The city of Atlanta has become one of the latest victims of a ransomware attack. The attack is believed to be the result of the SamSam malware that has compromised various healthcare, government, and educational systems over the past several years.
Is SamSam malware responsible?
This malware initially targeted a remote code execution vulnerability in JBoss web servers, but it has also been known to target exposed RDP and FTP services. If we continue with the assumption that the SamSam malware is responsible for locking down Atlanta’s IT systems, what could have been done to prevent such an attack, and what are some of the hurdles an organization may encounter?
Is a simple patch the solution?
If the ransomware attack originated from the original flavor of SamSam, which targets vulnerable JBoss servers, the first solution is to patch to a nonvulnerable version of JBoss. While this may sound easy in theory, it often becomes difficult in practice.
Continue Reading...
Posted in Data Breach | Comments Off on What you should know about the recent Atlanta ransomware attack
Before jumping into the final post within our discussion on vulnerabilities in the MEAN stack, look back at the other four posts within this series discussing MongoDB, Express.js (Core), Express.js (Sessions and CSRF), and AngularJS.
Development mode (Node.js/Express.js)
By default, Express applications run in development mode unless the NODE_ENV environmental variable is set to another value. In development mode, Express returns more verbose errors which can result in information leakage. For example, the error message below returns the full path to the requested file. This also provides an attacker with information about the host system.
Continue Reading...
Posted in Open Source Security, Software Architecture and Design, Web Application Security | Comments Off on Node.js: Preventing common vulnerabilities in the MEAN stack
Learn how to prevent common AngularJS vulnerabilities related to expression injection, local storage information leakage, and Angular’s own SCE service.
Continue Reading...
Posted in Software Architecture and Design, Web Application Security | Comments Off on AngularJS: Preventing common vulnerabilities in the MEAN stack
With MEAN stack apps, you can store the session state client-side in a JSON Web Token or custom cookie object. But how do you invalidate a user’s session?
Continue Reading...
Posted in Web Application Security | Comments Off on ExpressJS: Preventing common vulnerabilities in the MEAN stack (Part 2)
With the Express framework, developers can easily add multiple middleware plugins globally to all routes. But middleware must be applied in the right order.
Continue Reading...
Posted in Open Source Security, Web Application Security | Comments Off on ExpressJS: Preventing common vulnerabilities in the MEAN stack (Part 1)
MEAN stack applications (MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js) are becoming increasingly popular as lightweight, easily deployable frameworks due to a vast ecosystem of middleware plugins and dependencies. But just how secure are these technologies?
Continue Reading...
Posted in Open Source Security, Web Application Security | Comments Off on MongoDB: Preventing common vulnerabilities in the MEAN stack
Multiple versions of JBoss contain a vulnerability that can allow remote users to execute arbitrary code on the server running JBoss; mitigating this issue is not always as simple as upgrading JBoss to the latest version. The Java deserialization vulnerability (CVE 2015-7501 and CWE-502, disclosed in January 2015) affects specific classes within the Apache Commons-Collections library prior to versions 3.2.2 and 4.1; this vulnerability allows remote code execution by an unauthenticated attacker. The Apache Commons-Collections library is included in multiple middleware technologies, including JBoss application servers. JBoss is of particular interest because the invoker servlets which pass serialized objects to the vulnerable Commons-Collections classes are made available over the HTTP web listener (i.e., port 80, 8080, etc.), increasing the likelihood that they are externally accessible beyond corporate firewalls and available to an attacker. Default configurations of JBoss versions 4.3.x, 5.x, and 6.x contain the vulnerable Commons-Collections library and have the invoker servlets enabled; however, the invoker servlets are not enabled by default in JBoss version 7.x.
Continue Reading...
Posted in Software Architecture and Design | Comments Off on How to mitigate the Java deserialization vulnerability in JBoss application servers
