Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As companies adopt container technologies, they face a significant challenge - how do we secure this new attack surface? It’s an issue that you often see backlogged in favor of solving storage, networking and monitoring issues. Add on the challenge of educating the workforce on one of the fastest-growing open source projects to date, and it’s no wonder security has lagged as the primary focus for teams.

Cloud environments are always susceptible to security issues. A significant contributor to this problem is misconfigured resources. Traditional IT Infrastructure was somewhat static; server hardware only changed every few years. With few changes occurring, security was also more static. The modern cloud environment is a much different challenge. In cloud environments, servers, services, and storage are created with automation, resulting in a dynamic and potentially ever-changing server environment.

This blog post is a part of Mattermost’s public disclosure of three serious vulnerabilities in Go’s encoding/xml related to tokenization round-trips. The public disclosure comes as a result of several months of work, including collaborating with the Go security team since August 2020 and with affected downstream project maintainers since earlier this month.

TL;DR: This blog contains some immediate guidance on using Splunk Core and Splunk Enterprise Security to protect (and detect activity on) your network from the Sunburst Backdoor malware delivered via SolarWinds Orion software. Splunk’s threat research team will release more guidance in the coming week. Also please note that you may see some malicious network activity but it may not mean your network is compromised. As always review carefully.

The past decade has witnessed many organizations adapting to a digital workspace, replacing the traditional physical offices setups with virtual workplaces encompassing all the technologies that employees require to get their work done. Because of the pandemic, even companies that were once against the concept of a distributed workforce have now been forced to embrace remote work. Though a digital workspace offers a more flexible user experience for employees, it comes with its own set of challenges.

Attackers (i.e., threat actors) often reuse techniques or resources, such as IP addresses, hashes, and domains, in multiple attempts to find and exploit vulnerabilities in your systems. Defenders can categorize this data as indicators of compromise (IOCs) and create collections of IOCs in order to look out for potential attacks. These IOC collections are known as threat intelligence.