Cybersecurity Newsletter, June 8 - 13
Qrator Newsletter


Wow, that's been a week! Here's the blogpost copying our newsletter that covers all the newest information on what happened in cyber and network security from June 8 to June 13.

 

First things first - researchers have found 2 new vulnerabilities hitting Intel processors, they are called CrossTalk and SGAxe

For the past two years, modern CPUs—particularly those made by Intel—have been under siege by an unending series of attacks that make it possible for highly skilled attackers to pluck passwords, encryption keys, and other secrets out of silicon-resident memory. On Tuesday, two separate academic teams disclosed two new and distinctive exploits that pierce Intel's Software Guard eXtension, by far the most sensitive region of the company's processors.

Abbreviated as SGX, the protection is designed to provide a Fort Knox of sorts for the safekeeping of encryption keys and other sensitive data even when the operating system or a virtual machine running on top is badly and maliciously compromised. SGX works by creating trusted execution environments that protect sensitive code and the data it works with from monitoring or tampering by anything else on the system - ArsTechnica.

The patches are already there and causing issues for some users.

 

At the same time, Google Engineer Uncovers Holes in Linux's Speculative Execution Mitigation

There are some urgent fixes pending for the x86/x86_64 speculative execution handling for the Linux kernel following a Google security engineer discovering these issues, including one of the fixes address a situation that unfairly impacted AMD CPUs.

Queued up this morning in x86/urgent are a number of fixes to the Linux kernel's speculative execution mitigations.
 

IETF announces last calls on QUIC protocol drafts

After more than three and a half years and substantial discussion, all 845 of the design issues raised against the QUIC protocol drafts have gained consensus or have a proposed resolution. In that time the protocol has been considerably transformed; it has become more secure, much more widely implemented, and has been shown to be interoperable. Both the Chairs and the Editors feel that it is ready to proceed in standardisation.

 

Technology Preview of NGINX Support for QUIC and HTTP/3

We are pleased to announce the technology preview of QUIC+HTTP/3 for NGINX at a special open source repository. This is pre‑release software, based on the IETF QUIC draft and is maintained in a development branch, isolated from the stable and mainline branches. The release is the culmination of several months of initial development, and is now ready for interoperability testing, feedback, and code contributions.

A demo site enabled with the NGINX QUIC+HTTP/3 implementation is available at https://quic.nginx.org/ - NGINX.

 

CallStranger - a CVE allowing Data Exfiltration & Reflected Amplified TCP DDOS & Port Scan via UPnP SUBSCRIBE Callback 

 

A what would be a series of articles, Mozilla's developers explaining Web Security Checks in Firefox (Part 1)

 

A brilliant article by John Scudder we missed last week on Modern router architecture and IPv6

We're going to talk mostly about forwarding hardware and its relationship with the network layer, but to get there, I want to start with a cartoon sketch of a router. We'll consider what classes of processors and designs are used for forwarding packets, then focus on one of them, walk through its advantages and limitations in more detail, and finish with considerations for what the implications are for network-layer protocols (and IPv6 in particular).

 

Nokia's insights into four months of traffic

  • Peak traffic "normalizes" at 25-30% above pre-pandemic levels
  • Aggregate traffic volumes continue to be over 25% above pre-pandemic levels
  • Video streaming rates back to normal (no speed/quality reduction) almost everywhere
  • Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the rise; DDoS traffic increases 40-50% (February to May)

 

And the DNS traffic activity analysis which highlights the regional point of view.

 

And at the end, a Wired story on fuzzing military equipment for Pentagon.

 

Stay informed!

For feedback, please write to us at cybersec@qrator.net.