February 18, 2023

Hello all,
The Red-N Weekly Security newsletter is below the Notable Callouts as usual.

Notable Callouts:

  • Patch Tuesday from Microsoft and other vendors was this past week. As usual there was lot of activity, with no less than 75 patches, 4 of which are zero-days, and 2 of which were already being actively exploited by malactors.
  • Apple released several fixes as well for bugs and at least one zero-day being exploited.
  • CISA instructed all agencies to patch the above items immediately and urged civilians to do likewise. Four new items were added to CISA’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog.
  • Windows 2022 Servers running with Secure Boot enabled on VMware ESXi versions below 8.0 risk becoming unbootable if Patch Tuesday patches are applied.
  • Palo Alto released updates to fix a cleartext password exposure issue.
  • Cisco patched some critical vulnerabilities in their security products.
  • Citrix patched several high-severity vulnerabilities.
  • Fortinet fixed critical RCE flaws in some of their items.
  • Microsoft Exchange may have issues with EWS after applying updates from Patch Tuesday.
  • In Cyber Insurance News, CFC has introduced policy encryption to keep details of the policy out of threat actor’s hands if they compromise a network.

Two pieces of late breaking news that didn’t make it to the newsletter:

An excellent list of 10 Commandments of Information Technology crossed my desk this week that are worthy of sharing:

  1. Thou art replaceable at work, but thou art not replaceable at home.
  2. Thy users shall bear false witness.
  3. Remember the Friday, to keep it holy and read-only.
  4. Thou shalt under-promise and over-deliver.
  5. Test thy backups, lest they fail thee in thy time of need.
  6. Poor planning on thy user’s part shall not constitute an emergency on thine.
  7. If thou foresee a disaster, get it in writing and cover thy posterior.
  8. It is always DNS, thou shalt not forget this.
  9. Ask thyself, “Is it plugged in?” before seeking further answers.
  10. Reboot thy device, and if it still does not work, reboot again.

Visc. Zebulon Wamboldt Pike

Headline NEWS

Ransomware, Malware, and Vulnerabilities News

Other News Events of Note and Interest

Cyber Insurance News

For a PDF version of this week’s report, click here.

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