Security Research Articles
Information security is a rapidly changing, dynamic field with new attacks, breaches, technologies and vulnerabilities sprouting daily. And with such an influx of information, facts can be overlooked. Research and deeper investigation into these topics, however, can help us identify further potential threats while improving situational awareness, attack attribution and even defenses against future attacks.
In the “Research” category, we show you how SecurityTrails tools can help uncover what’s beneath the surface of controversial websites, malware, cybercrime campaigns, data breaches and bugs that make the headlines.
One of our earliest research projects here is a look into how you can track and trace websites who promote violence and other illegal activities (such as The Daily Stormer) through their DNS records. Among our later explorations, you’ll see our looks at malicious domain campaigns in the wake of hurricane Florence, cryptojacking campaigns, shutting down 8chan and, of course, our Recon Safari series.

Action needed: Atlassian Confluence On-Premise RCE Vulnerability - CVE-2022-26134
If you are an administrator of an Atlassian Confluence On-Premise installation, please make sure to update your installation immediately. All current versions of Confluence Server & Data Center are affected.

Insights and lessons learned from the recent BIG-IP Application Delivery Services Vulnerability
Every few months, a bug will come along that puts the information security community into a flurry of activity. Working weekends and nights to understand new vulnerability information as it comes to light, applying new patches (sometimes multiple times, as the situation changes), while also keeping apprised of new information hasn’t been uncommon. Throughout these past couple of years, we’ve had bugs as notable as Log4J, ProxyLogon, and more recently, a string of F5 vulnerabilities.

Understand Your Log4Shell Exposure with Detailed Asset Inventory
On Friday, December 10 2021, the SecurityTrails research team started tracking a critical vulnerability in the widely used Java-based Apache library Log4j. Dubbed Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228), this vulnerability has shaken the cybersecurity community as well as organizations across the globe.

Critical Log4j Vulnerability Threatens Major Internet Players
The SecurityTrails research team is tracking a critical RCE vulnerability in Apache Log4j which affects many major internet-facing services. Log4j is a Java logging package that’s used in many popular services and utilities. With a CVSS score of 10, this vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) impacts Apache Log4j versions 2.0-beta9 to 2.14.1 according to Apache.

Blast Radius: Mapping, Controlling, and Exploiting Dynamic Self-Registration Services
Vendors such as Datto, GeoVision, Synology and others leverage and depend on self-registered services for their products. These devices frequently leak critical data or have insecure design, unintentional or even intentional design decisions and application flaws. Through insecure network design and installation practices, they can be easily mapped, discovered and attacked by cyber criminals via insecure vendor, software and integrator practices.

Blast Radius: Misconfigured Kubernetes
Recognized as a leader in the container market, Kubernetes is an open source microservices cluster manager used by millions of companies worldwide. Bolstering its popularity is its considerable ability in managing container workloads, as it allows for the easy deployment of numerous servers with appropriate scaling as they grow.

Blast Radius: DNS Takeovers
Subdomain takeover remains a common vulnerability, and a destructive one at that. On one hand, there are types that practically don’t exist anymore, such as CNAME takeovers—while there are still plenty of hanging DNS records, PoC creation is nearly impossible due to restrictions put in place by major cloud providers (mainly AWS).

Blast Radius: Apache Airflow Vulnerabilities
Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow management platform that started at Airbnb in 2014 as a solution to manage complex workflows. It allows organizations to programmatically author, schedule and monitor their workflows over their web-based interfaces that are connected to internet databases and many other systems.

Recon Safari #4: Domains Riding the Robinhood Wave
During the past couple of weeks, the popular free financial trading app Robinhood made headlines for halting purchases of certain stocks. This has resulted in a lot of bad publicity for the company. And because threat actors enjoy exploiting trending news topics to their advantage, we decided to look at newly registered Robinhood domains to see how they’re being used.

Iran, the IRGC and Fake News Websites
Recently, the Department of Justice made two public announcements about shutting down fake news websites created by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). In the first instance, 92 domains were seized in August 2020. And according to the second announcement, 27 more domains were seized as part of the same effort to spread global disinformation.