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Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a now-patched security flaw affecting the Ollama open-source artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure platform that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution. Tracked as CVE-2024-37032 , the vulnerability has been codenamed Probllama by cloud security firm Wiz. Following responsible disclosure on May 5, 2024, the issue was addressed in version 0.1.34 released on May 7, 2024. Ollama is a service for packaging, deploying, running large language models (LLMs) locally on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. At its core, the issue relates to a case of insufficient input validation that results in a path traversal flaw an attacker could exploit to overwrite arbitrary files on the server and ultimately lead to remote code execution. The shortcoming requires the threat actor to send specially crafted HTTP requests to the Ollama API server for successful exploitation. It specifically takes advantage of the API endpoint "/api/pull...

Traditional application security practices are not effective in the modern DevOps world. When security scans are run only at the end of the software delivery lifecycle (either right before or after a service is deployed), the ensuing process of compiling and fixing vulnerabilities creates massive overhead for developers. The overhead that degrades velocity and puts production deadlines at risk. Regulatory pressure to ensure the integrity of all software components is also ramping up dramatically. Applications are built with an increasing number of open source software (OSS) components and other 3rd party artifacts, each of which can introduce new vulnerabilities to the application. Attackers seek to exploit these components' vulnerabilities, which also puts the software's consumers at risk. Software represents the largest under-addressed attack surface that organizations face. Some interesting statistics to digest: More than 80% of software vulnerabilities are introduced through o...

In cybersecurity, confidence is a double-edged sword. Organizations often operate under a false sense of security , believing that patched vulnerabilities, up-to-date tools, polished dashboards, and glowing risk scores guarantee safety. The reality is a bit of a different story. In the real world, checking the right boxes doesn't equal being secure. As Sun Tzu warned, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Two and a half millennia later, the concept still holds: your organization's cybersecurity defenses must be strategically validated under real-world conditions to ensure your business's very survival. Today, more than ever, you need Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) , the essential strategy that's still missing from most security frameworks. The Danger of False Confidence Conventional wisdom suggests that if you've patched known bugs, deployed a stack of well-regarded security tools, and passed the nec...

Introduction The Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack (2021) and SolarWinds supply chain attack (2020) were pivotal moments in cybersecurity, starting a new challenge for Chief Information Security Officers ( CISOs ). These attacks highlighted the importance of collaboration between CISOs and DevOps teams to ensure proper cloud security configurations. In this article, we will outline the 6-step approach to fostering strong partnerships between CISOs, DevOps teams, IT management, and organizations that can help to drive innovation while maintaining a robust security posture. You will learn how a CISO can effectively communicate with IT leadership and what methods to try. Our narrative will emphasize the most crucial aspect of an organization's security - growing your strong security team and moving to a proactive approach.  Understanding such breaches, such as the Capital One data breach (2019), Epsilon data breach (2019), Magecart compromises (ongoing), and MongoDB breaches (2...

Less than a month ago, Twitter indirectly acknowledged that some of its source code had been leaked on the code-sharing platform GitHub by sending a copyright infringement notice to take down the incriminated repository. The latter is now inaccessible, but according to the media, it was accessible to the public for several months. A user going by the name FreeSpeechEnthousiast committed thousands of documents belonging to the social media platform over several months.  While there is no concrete evidence to support this hypothesis, the timing of the leak and the ironic username used by the perpetrator suggest that the leak was a deliberate act aimed at causing harm to the company. Although it is still too early to measure the impact of this leak on the health of Twitter, this incident should be an opportunity for all software vendors to ask a simple question:  what if this happened to us? Protecting sensitive information in the software industry is becoming increasingly cr...

LastPass, which in December 2022 disclosed a severe data breach that allowed threat actors to access encrypted password vaults, said it happened as a result of the same adversary launching a second attack on its systems. The company said one of its DevOps engineers had their personal home computer hacked and infected with a keylogger as part of a sustained cyber attack that exfiltrated sensitive data from its Amazon AWS cloud storage servers. "The threat actor leveraged information stolen during the first incident, information available from a third-party data breach, and a vulnerability in a third-party media software package to launch a coordinated second attack," the password management service  said . This intrusion targeted the company's infrastructure, resources, and the aforementioned employee from August 12, 2022, to October 26, 2022. The original incident, on the other hand, ended on August 12, 2022. The  August breach  saw the intruders accessing source cod...

The (Other) Risk in Finance A few years ago, a Washington-based real estate developer received a document link from First American – a financial services company in the real estate industry – relating to a deal he was working on. Everything about the document was perfectly fine and normal. The odd part, he  told  a reporter, was that if he changed a single digit in the URL, suddenly, he could see somebody else's document. Change it again, a different document. With no technical tools or expertise, the developer could retrieve FirstAm records dating back to 2003 – 885  million  in total, many containing the kinds of sensitive data disclosed in real estate dealings, like bank details, social security numbers, and of course, names and addresses. That nearly a billion records could leak from so simple a web vulnerability seemed shocking. Yet even more severe consequences befall financial services companies every week. Verizon, in its most recent  Data Breach Inv...

