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On May 27, 2022, an interesting Microsoft Word doc was uploaded to VirusTotal by an independent security research team called nao_sec. The Word doc contains built-in code that calls an HTML file from a remote source that in-turn executes more (malicious) code and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint misses detection. Two days later, May 29, Kevin Beaumont publishes an article describing the behavior of this Word doc, and deems this a new 0-day vulnerability in Office/Windows products.

Organizations cannot rely on a single source of data on which to base their entire cybersecurity strategy – particularly their vulnerability management programs. Case in point: The National Vulnerability Database, or NVD. This publicly available database of known vulnerabilities covers an enormous array of all the different vulnerabilities that currently affect applications, software and hardware applications.

Vulnerabilities within an IT environment pose a big security risk and are a threat to digital data within an organization. These vulnerabilities can be exploited by others, or a lack of necessary precautions can result in damaged or lost organizational data. Therefore, it is essential to have a vulnerability management process in place for these reasons.

An unpatched vulnerability in a popular C standard library found in a wide range of IoT products and routers could put millions of devices at risk of attack. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-05-02 and discovered by Nozomi Networks, is present in the domain name system (DNS) component of the library uClibc and its uClibc-ng fork from the OpenWRT team.

On March 29, 2022, a critical vulnerability targeting the Spring Java framework was disclosed by VMware. This severe vulnerability is identified as a separate vulnerability inside Spring Core, tracked as CVE-2022-22965 and canonically named “Spring4Shell” or “SpringShell”, leveraging class injection leading to a full remote code execution (RCE).

On March 30th, 2022, rumors began to swirl around a GitHub commit from a researcher containing proof of concept (POC) exploit code. The exploit targeted a zero-day in the Spring Core module of the Spring Framework, and was quickly confirmed against specific versions of Spring Core with JDK 9 and above. Anything running Tomcat is most at risk given the POC was based on Tomcat apps. This threat posture will evolve over time as new vectors and payloads are discovered and distributed.

Recently, a Remote Code Execution vulnerability was discovered in the Java Spring Core library. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on affected systems. You can find more information on that vulnerability in the announcement on the Spring Blog. While HAProxy Enterprise, HAProxy ALOHA, and other products within the HAProxy Technologies portfolio are not impacted by this (they do not use the Spring Core library at all), you can use our products to mitigate the attack.