2022 has been a busy year for the information security industry on both sides of the playing field. We have seen an increase in target attacks on businesses, a larger number of Zero-Day vulnerabilities disclosed that were being actively exploited in the wild, several major companies had data stollen and leaked, and we cannot forget the threat actor war going on over the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. With all these items, law enforcement agencies have also been very busy with the seizure and shut down of two major “hacker” marketplaces, Hydra and RaidForums.

The Open Source community has been one that many leverage to help build their applications. It has become a great place to find applications packages that make building out a larger application or eco systems less time consuming. We see this in just about every development space from large to small. Having helpful sources of working code can speed up the development lifecycle and allow for greater interoperability as many applications use the same dependencies and core functions. The open source community is a great resource and typically is one that you can trust to pull code from.

Twitter is an interesting company. On the one hand they act like they are a bastion of free speech and have stood up for the anonymity of some of the users. They have, in the past refused government interference in how their users post information and respond to tweets on their service. They claim to be against bullying and hate. At the same time, they have suspended accounts, removed tweets and permanently banned people for some very arbitrary reasons. They have stood their ground over this even when proven wrong about the original action. They have also left up tweets calling for violence by some while removing others, very confusing.

Not that long ago, a Ukrainian security researcher published a vast number of internal chats from the Ransomware group Conti. On top of that treasure trove of information the same researcher also published the source code for the Conti Ransomware. The leak of information came after the Conti group pledged their full support of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and vowed to target anyone they felt was waging cyber-war on Russia. The message was later toned down, but the effect still lingers and was one of the moves that started an interesting threat group war.