All news with #appsec tag

Dynamic Binary Instrumentation with DynamoRIO on Windows

🛠️ This post introduces dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) and provides a hands-on guide to building DBI tooling using DynamoRIO on Windows 11. It explains the difference between static and dynamic instrumentation and highlights practical uses such as malware analysis, anti-anti-analysis techniques, runtime de-obfuscation, and automated unpacking. The tutorial includes example clients, build instructions, and a GitHub repository with sample code to help researchers get started.

Detecting CGNAT to Reduce Collateral Damage Globally

🔎Cloudflare describes a supervised approach to detect large-scale IP sharing — especially CGNAT — to reduce collateral damage from IP-based security controls. They build labeled training data using distributed traceroutes (RIPE Atlas), PTR/WHOIS scraping, and lists of known VPN/proxy exit IPs, then extract per-IP and per-/24 behavioral features. An XGBoost model trained on these features achieves high accuracy, enabling operators to tune rate limits and blocklists with less harm to innocent users, particularly in regions with heavy IP sharing.

Improving JavaScript Trustworthiness via WAICT for the Web

🔒 Cloudflare presents an early design for Web Application Integrity, Consistency, and Transparency (WAICT) to address the risks of mutable JavaScript in sensitive web apps. The proposal pairs expanded Subresource Integrity (SRI) and a signed integrity manifest with append-only transparency logs and third-party witnesses to provide verifiable inclusion and consistency proofs. Browser preload lists, proof-of-enrollment, and client-side cooldowns are used to avoid extra round trips and to limit stealthy changes. Cloudflare plans to participate as a service provider and to collaborate on standardization.

AI-Enhanced Reconnaissance: Risks for Web Applications

🛡️ Alex Spivakovsky (VP of Research & Cybersecurity at Pentera) argues that AI is accelerating reconnaissance by extracting actionable insight from external-facing artifacts—site content, JavaScript, error messages, APIs, and public repos. AI enhances credential guessing, context-aware fuzzing, and payload adaptation while reducing false positives by evaluating surrounding context. Defenders must treat exposure as what can be inferred, not just what is directly reachable.

Oracle issues second emergency patch for E-Business Suite

⚠️ Oracle released an emergency security alert on October 11 for CVE-2025-61884, a 7.5 CVSS information-disclosure flaw in the Runtime UI component of E-Business Suite (versions 12.2.3–12.2.14). The vulnerability allows unauthenticated remote attackers with network access to steal sensitive data. The patch arrives one week after an emergency fix for a Cl0p-exploited RCE, and experts urge administrators to apply updates, hunt for prior compromise, and restrict outbound traffic from EBS servers.

Unmonitored JavaScript: The Holiday Shopping Risk 2025

⚠️ The article warns that unmonitored JavaScript on e-commerce sites is the single biggest holiday security risk, enabling attackers to steal payment data while server-side defenses like WAFs and intrusion detection systems remain blind. It reviews major 2024 incidents, including the Polyfill.io and Cisco Magecart campaigns, and highlights a dramatic uptick in attacks during peak shopping windows. Recommended mitigations emphasize closing visibility gaps with real-time client-side monitoring, maintaining strict third-party script inventories, and deploying Content Security Policy (initially in report-only mode) using nonces rather than weakening directives.

How Uber Appears to Know Your Location on iOS Devices

📍 iPhone users have reported receiving airport pickup prompts from Uber even when the app’s location permission is set to Only While Using. The notifications are generated locally by iOS using Apple’s UNLocationNotificationTrigger, which fires preconfigured alerts when a device enters or exits a geofenced area. Uber does not receive location data until you open the app, but the notification’s wording can misleadingly suggest active tracking.

Cloud and Application Security: Awareness Best Practices

🔐 The 2025 State of Cloud Security Report from Fortinet and Cybersecurity Insiders highlights how accelerating cloud adoption and a widespread cybersecurity skills shortage are expanding organizational risk across SaaS, APIs, and hybrid environments. Many incidents result from human error — misconfigurations, exposed APIs, and overprivileged accounts — rather than sophisticated targeted attacks. The post recommends five practical measures, including embracing shared responsibility, enforcing MFA and least privilege, integrating security into CI/CD, automating configuration management, and monitoring SaaS and APIs, and stresses that tools must be paired with user awareness and cultural change.

Study Finds Major Security Flaws in Popular Free VPN Apps

🔍 Zimperium zLabs’ analysis of 800 Android and iOS free VPN apps found widespread privacy and security weaknesses, including outdated libraries, weak encryption, and misleading privacy disclosures. The report highlights concrete failures such as vulnerable OpenSSL builds (including Heartbleed-era versions), roughly 1% of apps permitting Man-in-the-Middle decryption, and about 25% of iOS apps lacking valid privacy manifests. Researchers warn excessive permission requests and private entitlements increase risk, especially in BYOD and remote-work environments, and recommend stronger security models, endpoint visibility and zero-trust approaches.

Automating Pentest Delivery: Seven High-Impact Workflows

🔁 Penetration testing delivery must evolve from static, manual reports to automated, real-time workflows that shorten remediation cycles and improve visibility. This contributed piece highlights seven practical automation workflows — from auto-creating remediation tickets in Jira or ServiceNow to auto-closing informational findings — that reduce triage noise and accelerate fixes. Implementing targeted rules and alerts ensures findings reach the right teams immediately and supports continuous testing practices.

