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A recent privilege escalation heap overflow vulnerability (CVSS 7.8), CVE-2021-3156, has been found in sudo. sudo is a powerful utility built in almost all Unix-like based OSes. This includes Linux distributions, like Ubuntu 20 (Sudo 1.8.31), Debian 10 (Sudo 1.8.27), and Fedora 33 (Sudo 1.9.2). This popular tool allows users to run commands with other user privileges.

On January 26th, 2021, Qualys reported that many versions of SUDO (1.8.2 to 1.8.31p2 and 1.9.0 to 1.9.5p1) are vulnerable (CVE-2021-3156) to a buffer overflow attack dubbed Baron Samedit that can result in privilege escalations. Qualys was able to use this vulnerability to gain root on at least Ubuntu 20.04 (Sudo 1.8.31), Debian 10 (Sudo 1.8.27), and Fedora 33 (Sudo 1.9.2), some of the most modern and widely used Linux operating systems.

Over the last few days, third parties and the media publicly reported on a malware, now referred to as SUPERNOVA. Based on our investigation, this malware could be deployed through an exploitation of a vulnerability in the Orion Platform.

CVE-2020-8554 is a vulnerability that particularly affects multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters. If a potential attacker can create or edit services and pods, then they may be able to intercept traffic from other pods or nodes in the cluster. An attacker that is able to create a ClusterIP service and set the spec.externalIPs field can intercept traffic to that IP. In addition, an attacker that can patch the status of a LoadBalancer service can set the status.loadBalancer.ingress.ip to similar effect.

A few weeks ago a solution engineer discovered a critical flaw in Kubernetes architecture and design, and announced that a “security issue was discovered with Kubernetes affecting multi-tenant clusters. If a potential attacker can already create or edit services and pods, then they may be able to intercept traffic from other pods (or nodes) in the cluster.” If a hostile user can create a ClusterIP service and set the spec.externalIP field, they can intercept traffic to that IP.

Earlier this month the Kubernetes project discovered a security issue affecting multitenant clusters: If a potential attacker can already create or edit services and pods, then they may be able to intercept traffic from other pods (or nodes) in the cluster. An attacker that is able to create a ClusterIP service and set the spec.externalIPs field can intercept traffic to that IP.

On Saturday, December 12, our CEO was advised by an executive at FireEye of a security vulnerability in our Orion Software Platform which was the result of a very sophisticated cyberattack on SolarWinds. We soon discovered that we had been the victim of a malicious cyberattack that impacted our Orion Platform products as well as our internal systems.

This blog post is a part of Mattermost’s public disclosure of three serious vulnerabilities in Go’s encoding/xml related to tokenization round-trips. The public disclosure comes as a result of several months of work, including collaborating with the Go security team since August 2020 and with affected downstream project maintainers since earlier this month.

Vulnerability remediation is still an ongoing struggle for organizations. A simple mistake could cause no issues, or it could set off a wide-scale, devastating, corporate breach. Why is this? There are many reasons. Security and Ops talk past one another. No one wants to be the one that broke something. Speed is hindered by ineffective testing.