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The Security Digest: #53

by Daniel Tobin on March 23, 2021

Hello and welcome to the 52nd TSD, your weekly blog post with top of mind security issues. TSD began as an internal newsletter 1 year ago that our Security Lead, Daniel Tobin, would circulate to the team each Tuesday. It proved to be a great resource for all of us so we thought, why not share it with all of you? Our hope is that it helps make you just a bit more secure. Take a look back at TSD-01 to see where it all began!

Check back here every Tuesday for more TSD or sign up below to stay in the loop!

Please reach out to us directly, via [email protected] or on Twitter at @dant24 if you have any questions, concerns, tips or anything else!

F5’s BIG IP appliances have a 9.8 severity vulnerability that is now actively being exploited according to researchers at NCC Group. Hopefully you didn’t wait to patch yet. Read more at ArsTechnica.
Microsoft says 92% of Exchange servers are now safe from either being patched or via Microsoft Defender updates to mitigate the attack. The 8% represents close to 30K out of 400,000 total around the world. Read more at BleepingComputer.
The fall out from the Accellion hack continues as Shell announces they were breached as well via BleepingComputer
Acer reportedly was asked for $50 million in a REvil ransomware attack according to ZDNet.
Google’s Project Zero flexes their research prowess to show how a group burned 11 zero-days in a 9 month period to infect multiple different devices. Read more at ArsTechnica.
Kim Zetter just started her own Substack, Zero Day, and has a new article out pushing against the narrative that more government monitoring would have found the SolardWinds intrusion sooner.

Owl fun and facts:

How many burrowing owls do you see? Take a look at the original from Wendy @geococcyxcal on Twitter to get a closer look. According to Audubon, cowboys sometimes “called these owls “howdy birds,” because they seemed to nod in greeting from the entrances to their burrows in prairie-dog towns.” These owls, as you may guess, are often active during the day. Sadly howdy birds are on the decline and are considered endangered or threatened.

A Shout Out:

Palantir has released an open source policy as code GitHub application to provide more complex approval features including from specific users, based on files, combinations and even auto approvals. Check out policy-bot on GitHub.