Question

1. Why is patching software still an issue for companies in the face of current security breaches? Provide at least two issues that you consider is a result of patching software. Justify your response with one credible resource.
2. Find another company that in the last five years has been breached and had a major impact on the stock price of that company and personal information that may have been needlessly exposing to the public. Make sure you provide a copy of the link in your response so other students may comment on your article/source.
3. If you were the administrator for these networks what recommendations would you make? What about your home network are your updates enabled?

Answer 1

Below is one such example of the data breaches and why patching such software becomes very important and also managing the breach and what should be done simultaneously.

Company Data Breaches:

I have an example of the real-life technological security flaw which has been appeared in one of the most used applications,i.e. Adobe Flash Player. So here is the information related to it in detail:

• The vulnerability which we are going to talk about today is one of the most critical ones and for one of the largest companies "Adobe". This vulnerability left lakhs of the user under danger of getting breached.
• The name of the vulnerability is "Flash Player Vulnerability" with an identification code "CVE-2018-5002". This vulnerability has been affecting densely in the Middle East region and was brought into vision in June 2018.
• What actually was the security flaw here? The security flaw was one of the stack-based buffer overflow bugs that have been able to execute arbitrary code.
• The following vulnerability was allowing the attackers to maliciously craft the Flash object which would help them in executing codes in the victim machine and then execute the range of payloads & actions.

How would have this been prevented?

• The applications are been vulnerable to buffer overflow bugs when there are certain programming errors or memory leaks left in the programming.
• Hence, this can be prevented using the right programming methods and also putting the best programming techniques to use so that none of the vulnerabilities are left in open to ruin the applications.
• There must be thorough testing of the application done before releasing the application publicly and must also make the application good enough for working against the vulnerabilities.

Hence, these are the methods in which the vulnerability could have been prevented.

How did this vulnerability actually work?

• The vulnerability was allowing the attacker to provide a word file to download and once executed in the victim PC the adobe flash exploits would start running.
• This file once executed starts executing the shellcode which will then enable the attacker to command and control the servers from which the attacker would gain complete access to the victim machine.

Patch For Vulnerability:

• The company has declared the patch for the vulnerability and can be patched automatically by installing the updated Flash Player as this was a critical zero-day attack.
• The patch is available only for the users from East Asia as the vulnerability was highly active in that region.

Hence, this was all on technology security and how to maintain the security levels in order to stay updated and up to the mark.