How Attackers are Taking Advantage of the Human Factor

2013 is well on its way to be another record year for cyber intrusions, keeping security as a topic in every corporation’s boardroom and in every government agency.

How many vulnerabilities did your security team find scanning today, last month, or this year? And how many were high risk? In the first six months of 2013, the IBM X-Force Research and Development team analyzed 4,100 new security vulnerabilities and 900 million new web pages and images.

The IBM X-Force team just released their Trend and Risk Report which summarizes their findings on emerging threats and the 2013 attack landscape. If you are a CIO, CEO, CISO or a line of business executive this must read report outlines the new attack opportunities in areas like:

Social media: how social media is a valuable tool for business, but is also being used by attackers for reconnaissance and launching attacks
Mobile device malware: how the explosive growth of Android devices is attracting malware authors
Poisoning the watering hole: how attackers are compromising a central strategic target and launching zero day exploits
Distraction and diversion: how attackers are amplifying Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks as a distraction to allow them to breach other systems
Old techniques, new success: how today’s security complexity can enable old gaps to be exploited

Read the latest research from IBM X-Force

Caleb Barlow

Being a good CLR host – Modernizing offensive .NET tradecraft

14 min read - The modern red team is defined by its ability to compromise endpoints and take actions to complete objectives. To achieve the former, many teams implement their own custom command-and-control (C2) or use an open-source option. For the latter, there is a constant stream of post-exploitation tooling being released that takes advantage of various features in Windows, Active Directory and third-party applications. The execution mechanism for this tooling has, for the last several years, relied heavily on executing .NET assemblies in…

Abusing MLOps platforms to compromise ML models and enterprise data lakes

15 min read - For full details on this research, see the X-Force Red whitepaper “Disrupting the Model: Abusing MLOps Platforms to Compromise ML Models and Enterprise Data Lakes”.Machine learning operations (MLOps) platforms are used by enterprises of all sizes to develop, train, deploy and monitor large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models (FMs), as well as the generative AI (gen AI) applications built on top of these models. The rush to leverage AI throughout enterprises has meant that security has been often…

FYSA – Adobe Cold Fusion Path Traversal Vulnerability

2 min read - Summary Adobe has released a security bulletin (APSB24-107) addressing an arbitrary file system read vulnerability in ColdFusion, a web application server. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2024-53961, can be exploited to read arbitrary files on the system, potentially leading to unauthorized access and data exposure. Threat Topography Threat Type: Arbitrary File System Read Industries Impacted: Technology, Software, and Web Development Geolocation: Global Environment Impact: Web servers running ColdFusion 2021 and 2023 are vulnerable Overview X-Force Incident Command is monitoring the disclosure…

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More from X-Force

Being a good CLR host – Modernizing offensive .NET tradecraft

Abusing MLOps platforms to compromise ML models and enterprise data lakes

FYSA – Adobe Cold Fusion Path Traversal Vulnerability

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