In an ideal world, security and development teams would be working together in perfect harmony. But we live in a world of competing priorities, where DevOps and security departments often butt heads with each other. Agility and security  are often at odds with each other— if a new feature is  delivered quickly but  contains security vulnerabilities, the SecOps team will need to scramble the release and patch the vulnerabilities, which can take days or weeks. On the other hand, if the SecOps team takes too long to review and approve a new feature, the development team will get frustrated with the slow pace of delivery. Security needs to move slowly and cautiously, while development wants to "move fast and break things" and release new features quickly. DevOps teams can view security as an impediment to their work instead of an important part of the process. With each team pulling in opposite directions, there is often tension and conflict between the two teams, slowing ...

DevOps platform CircleCI on Wednesday urged its customers to rotate all their secrets following an unspecified security incident. The company said an investigation is currently ongoing, but emphasized that "there are no unauthorized actors active in our systems." Additional details are expected to be shared in the coming days. "Immediately rotate any and all secrets stored in CircleCI," CircleCI's chief technology officer, Rob Zuber,  said  in a terse advisory. "These may be stored in project environment variables or in contexts." CircleCI is also recommending users to review internal logs for signs of any unauthorized access starting from December 21, 2022, to January 4, 2023, or until when the secrets are rotated. The software development service did not disclose any further specifics about the breach, but said it has also invalidated all  Project API tokens  and that they need to be replaced. The disclosure comes weeks after the company anno...

GitHub has put out an advisory detailing what may be an ongoing phishing campaign targeting its users to steal credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes by impersonating the CircleCI DevOps platform. The Microsoft-owned code hosting service said it learned of the attack on September 16, 2022, adding the campaign impacted "many victim organizations." The fraudulent messages claim to notify users that their CircleCI sessions have expired and that they should log in using GitHub credentials by clicking on a link. Another bogus email  revealed by CircleCI  prompts users to sign in to their GitHub accounts to accept the company's new Terms of Use and Privacy Policy by following the link embedded in the message. Regardless of the lure, doing so redirects the target to a lookalike GitHub login page designed to steal and exfiltrate the entered credentials as well as the Time-based One Time Password (TOTP) codes in real-time to the attacker, effectively allowing ...

SecDevOps is, just like DevOps, a transformational change that organizations undergo at some point during their lifetime. Just like many other big changes, SecDevOps is commonly adopted after a reality check of some kind: a big damaging cybersecurity incident, for example. A major security breach or, say, consistent problems in achieving development goals signals to organizations that the existing development framework doesn't work and that something new is needed. But what exactly is SecDevOps, why should you embrace it – and how can you do it more easily in practice? The fundamentals of SecDevOps By itself, SecDevOps is not just one single improvement. You may see it as a new tool, or set of tools, or perhaps a different mindset. Some might see SecDevOps as a culture. In reality, it's all of those factors wrapped into a new approach to development that's intended to put security first. SecDevOps rely on highly reproducible scenarios, touching on topics such as system...

DevOps platform GitLab this week issued patches to address a critical security flaw in its software that could lead to arbitrary code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-2884 , the issue is rated 9.9 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and impacts all versions of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) starting from 11.3.4 before 15.1.5, 15.2 before 15.2.3, and 15.3 before 15.3.1. At its core, the security weakness is a case of authenticated remote code execution that can be triggered via the GitHub import API. GitLab credited  yvvdwf  with discovering and reporting the flaw. A successful exploitation of the critical flaw could enable a malicious actor to run malicious code on the target machine, inject malware and backdoors, and seize complete control of the susceptible devices. While the issue has been resolved in versions 15.3.1, 15.2.3, 15.1.5, users also have the option of securing against the flaw by temporarily disabling...

GitLab has moved to address a critical security flaw in its service that, if successfully exploited, could result in an account takeover. Tracked as  CVE-2022-1680 , the issue has a CVSS severity score of 9.9 and was discovered internally by the company. The security flaw affects all versions of GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) starting from 11.10 before 14.9.5, all versions starting from 14.10 before 14.10.4, and all versions starting from 15.0 before 15.0.1. "When group SAML SSO is configured, the SCIM feature (available only on Premium+ subscriptions) may allow any owner of a Premium group to invite arbitrary users through their username and email, then change those users' email addresses via SCIM to an attacker controlled email address and thus — in the absence of 2FA — take over those accounts," GitLab  said . Having achieved this, a malicious actor can also change the display name and username of the targeted account, the DevOps platform provider cautioned in its...

Containers revolutionized the development process, acting as a cornerstone for DevOps initiatives, but containers bring complex security risks that are not always obvious. Organizations that don't mitigate these risks are vulnerable to attack.  In this article, we outline how containers contributed to agile development, which unique security risks containers bring into the picture – and what organizations can do to secure containerized workloads, going beyond DevOps to achieve  DevSecOps . Why did containers catch on so fast? Containers are, in many ways, the evolution of virtualization. The goal was to speed up the development process, creating a more agile route from development through to testing and implementation – a method that's more lightweight than using full-blown virtual machines, anyway. At the core of this issue is application compatibility, as applications require certain versions of libraries – which could clash with the requirements of other applications. ...