Vicarius, creators of vsociety, the open and independent social community for research and security professionals, has announced the publication of novel security research detailing multiple new exploits for popular developer tools. The publication comes in an effort to amplify safe hygiene practices during CISA’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
October 2022 marks the 19th anniversary of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, with this year’s campaign theme — “See Yourself in Cyber” — demonstrating that while cybersecurity may seem like a complex subject itself, it’s really all about people. In alliance with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who leverages the month to spread awareness of good cyber hygiene, Vicarius looks to enhance the security posture of organizations by publishing new research along with steps to mitigate the risk.
Among the publications, which are provided to the community by independent researchers and validated by Vicarius, is a zero-day vulnerability for a popular Python developer tool called yacmmal. In the post, anonymous researcher “M” lays out the steps taken to compromise the application and execute code remotely, going further to warn “as this exploit is not known and no patches are available, usage of the package should be avoided until patches are public,” while providing a workaround for temporary protection.
In a few subsequent posts to the community, the same researcher details an exploit to a beloved developer resource called Flask as well as a method to exploit a deserialization vulnerability in a python library called Jsonpickle. Both of these examples illustrate the potential for remote code execution and the steps required to mitigate the threat. Vicarius stresses the importance of providing mitigation details for any exploit posted to vsociety. Research is only published on the platform if it follows responsible disclosure and is accompanied by remediation details and documentation.
“Our goal is to make organizations more aware of potential vulnerabilities in the wild and provide the steps necessary to protect against them. “With the growing popularity and prominence of Awareness Month, we aimed to go a step beyond the typical materials provided by other CISA partners, encouraging awareness of previously unpublished threats in the wild which all security teams should be cognizant of.”
Vicarius CEO Michael Assraf
Vicarius will release additional pieces of research that will be published to vsociety throughout the month.
About Vicarius
Vicarius helps security teams protect their most critical apps and assets against software exploitation through TOPIA, the company’s end-to-end vulnerability remediation platform. Founded by three security experts and backed by tier one investors from Silicon Valley, Vicarius’ mission is to provide customers with problem-solving solutions that proactively reduce risk wherever computer software resides.