Ed Skoudis – President of SANS Technology Institute, Director of Holiday Hack Challenge at SANS Institute & Counter Hack

Ed Skoudis has taught cyber incident response and advanced penetration testing techniques to more than 12,000 cybersecurity professionals. He is a SANS Faculty Fellow and the lead for the SANS Penetration Testing Curriculum. His courses distill the essence of real-world, front-line case studies he accumulates because he is consistently one of the first experts brought in to provide after-attack analysis on major breaches where credit card and other sensitive financial data is lost.

Josh Marpet

Executive Director at RM-ISAO

Larry Pesce

Principal Managing Consultant and Director of Research & Development at InGuardians

Lee Neely

Senior Cyber Analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Paul Asadoorian

Founder at Security Weekly

Sinan Eren – VP, Zero Trust Access • ZTNA Engineering at Barracuda Networks

Sinan Eren is the VP of Zero Trust Access at Barracuda. Sinan was formerly the Founder & CEO at Fyde, acquired by Barracuda in November of 2020.

Josh Marpet

Executive Director at RM-ISAO

Larry Pesce

Principal Managing Consultant and Director of Research & Development at InGuardians

Lee Neely

Senior Cyber Analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Paul Asadoorian

Founder at Security Weekly

Josh Marpet

Executive Director at RM-ISAO

Larry Pesce

Principal Managing Consultant and Director of Research & Development at InGuardians

1. Printing Shellz –
2. Windows 10 RCE: The exploit is in the link –
3. A mysterious threat actor is running hundreds of malicious Tor relays –
4. Russia issues threat to GPS satellites – GPS World –
5. Google warns over 1M devices have been infected in ‘Russian hack’ –
6. ruDALL-E –
7. Jaques Tits, the mathematician behind Tits buildings, the Tits alternative, the Tits group, and the Tits metric, has died at 91 –
8. Ragnar Locker ransomware group took screenshots of their targets Cybersecurity Incident Response –
9. Hackers drain $31 million from cryptocurrency service MonoX Finance –

Lee Neely

Senior Cyber Analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

1. Statement from CISA Director Easterly on “Log4j” Vulnerability – CISA director Jen Easterly said, “We have added this vulnerability to our catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities, which compels federal civilian agencies — and signals to non-federal partners — to urgently patch or remediate this vulnerability.”

   CVE-2021-44228 or Log4Shell has us all busy.

2. Apple Releases Security Updates for Multiple OSs – Apple has released updates for multiple operating systems, including macOS, iOS, watchOS, iPadOS, and tvOS. The new iOS and iPadOS updates address 42 CVEs and adding new features including Apple Music Voice Plan, “App Privacy Report” and new “communication safety” settings intended to notify parents when their children receive or send photos that contain nudity.
3. Mozilla Patches High-Severity Vulnerabilities in Firefox, Thunderbird – Mozilla this week released security updates for the Firefox browser and Thunderbird mail client to address multiple vulnerabilities, including several bugs.
4. Google pushes emergency Chrome update to fix zero-day used in attacks – As part of its Chrome 96.0.4664.110 release for Linux, Mac, and Windows, Google has issued a fix to address a high-severity use-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2021-4102) affecting the Google Chrome V8 JavaScript engine that has already been actively exploited in the wild.
5. ‘Karakurt’ Extortion Threat Emerges, But Says No to Ransomware – Researchers say the financially motivated “Karakurt” threat group, which is focused on data exfiltration and follow-up extortion, has already targeted some 40 victims since September 2021 but has shown no interest in deploying ransomware on targeted systems or taking high-profile targets down.

   Rather than deploying Cobalt Strike, the group “persisted within the victim’s network via the VPN IP pool or installed AnyDesk to allow external remote access to compromised devices.

   Threat group claims that it “… do[es] not try to harm your processes, delete your data, destroy your business, at least until you yourself give us a reason.”

6. China continues to exploit US universities to bolster military modernization: Report – The Foundation for Defense of Democracies released a report asserting that China is exploiting its existing relationship with U.S. universities to steal sensitive data and technology that it will ultimately use to “achieve military dominance.”

   China operates more than 200 talent recruitment plans, the most prominent of which is the Thousand Talents Plan (TTP) established in 2008.

7. University Targeted Credential Phishing Campaigns Use COVID-19, Omicron Themes – Proofpoint observed COVID-19 themes impacting education institutions throughout the pandemic, but consistent, targeted credential theft campaigns using such lures targeting universities began in October 2021. Following the announcement of the new Omicron variant in late November, the threat actors began leveraging the new variant in credential theft campaigns.

Paul Asadoorian

Founder at Security Weekly

1. Actively Exploited Microsoft Zero-Day Allows App Spoofing, Malware Delivery – “Kevin Breen, director of cyber-threat research at Immersive Labs, explained that the bug “allows an attacker to create a malicious package file and then modify it to look like a legitimate application, and has been used to deliver Emotet malware, which made a comeback this year.”
2. WooCommerce Credit Card Stealer Found Implanted in Random Plugins – “As elaborated, the malware didn’t precisely run as a script on the infected web page. Instead, the malware ran on the backend. Hence, upon inspecting logs, the researchers noticed that the malware mainly exploited a WordPress plugin running on the website.” Original research: https://blog.sucuri.net/2021/12/woocommerce-credit-card-swiper-injected-into-random-plugin-files.html
3. Second Log4j Vulnerability (CVE-2021-45046) Discovered — New Patch Released – “Dealing with CVE-2021-44228 has shown the JNDI has significant security issues,” Ralph Goers of the ASF explained. “While we have mitigated what we are aware of it would be safer for users to completely disable it by default, especially since the large majority are unlikely to be using it.”
4. A List of Vulnerable Products to the Log4j –
5. How Cybercriminals Are Using Bitcoin’s Blockchain to Make Botnets Stronger Than Ever – ” instead of hard-coding web domains into the malware, they hard-coded three Bitcoin wallet addresses into it. With these addresses, Glupteba has managed to set up an infallible interface between its bot herds and its C2 infrastructure via a little-known function known as the “OP_Return.” The OP_Return is a controversial feature of Bitcoin wallets that allows for the entry of arbitrary text into transactions. It basically functions as the crypto equivalent of Venmo’s “memo” field. Glupteba has taken advantage of this feature by using it as a communication channel. “
6. CVE-2021-42287/CVE-2021-42278 Weaponisation –
7. Log4Shell: RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j 2, a popular Java logging package –
8. CVE-2021-44515: ZoHo Patches ManageEngine Zero-Day Exploited in the Wild – Wow: “On December 3, ZoHo issued a security advisory and patches for CVE-2021-44515, an authentication bypass vulnerability in its ManageEngine Desktop Central product that has been exploited in the wild. In addition, a patch was released for CVE-2021-44526, another authentication bypass vulnerability in ServiceDesk Plus, a help desk and asset management application. This follows months of reports and alerts regarding active exploitation of two other vulnerabilities in ManageEngine products, CVE-2021-44077 and CVE-2021-40539. The attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities have been linked to advanced persistent threat (APT) groups.”
9. Important Message: Security vulnerability in Java Edition –
10. 1.6 Million WordPress Sites Hit With 13.7 Million Attacks In 36 Hours From 16,000 IPs –
11. Google pushes emergency Chrome update to fix zero-day used in attacks – Groundhog day: “The zero-day bug fixed today, tracked as CVE-2021-4102, was reported by an anonymous security researcher and is a use after free weakness in the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine.”