PHP, TLS, etc… We appear to be facing a tsunami of vulnerabilities being discovered in record time. Further, the window to act on these vulnerabilities has basically closed to zero; hackers’ tools now automatically fold the very latest vulnerabilities into their botnets within minutes/hours of discovery. I have always been extremely reluctant to expose any of my services - even with the latest and greatest security tools. My choice to stay totally within the confines of tailscale seems vindicated given this week’s news. How are you all taking this?
It’s really not the publicly disclosed vulnerabilities you need to worry about. Most of those vulnerabilities have existed for years - the recent php thing is supposedly 12 years old. Maybe someone’s been out there exploiting it for 12 years.
The people who have sought and exploited vulnerabilities since computers went online don’t disclose what they find. They are the people who should be most worried about AI-assisted vulnerability research, because it directly attacks their business model.
10000% correct! I bet the NSA or KGB has had that PHP exploit for close to a decade and they are gutted its finally been patched! There are probably an infinite number of vulnerabilities in currently running servers and clients, a few 100 will already be known and being quietly exploited. Yes, ai will find some completely unknown ones for malicious actors, but it will also find those same ones for cybersec bods, so effectively cancel each other out.
Do security companies like cloudflare go back and look for past exploitation of vulnerabilities that were recently found by the public? I can’t think of any “we found this new vuln and turns out someone has been exploiting it for years” stories.
Maybe not, but maybe, just maybe, the people with these exploits aren’t running round attacking Joe bloggs personal photo album server to steal some photos, but in fact are only using the exploit very carefully and sparingly so as not to be detected, and only targeting high value and highly confidential services, where even if they were hacked or a specific exploit was deployed, either are too big to notice, or to proud to divulge the fact they lost some data 🤷