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If I have said it once, I have said it a thousand times; attackers are cunning. The adage that attackers are lazy has nothing to do with strategic, tactical, or technical knowledge. They understand the landscape and, in many cases, better than the organizations they are attacking do. Because of this deep understanding of their target environment, they also know to be on the lookout for special purpose entities. In this case we are talking about Security Researchers. Security researchers are a special target for attackers and when they can leverage an existing opportunity to target and potentially compromise them, they are going to take it.

Diver Signing requirements in Windows is a feature that is intended to help prevent the Windows Operating system from being compromised through malicious software posing as legitimate drivers. The policy was implemented way back in early versions of the 64-bit flavor of Windows XP and became a defacto security policy very quickly after that. Since its implementation and enforcement threat groups have found multiple ways around this policy including the use of compromised certificate issuing groups, purchasing actually legitimate certificates, and certificate theft.

Social engineering efforts via voice calls (Vishing) is nothing new. The use of phone calls for malicious activity is pretty old and include such popular scams as extended car warranties, IRS collection attempts, and the ever popular “there is a complaint against you”. These are just a few of the consumer scams that have been in play and are still in play. On the corporate side there are even more which target general employees and support personnel to either gain entry or enable some form of financial fraud. Sadly, this pivot is also seriously under managed by most organizations, with few providing any preventative training and most not testing this attack vector to determine exposure.

Last week Progress Software, the company behind MOVEit file transfer software, announced another SQL injection flaw had been identified and patched. This flaw is just the latest in a series of vulnerabilities that have been identified in the application after the Cl0p ransomware group was found to have exploited a different SQL injection flaw to steal data from multiple MOVEit users. The attacks started in late 2022, but the Cl0p group might have been testing different entry points as far back as June 2022.