CISA urges devs to weed out OS command injection vulnerabilities

CISA urges devs to weed out OS command injection vulnerabilities

July 10, 2024 at 02:07PM

CISA and FBI have jointly urged software companies to address OS command injection vulnerabilities in their products, following recent attacks by the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor, Velvet Ant. The advisory recommends implementing mitigations to prevent these vulnerabilities, such as separating user input from commands and conducting rigorous product testing. CEOs and business leaders are urged to take action to eliminate these vulnerabilities.

From the meeting notes, the key takeaways are:

1. CISA and the FBI have urged software companies to review and eliminate OS command injection vulnerabilities before shipping their products. This is in response to recent cyber attacks that exploited multiple OS command injection security flaws to compromise network edge devices from companies such as Cisco, Palo Alto, and Ivanti.

2. The Chinese state-sponsored threat actor, Velvet Ant, deployed custom malware to gain persistence on hacked devices as part of a cyber espionage campaign.

3. The advisory emphasizes that OS command injection vulnerabilities can arise when manufacturers fail to properly validate and sanitize user input when constructing commands to execute on the underlying OS.

4. CISA advises developers to implement well-known mitigations to prevent OS command injection vulnerabilities at scale while designing and developing software products, such as using built-in library functions, input parameterization, and limiting user input in commands.

5. Tech leaders should be actively involved in the software development process and ensure the use of safe command-generating functions, review threat models, use modern component libraries, conduct code reviews, and implement rigorous product testing to ensure the quality and security of their code throughout the development lifecycle.

6. CISA and the FBI urge CEOs and other business leaders at technology manufacturers to request their technical leaders to analyze past occurrences of OS command injection vulnerabilities and develop a plan to eliminate them in the future.

7. OS command injection security bugs took the fifth spot in MITRE’s top 25 most dangerous software weaknesses, emphasizing the significance of addressing these vulnerabilities.

8. In May and March, “Secure by Design” alerts urged tech executives and software developers to weed out path traversal and SQL injection (SQLi) security vulnerabilities.

These takeaways capture the main points of the meeting and provide a clear summary of the key issues and recommendations discussed. Let me know if there’s anything else you need assistance with!

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