Author: Geoffrey Mattson, CEO, Xage Security
A critical vulnerability, CVE-2024-3094, was recently discovered in the XZ Utils library of the Linux operating system, with a severity score of 10. This is, by far, the most significant vulnerability to be identified this year to date. It was a cyber weapon of mass destruction that nearly achieved global reach.
The vulnerability is a backdoor, very well-crafted, suggesting its creator likely to be a nation-state actor. It was socially engineered into Linux libraries by an actor playing the long game by infiltrating the Linux maintainer community over a period of years. Had it not been accidentally discovered, it would have eventually been incorporated into stable releases of Linux in every cloud and data center around the world. The perpetrator would be able to access and take over any of these servers at any time.
Although the software used in the backdoor was very sophisticated, the attack that it enabled was straightforward: the attacker had a special key that would allow access to any system by using the SSH protocol.
Xage stops this backdoor from being used. And that is not because Xage added a detection after it was disclosed; Xage blocks backdoor as a zero-day. Xage stops attacks like this by proxying all access. In this case, a SSH session request would have been proxied, authenticated, and turned into the safer WebSSH session.
This backdoor was discovered by accident. It is difficult to imagine that there are not similar unknown vulnerabilities elsewhere. That’s why Xage provides complete protection against similar supply chain zero days.
Supply chain risks, open source backdoors, and zero days will continue to be a problem that enterprises have to mitigate against. The only sustainable path forward is to implement an architecture that will prevent them from having an impact on your business.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of detecting, patching, and upgrading.
Xage’s ability to protect against CVE-2024-3094 isn’t just about addressing one vulnerability, it’s about complete protection for your servers, assets and users.
