Offensive Security

In February 2023, X-Force posted a blog entitled “Direct Kernel Object Manipulation (DKOM) Attacks on ETW Providers” that details the capabilities of a sample attributed to the Lazarus group leveraged to impair visibility of the malware’s operations. This blog will not rehash analysis of the Lazarus malware sample or Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) as […]

Applications have historically been deployed and created in a manner reminiscent of classic shopping malls. First, a developer builds the mall, then creates the various stores inside. The stores conform to the dimensions of the mall and operate within its floor plan. In older approaches to application development, a developer would have a targeted system or […]

There are two kinds of companies in the world: those that have been breached by criminals, and those that have been breached and don’t know it yet. Criminals are relentless. Today’s cyberattacks have evolved into high-level espionage perpetrated by robust criminal organizations or nation-states. In the era of software as a service (SaaS), enterprise data […]

IBM Security X-Force Red took a deeper look at the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and found a potential method an attacker could use to persist in GCP via the Google Cloud Shell. Google Cloud Shell is a service that provides a web-based shell where GCP administrative activities can be performed. A web-based shell is a […]

An insidious issue has been slowly growing under the noses of IT admins and security professionals for the past twenty years. As companies evolved to meet the technological demands of the early 2000s, they became increasingly dependent on vulnerable technology deployed within their internal network stack. While security evolved to patch known vulnerabilities, many companies […]

You may recall my previous blog post about how our X-Force veteran threat hunter Neil Wyler (a.k.a “Grifter”) discovered nation-state attackers exfiltrating unencrypted, personally identifiable information (PII) from a company’s network, unbeknownst to the security team. The post highlighted why threat hunting should be a baseline activity in any environment. Before you can embark on […]

When you look at breach statistics in today’s cloud-dominated IT world, you can see several examples where a small error made by the DevOps or CloudOps team has led to a tremendous impact on businesses’ reputations or, in some cases, their existence. Misconfigured AWS S3 buckets, poor password management on publicly exposed databases and secrets […]

“You won’t know you have a problem unless you go and look.” Neil Wyler, who is known as ‘Grifter’ in the hacker community, made that statement as a precursor to an unforgettable story. An organization hired Grifter to perform active threat hunting. In a nutshell, active threat hunting entails looking for an attacker inside an […]

You’d have to look far and wide to find an IT professional who isn’t aware of (and probably responding to) the Log4Shell vulnerability. The Operational Technology (OT) sector is no exception, yet the exact exposure the vulnerability poses to OT technology is yet to be fully uncovered. The vulnerability was first made public earlier this […]

In an age where organizations have established a direct dependence on software to run critical business operations, it’s fundamental that they are evaluating their software development lifecycles and that of their extended environment — third-party partners — against the same standards. Concerns around vulnerability management are gaining more government attention around the world in order […]

Ransomware. Five years ago, the cybersecurity community knew that term well, although among others it was far from dinner table conversation. Times have changed. Since early 2020, ransomware has hit a slew of headlines. People inside and outside of the security industry are talking about it, and many have experienced the ransomware pain firsthand. The […]

When Liza Minnelli sang that famous tune, “Money makes the world go around,” she should have added one more word: time. Time makes the world go around. It’s that one agreed-upon part of life that the world shares. From laptops to phones to wall clocks to just about every other technology, time is everywhere, controlling […]