Google Mandiant security analysts warn of a worrying new trend of threat actors demonstrating a better capability to discover and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in software.
Specifically, of the 138 vulnerabilities disclosed as actively exploited in 2023, Mandiant says 97 (70.3%) were leveraged as zero-days.
This means that threat actors exploited the flaws in attacks before the impacted vendors knew of the bugs existence or had been able to patch them.
Tinfoil hat conspiracy coming up – the large quantity of layoffs meant security has been tossed aside.
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Employed engineers not having the bandwidth, resources, time to bake in better security. Literally having to do more with less.
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Fired engineers may had tribal knowledge on how something worked. Now only God knows.
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Unemployed engineers are bored engineers. Not saying they did the deed, but maybe they discovered it.
That would assume that security was a priority beforehand.
Google has been known to prioritize new projects over maintaining existing ones. That would generally lead to less defined security architecture as the system is less tested.
Unstaffing is corporate MO for which they don’t really suffer any consequences so they will keep doing it.
If they understaff hospitals an people die…
They already understaff hospitals. People are dying.
They understaff non critical jobs even harder
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When pleasing the investors becomes top priority, everything else turns into shit.
So what happens when pleasing the investors becomes the only priority?
Short term decisions are made that ultimately collapse the company and that also turns to shit.
Unless they’re too big to fail, and especially if they are too big to jail, e.g. Facebook, Google, etc. Or if they correctly judge the stupidity and malleability of their audience e.g. Reddit, X, etc.
That just kicks the can down the road, can’t run a company when no one can afford your product. Which is the situation we seem to be rapidly approaching.
The inestors maximize their shares value. It’s wonderfull
For them, for now.
Well… yeah!
And that is all that matters, to them, forever moving forward 🤮.
This thread desperately wants Google to be at fault rather than accept that attacks are easier than ever with highly sophisticated and learning cracking models.
The thread, like Lemmy, is filled with software engineers and IT professionals who are angry that almost all major tech companies are destaffing and want to use this as a reason that destaffing is bad.
Security likely a shit show before, especially if more successful attacks previously were of known flaws that weren’t patched.
IDK, every project I touched while working there had some suite of static analysis cve report, secrets scanning, as well as absurdly strict data collection policies and procedures. It was challenging to navigate at times when you had to wait on upstream fixes and crap. The only time I ever saw a fix go live quickly and to the majority of the customer base on quick rollout was for a zero day or active exploit. I’m sure there are gaps, but for as many services they offer, I never saw any crazy shit.
Google is probably one of the top 10 probed companies in the world and you don’t hear about too many major breeches that originated from the tech. It’s usually legal and sharing with bad partners where they fuck up.
Global espionage actors are being better funded, and executing longer-term plays against less expected targets.
This is actually fantastic news it means people are patching their shit and now TA’s have to spend significant resource finding new methods. For the gen pop this is good news. For nation state targets less so but thats a much smaller pool of victims.
