supply chain
6 articles with this tag
Osaka General Medical Center ransomware (2022) — a contractor's VPN as the way in, and hospital BCP
The way in was not the hospital itself but a meal-service contractor's remote-maintenance VPN device — unpatched, and reachable using leaked credentials — the investigation committee found. Because the hospital and contractor were constantly connected, and because servers/PCs shared passwords, users held broad admin rights, EMR servers lacked antivirus, and the network wasn't segmented, the encryption spread across the EMR system. Outpatient care, surgery, and emergency intake were restricted; full recovery took over two months. Defend by treating contractor links as your own attack surface: patch internet-facing VPNs, end credential reuse, least privilege, segment, and build a medical BCP (paper fallback, tested restore).
MOVEit mass breach (2023) — how a SQL injection zero-day reached 2,700+ orgs, and how to defend
The entry was a SQL injection zero-day (CVE-2023-34362) in the internet-facing MOVEit Transfer. A web shell (LEMURLOOT) was planted and data was bulk-stolen from the backing database, hitting 2,700+ orgs and ~93.3M people. Most victims were pulled in indirectly because a vendor used MOVEit. In your environment: KEV fast-patching, minimize exposure, web↔DB least privilege and segmentation, vendor inventory and data minimization.
Self-hosted Git vs GitHub: which is actually more secure?
Self-hosting Git doesn't make you 'more secure' — it relocates the risk. The accidental-public-exposure class disappears, but patching the server, backups, and pre-commit secret detection move onto you. The right call if you pay the price; worse than GitHub if you neglect it. This site's view: self-hosting only works bundled with its compensating controls.
Installing and using osv-scanner: find CVEs in your dependencies
osv-scanner scans lockfiles and containers to surface CVEs in your dependencies, free. This walks through install, run, and CI integration, plus when to use it vs npm/pnpm audit vs Dependabot. This site's view: the right tool is decided by YOUR setup — reach for osv-scanner on multi-ecosystem or GitHub-free projects, and the bundled pnpm audit for a single npm tree.
Codecov breach (2021) — when a 'trusted tool' in CI was hijacked and secrets leaked
A trusted CI tool (the curl|bash Bash Uploader) was altered upstream. Because your own code was untouched, it went unnoticed for ~2 months while CI secrets leaked; a checksum check caught it. In your CI: verify fetched artifacts, least-privilege secrets, rotation, egress monitoring.
The XZ Utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094) — when trust itself was the target
A trusted maintainer planted a backdoor in xz — a supply-chain attack. One engineer's 'this feels slow' caught it just before stable. Code wasn't the target — people and trust were. Minimize dependencies, pin versions, build reproducibly, chase anomalies, and support maintainers.