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Vulnerability Research

Zero-Day Alert: Multiple Vulnerabilities Within the EMC VMAX

Today Digital Defense is publishing six zero-day vulnerabilities found in the Dell EMC VMAX Management Product family that our vulnerability research team discovered and brought to the attention of Dell EMC. Dell EMC has been extremely professional and worked diligently with Digital Defense engineering staff to understand, resolve and verify the fixes for these security issues.Dell EMC has...
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Eight Ways to Avoid Becoming Phish Bait

Is your organization capable of defending against today’s phishing attacks? Social Engineering requires very little to no knowledge of information technology or cutting-edge applications. All an attacker needs is a target and a crafty email to prey on weaknesses in human behavior.Don’t Take the Bait! Tips to Help Defend Against a Phishing AttackBe suspicious of emails asking you to “verify” your...
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Veritas InfoScale Operations Manager Vulnerabilities

Today, Fortra is publishing two zero-day vulnerabilities found in the Veritas InfoScale Operations Manager that our vulnerability research team discovered and brought to the attention of Veritas. Veritas has been extremely professional and worked diligently with Digital Defense engineering staff to understand, resolve and verify the fixes for these security issues.Veritas has released fixes for...
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IT Risk Mitigation

It's a brave new world for IT. And it often seems impossible to predict future demand and guard against performance risks. You have mountains of data, scalable cloud infrastructures, and a complex web of IT environments. It's complicated, to say the least. And it's matched by skyrocketing consumer demand for and reliance on online services. Bottom line: outages are more dangerous to a company...
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Learning Cyber Defense Strategies from Stratego Strategy

I grew up in an environment filled with fun and engaging games. My parents, who were Grand Life Masters in the game of Bridge, believed their children could “learn to think” by playing and facing challenges presented by different strategy games. Growing up my family played many hours of strategy games such as Chess, Risk, Bridge, and many others. One of my favorite games was Stratego. As CTO of an...
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Vulnerability Research Team Shares Details Regarding Recent Zero-Day Discoveries

Today Fortra is publishing several high-impact vulnerabilities on the Dell SonicWall GMS platform that our vulnerability research team discovered and brought to the attention of Dell. Dell has been extremely professional and worked diligently with Fortra engineering staff to understand, resolve and verify the fixes for these security issues. Dell has released fixes and customer advisories for...
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What Is Queuing Theory?

Queuing theory is the study of queues, otherwise known as waiting lines. It sounds straightforward. But unless you have an advanced math degree, queuing theory can be difficult to understand. That’s why we’re clarifying queuing theory basics.
Vulnerability Research

Finding the Solarwinds Flaw

Several months back I was updating our vulnerability scanner checks for various Solarwinds products. As I added a detection script for a product called Log and Event Manager (LEM), I realized that there were really no significant publicly disclosed vulnerabilities for it. This spurred me to download their trial, which comes as a virtual appliance, and look for some flaws. After initially setting...
Vulnerability Research

DDIVRT-2015-55 SolarWinds Log and Event Manager Remote Command Execution

Title: DDIVRT-2015-55 SolarWinds Log and Event Manager Remote Command ExecutionSeverity: HighDate Discovered: August 15, 2015Discovered By: Chris Graham @cgrahamsevenVulnerability Description:SolarWinds Log and Event Manager (LEM) is vulnerable to an Extensible Markup Language (XML) external entity injection through the agent message processing service. This service listens on TCP port 37891....
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The Long Goodbye to SSL/Early TLS

If your organization is required to comply with the Payment Card Industry-Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), particularly Requirement 11, then you are likely familiar with the problems plaguing SSL, early TLS (i.e. TLSv1.0) and their supported ciphers over the past several months. High profile vulnerabilities such as HeartBleed, POODLE, FREAK and LogJam have sent merchants scrambling to patch...
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3 Ways to Protect Your Company Against USB Drops

Recently in Arstechnica.com there was an article bringing light to how Windows computers can be exploited when booby-trapped USB fobs are inserted into the machine that then executes malicious code.Microsoft has acknowledged this and released a security bulletin regarding the issue stating, “To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker would have insert a malicious USB device into a target system.”So...
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Vulnerability Assessment vs Vulnerability Management – What is the Difference?

I recently came across a post on LinkedIn, asking about advice related to vulnerability management (VM) and specifically as it relates what elements should be included in the process. I found many participants giving advice which was more assessment related, as opposed to VM related. Seeing this confusion out there, I felt it important to share my views on the differences. So what is the...
Vulnerability Research

Hardened Mac Configuration Tips & Recommendations

Given the popularity of the Mac and the ever increasing number of users, we thought it would be good to share insight that everyone, regardless of what they use their Mac for, should do to protect their system and their data. This list is not all inclusive; however, it does give most users much more control over the security and privacy of their data. Under System Preferences >> Security &...
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When Less is More: Make Sure Your Security Mechanisms Aren’t Duplicating Assets!

During some recent research, I came across two issues in a large vulnerability management (VM) vendor’s public community support forum. The first post described a problem in which their tool reported a different number of network endpoint assets from what was seen on “the console.” The second detailed a user experiencing duplicate assets. After some investigation, I determined that both issues...
Vulnerability Research

Has Microsoft Introduced a Hole in your Patching Program?

I was recently putting together material for a recurring vulnerability management meeting with one of our clients. This involves comparing authenticated scanning results from one scanning period to the next in an effort to determine progress in addressing high-risk vulnerabilities; particularly, missing Microsoft, Adobe and Java patches, as vulnerabilities in these products are generally...