Mitigating Leaky Vessels Vulnerabilities in runc, BuildKit and Moby with Aqua

On January 31, 2024, researchers revealed the discovery of four severe security vulnerabilities in the container ecosystem. These vulnerabilities, affecting key components including runc, BuildKit, Moby (Docker Engine), and Docker Desktop, pose significant risks to the security and integrity of applications that use containerization applications.  

At the beginning of 2023, Aqua Nautilus researchers uncovered HeadCrab – an advanced threat actor utilizing a state-of-the-art, custom-made malware that compromised 1,200 Redis servers. As you know in the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, threat actors continually adapt and refine their techniques. Recently, our researchers detected a new version of the HeadCrab malware targeting our …

The widespread issue of unmaintained and deprecated npm packages recently discovered by Aqua researchers affects more than a fifth of open source packages. Presenting yet another silent example of hidden threats to the software supply chain, it demonstrates how poor operational and structural integrity of dependencies can be just as risky as code vulnerabilities, while …

Researchers at Aqua Nautilus found that 8.2% percent of the most downloaded npm packages are officially deprecated, but due to inconsistent practices in handling package dependencies, the real number is much larger, closer to 21.2%. Moreover, some package maintainers, when confronted with security flaws, deprecate their packages instead of reporting them, getting a CVE assigned …

Researchers at Aqua Nautilus have uncovered a new attack targeting Apache Hadoop and Flink applications. This attack is particularly intriguing due to the attacker’s use of packers and rootkits to conceal the malware. The simplicity with which these techniques are employed presents a significant challenge to traditional security defenses.

Exposed Kubernetes secrets pose a critical threat of supply chain attack. Aqua Nautilus researchers found that the exposed Kubernetes secrets of hundreds of organizations and open-source projects allow access to sensitive environments in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and open a severe supply chain attack threat. Among the companies were SAP’s Artifacts management system …

Aqua Nautilus researchers evaluated the vulnerability disclosure process for tens of thousands of open-source projects and found flaws in the process. These flaws allowed harvesting the vulnerabilities before they were patched and announced. This could enable attackers to exploit security holes before the project’s users are alerted.

Researchers from Aqua Nautilus have successfully intercepted Kinsing’s experimental incursions into cloud environments. Utilizing a rudimentary yet typical PHPUnit vulnerability exploit attack, a component of Kinsing’s ongoing campaign, we have uncovered the threat actor’s manual efforts to manipulate the Looney Tunables vulnerability (CVE-2023-4911). This marks the first documented instance of such an exploit, to the …

Aqua Nautilus researchers have shed brighter light on a long-standing threat to SSH in the context of the cloud. More specifically, the threat actor harnessed our SSH server to be a slave proxy and pass traffic through it. In this blog, we will explain this threat, demonstrate how attackers exploit SSH, what actions they take …

Aqua Nautilus discovered a new campaign that exploits the Openfire vulnerability (CVE-2023-32315), that was disclosed in May of this year, to deploy Kinsing malware and a cryptominer. This vulnerability leads to a path traversal attack, which grants an unauthenticated user access to the Openfire setup environment. This then allows the threat actor to create a …

Recent findings by Aqua Nautilus have exposed significant flaws that are still active in the PowerShell Gallery’s policy regarding package names and owners. These flaws make typosquatting attacks inevitable in this registry, while also making it extremely difficult for users to identify the true owner of a package. Consequently, these flaws pave the way for …

If you thought that falling victim to ransomware, or a hacker hijacking your workstation was a nightmare, consider the potential catastrophe of having your Kubernetes (k8s) cluster hijacked. It could be a disaster magnified a million times over.