August 9, 2025 - Red Dot Security

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Hello all,

Hacker Summer Camp in Las Vegas has now concluded. There were quite a few new vulnerabilities and security gaps revealed, along with a nice quantity of new and interesting products. Expect that the next couple of weeks will have an increased amount warnings and patches as products and services announce what was fixed, and address some that were still exposed at the time of the reveals.

I was personally blessed to see the vendor showcase at Blackhat, and to attend Defcon. The most common word at the first was AI – in everything. It was actually more prevalent than the word Security. It will be interesting to see which vendors are still around next year as agentic AI comes into its own and security vendors finally start to figure out how to manage it and finally make serious dents in the threat actors’ weapons and tactics. At Defcon, the operative word, in my opinion, was curiosity. The myriad of talks, demonstrations, educational sessions, and competitive events showcased that the most important quality in a security-minded person is being curious. Curious how something works, how to make it do something different, how to make something to solve an issue that was observed, and simply curious to learn something new. It was a cornucopia of talent and creativity. I could go on, but I need to get to news items from the prior week.

Headline NEWS:

Adobe had to issue an emergency patch for their AEM forms due to a zero-day defect that now has proof-of-concept (PoC) code available in the wild. Patch soon.
Blackhat and Defcon, as mentioned a moment ago, took place in Las Vegas this past week and weekend. There are several linked articles that do a good job of describing the events and some of the goings on. And while not reported on in our links, BSidesLV also took place at the same time, providing excellent additional security related content to attendees.
Google confirmed a data breach where information was exfiltrated. They are currently downplaying it, saying that most of the information was already publicly available. However, despite it being out there, the ability to correlate it to the Google infrastructure helps threat actors paint a better picture for their evil agentic AI’s “customer” relationship management systems (CRMs). I expect that we’ll hear more about this sometime soon.
Microsoft hybrid Exchange Servers have a new vulnerability that is rated as a high-severity defect. There are over 28,000 servers exposed to the Internet that may be vulnerable to this defect. I personally don’t feel that it is a pants-on-fire issue since you need administrative permission to perform the exploit, but if chained with other recent CVE’s, this has the potential to be quite the defection storm. So patching is prudent.
Squid Proxy has a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) defect. If you use this in your environment, patch quickly to avoid becoming sushi.
Trend Micro Apex One on-premise is under active exploitation due to a critical defect. If you use this product, patch immediately.

In Ransomware, Malware, and Vulnerabilities News:

SonicWall Gen 7 Firewalls were suspected of having a zero day. Late last week Arctic Wolf, Blackpoint, Huntress and others, detected escalating successful ransomware attacks against fully patched Gen 7 SonicWall firewalls, implicating the SSL-VPN. After several days of puckered cheeks, and admins globally turning off, or severely limiting, SSL-VPNs on their devices, it was found that this was not a new defect. Instead, the issue stemmed from clients having improperly updated their SonicWalls to newer firmware versions, which resulted in insecure configurations and credentials being retained, allowing threat actors to infiltrate and quickly pivot to ransomware. Nevertheless, the damage was done, with many admins vowing to never use SonicWall SSL-VPN again, moving to other solutions.

In Other News Events of Note and Interest:

AOL will end dial-up internet services. I didn’t even realize that this was a thing! I think that I still have a few AOL 3 ½ floppy discs advertising their service floating around my archives. In the late Jurassic period of the internet, or at least what now feels like it, we would turn on our computers, go make a cup of coffee while it booted up, open the AOL application, and then begin the war-dialing hunt for a modem connection that didn’t generate a busy-signal noise. If we were blessed to live in an area that had a handful of phone numbers, we would be rewarded with the warbling sounds of our modem negotiating up to a whopping maximum speed of 56.6k per second! Yep, the good ole days half a megabyte. Now we expect instant on, with internet speeds thousands of times faster than a dial-up modem could ever have even dreamed of seeing. It’s good to look back occasionally to see where we’ve come from, to hopefully make us a bit more patient, and a lot more grateful for the modern marvels that we use daily that we take for granted. Thank you AOL, I wish you well.

Musings:

As I transition back into the world of my ordinary day-to-day, being away and interacting with quite a few noobs – individuals that are new to the industry or to the disciplines of Cyber Security – has served as a nice reset for me. It reinforced that I need to be more patient and willing to educate. I have decades of technology experience and background that provide me with great context for many concepts that noobs rarely encounter anymore. It is not just my honor, it is my responsibility to mentor the up-and-coming generation of gurus and gray-beards so that they can excel. Everyone is on a journey, and it is a privilege to help others move forward, to overcome hurdles, and hopefully even surpass me as they run this marathon named life. We are all a work-in-progress. And if I’ve taken anything away from Blackhat and Defcon, it is that we are exponentially more effective together than we are individually.

Headline NEWS

Ransomware, Malware, and Vulnerabilities News

Other News Events of Note and Interest

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