victims in a recent data theft from one of its third-party data services provider. Ticketmaster only says in its filing to the state of Maine that there were more than 1,000 victims. A threat actor claims to have stolen personal information of 560 million people. Ticketmaster says those victimized bought tickets to events in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Data stolen includes email addresses, phone numbers, encrypted credit card information as well as some other personal information provided to the company.
A new software vulnerability is published by researchers and cybersecurity companies every 17 minutes. That’s the conclusion of Skybox Security after looking at data in its annual Vulnerability and Threat Trends Report. Nearly half of all newly discovered vulnerabilities are classified as high or critical. This is why it’s vital for IT teams to prioritize which patches need to be installed based on the sensitivity of applications and data. Twenty-five per cent of vulnerabilities are exploited the same day as they are announced. Three quarters are exploited within 19 days.
How secure are the applications in your IT inventory? IT leaders are increasingly asking software providers to give them a software bill of materials so they can judge how vulnerable their applications are — particularly software that uses open source components. According to Checkmarx’s just-released State of Software Supply Chain Security, half of security leaders and developers surveyed say they request software bills of materials from software vendors. On the other hand about the same number admin they are not using this information effectively. However, the report also argues software bills of materials should be only a part of a software supply chain security program — especially if your organization builds its own applications.
Speaking of software supply chain hacks, on the latest Week in Review podcast I reported that a domain distributing the Polyfill open-source library used by websites for supporting old browsers is now distributing malware. Bleeping Computer reports this activity, as well as compromises of other code, can be traced to a common operator. This came after a researcher in China found a GitHub repository that included a file with a Cloudflare API token that could allow a knowledgeable person to do nasty things. The worry is hundreds of thousands of websites could have been or are still using compromised code.
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