VSHN.timer #203: Uno, DDoS, Tres; Social Attacks Are The Best

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

This week we’re going to talk about DDoS attacks, security vulnerabilities, social engineering, and other virtues of the human spirit.

1. Last August, Google’s DDoS Response Team stopped the largest DDoS attack ever recorded: with a peak of… 398 million requests per second, it was larger than the previous record at „just“ 46 million rps.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/google-cloud-mitigated-largest-ddos-attack-peaking-above-398-million-rps

2. Daniel Stenberg disclosed last Wednesday a serious security issue in the curl project. The bug, named CVE-2023-38545, is the „worst security issue found in curl in a long time,“ he said.

https://www.heise.de/news/cURL-Infos-zu-schlimmster-Sicherheitsluecke-seit-Langem-kommen-am-11-Oktober-9326134.html

3. Many organizations, including quite a few Fortune 500 firms, have exposed Zoom information that allows anyone to initiate a Zoom meeting impersonating a valid employee, leading to phishing and social engineering attacks.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/10/dont-let-zombie-zoom-links-drag-you-down/

4. This blog post presents a technique in which an attacker leads a user to visit a website that silently places a DLL in the browser’s cache, disguised as an image, and then makes the user run a benign looking PowerShell one-liner that executes the DLL. Oops.

https://blog.whiteflag.io/blog/browser-cache-smuggling/

5. Switzerland’s e-voting system is supposed to have safeguards to protect elections against malicious actors, but a computer scientist has found a major flaw. This article explains to Swiss voters what they can do to help protect their vote against such attacks.

https://andreaskuster.ch/blog/2023/CVD-EVoting-Swiss-Post/

Are your co-workers aware of social engineering risks? Do you have a DDoS prevention team in your organization? Would you like to share some security vulnerabilities with our readers? Get in touch with us, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.

PS: check out our previous VSHN.timer editions about security: #8, #17, #22, #27, #32, #44, #54, #62, #76, #84, #93, #106, #117, #128, #142, #145, #164, #169, and #182.

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