Yesterday (July 5, 2023) Social Networking Giant, Meta launched their competitor to Twitter. This new app is a companion app to Instagram called threads. Ironically, Twitter had a lot of buzz about the new app including from people that routinely talk about how terrible Twitter is under Elon Musk. These Twitter detractors have been posting count down timers, information on how to ensure you can be on threads as soon as it launches and more. It is interesting, if not a bit funny, to see the dialog there. However, there is a very dark cloud (heavy black and pendulous) over the green pastures of Meta’s Threads. This is the very serious concern about Privacy and Security.

It has been a few days since we talked about NPM and node.js. The popular repository has been taking a bit of a beating in recent months as attackers, hacktivists, and others seek to compromise their packages as part of a general supply chain attack. Supply chain attacks are in vouge right now and are part of the reason you might be seeing the acronym SBOM (Software Build of Materials) so much. Sure, SBOM is not a new term, but the push for it and the rise of an entire vertical in the cybersecurity industry is new and should be a bit of an indicator that there is a problem.

There is nothing like an unresolved security flaw in a major product. Especially when the flaw is one that the developer knows about but does not consider important enough to fix in a timely manner. If the flaw is in a commonly used product, it is even better. In this case we are talking about a flaw we covered back on the 23rd of June. This is a bug that can allow an attacker to mimic an internal sender to get around file handling from external senders. In our opinion, it is significant, but Microsoft has no plans to remediate it any time soon. I guess they have other things on their plate like Privacy Investigations in the EU (Over Teams and Office) and the pending Activision/Blizzard deal in court in the US.

EDR, XDR, and MDR are acronyms that are well known to most organizations. The operative letters here are DR which stands for Detection and Response. The E, X, and M stand for Endpoint, E(x)tended, and Managed respectively. Each one of these is designed to monitor a device for threats and respond according to the profile/configuration/policy enabled for the device. This is different than the traditional “anti-virus/anti-malware” application in many ways. The most common is that an EDR is intended to do more than check files against a signature list and quarantine them if identified. The modern EDR does look for malware, but it also monitors script execution, process starts/stops, file and registry reads and writes and, in many cases, network activity that can indicate potential compromise.