CISOs Urged to Rethink Vulnerability Management amid Surge

⚠️ Enterprises face an unprecedented surge in disclosed vulnerabilities — over 20,000 in H1 2025 — with roughly 35% (6,992) accompanied by public exploit code, according to Flashpoint. Security leaders are urged to adopt risk-based patching and intelligence-led remediation that prioritizes remotely exploitable and actively exploited flaws while factoring in business context. Relying solely on CVE and the NVD is increasingly impractical due to enrichment delays; experts recommend integrating threat context, exposure management, and CTEM-style operations to concentrate limited resources on what truly matters.

Cloud Security Alliance Issues New SaaS Security Framework

🔐 The Cloud Security Alliance has published the SaaS Security Capability Framework (SSCF) to establish technical minimum requirements that help SaaS providers and customers apply Zero-Trust principles and address rising third-party risks highlighted by recent Salesforce attacks. The SSCF defines controls across six domains, including identity and access management, data lifecycle, and logging and monitoring, and translates business requirements into concrete, configurable security functions such as log forwarding, SSO enforcement and incident notification. CSA positions the SSCF as a complement to, not a replacement for, frameworks like ISO 27001, while vendors stress that continuous validation and operational implementation are essential to reduce real-world risk.

Safe in the Sandbox: Security Hardening for Workers

🔒 Cloudflare describes recent security hardening applied to Cloudflare Workers, combining V8 runtime changes with CPU features to strengthen isolation of customer scripts. The post highlights use of memory protection keys (PKU) assigned per-isolate, adoption of V8's sandbox and compressed pointers to confine heap corruption, and custom memory placement to pack sandboxes efficiently. Together these mitigations improve defense-in-depth and reduce opportunities for cross-isolate data leaks.

Tech Surpasses Gaming as Top DDoS Target Q1-Q2 2025

🛡️ The Gcore Radar Q1–Q2 2025 report shows a 41% year-on-year rise in DDoS attacks, with total incidents reaching 1.17 million and a record 2.2 Tbps peak. Attacks are getting longer, more sophisticated, and increasingly multi-vector, with technology (≈30%) overtaking gaming (19%) as the primary target. Gcore emphasizes integrated WAAP and global filtering capacity to mitigate these risks.

Five Questions CISOs Should Ask Security Vendors Today

🔍 CISOs are inundated with vendor outreach and need a short, practical checklist to evaluate security offerings. Senior security leaders recommend starting by confirming a vendor understands your organization and presenting solutions that reduce workload, consolidate tools, or demonstrably improve operations rather than add noise. Key topics include integration and maintenance, update cadence and product roadmap involvement, and concrete real‑world use cases that validate claims. Watch for vague claims, FUD, buzzwords, or resistance to feedback — they signal potential long‑term friction.

Application Security Posture Management: Buying Guide

🛡️ Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) consolidates visibility and controls across cloud, container, and on-premises application environments to help organizations manage the growing volume of vulnerabilities. ASPM platforms typically secure the software development lifecycle and supply chain, automate testing, and integrate with existing tools to enable prioritization and remediation. Feature sets vary widely, and vendors take either a code-first or cloud-first approach, so buyers should evaluate integrations, scan capabilities, coverage, analysis teams, and pricing before purchasing.

Apple Adds Always-On Memory Integrity Enforcement Feature

🔒 Apple has introduced Memory Integrity Enforcement in the iPhone 17, a hardware-aware, always-on defense against memory-safety exploits used by spyware like Pegasus. Building on Arm’s MTE and its 2022 Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension, Apple’s implementation tags allocations with secrets and verifies them on every access. The company says the protection runs continuously without noticeable performance loss. Apple collaborated with Arm and tuned the chip-level design to make exploitation of memory-corruption bugs significantly harder while preserving compatibility with existing code.

CSO Awards: Security Innovation and Transformative Work

🔒 CSO highlights seven award-winning security initiatives that showcase practical innovation across vulnerability management, third-party risk, multicloud security, secure coding, threat detection, and AI-driven hunting. Profiles include BMHCC’s risk-based remediation delivering a 70% risk reduction, FSU’s tighter vendor assessments, Marvell’s unified cloud vulnerability platform, and Mastercard’s developer-focused security conference. The pieces emphasize automation, AI, and cross-team collaboration as key drivers of measurable security impact.

One in Three Android Apps Expose Sensitive Data to Attackers

🔒 The 2025 Zimperium Global Mobile Threat Report finds that one in three Android apps and more than half of iOS apps leak sensitive information through insecure APIs, and nearly half of apps contain hardcoded secrets such as API keys. Client-side weaknesses let attackers tamper with apps, intercept traffic and bypass perimeter defences. The report recommends API hardening and app attestation to ensure API calls originate from genuine, untampered apps.

Marine Corps Cuts ATO Delays with DevOps and Agile

🚀 Operation StormBreaker transformed how Marine Corps Community Services (MCCS) develops and authorizes IT. By creating a Marine Corps–authorized landing zone in AWS and pairing it with the Department of the Navy’s RAISE platform, MCCS implemented CI/CD pipelines and automated security checks to push security left. The result: ATOs that once took 18 months can now be granted in a day, saving roughly $1M per system and improving digital services for Marines and families.