CISA recommends VMware, F5 patches. Liquidity mining fraud. Strapi issues patched. TDI clarifies data incident.

VMware yesterday addressed issues in several of its products: VMware Workspace ONE Access (Access), VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud Foundation, and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. That these are more significant than the ordinary run of patches may be seen by the way the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has discussed them. Alert (AA22-138B), "Threat Actors Chaining Unpatched VMware Vulnerabilities for Full System Control" warns that "malicious cyber actors, likely advanced persistent threat (APT) actors, are exploiting CVE-2022-22954 and CVE-2022-22960 separately and in combination." The Alert adds, "CISA expects malicious cyber actors to quickly develop a capability to exploit newly released vulnerabilities CVE-2022-22972 and CVE-2022-22973 in the same impacted VMware products. In response, CISA has released, Emergency Directive (ED) 22-03 Mitigate VMware Vulnerabilities, which requires emergency action from Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies to either immediately implement the updates in VMware Security Advisory VMSA-2022-0014 or remove the affected software from their network until the updates can be applied." US Federal civilian agencies have until next Monday to identify and remediate the issues, and they're required to report completion no later than Tuesday.

Fraudulent liquidity mining.
Sophos describes the way the threat of fraudulent liquidity mining is shaping up in decentralized finance systems. "Legitimate liquidity mining exists to make it possible for decentralized finance (DeFi) networks to automatically process digital currency trades," Sophos explains, and criminals are using social engineering to abuse such systems to defraud cryptocurrency investors of their holdings.

More loosely regulated than conventional cryptocurrency exchanges, which use market makers and seek to ensure that sufficient reserves are on hand to back trades, DeFi exchanges use Automated Market Makers (AMMs). Sophos explains that "Smart contracts built into the DeFi network have to rapidly determine the relative value of the currencies being exchanged and execute the trade. Since there is no centralized pool of crypto for these distributed exchanges to pull from to complete trades, they rely on crowdsourcing to provide the pool of cryptocurrency capital required to complete a trade—a liquidity pool." Liquidity pool tokens, ("LP tokens") are used to represent the portion of the liquidity pool an investor contributed. But unethical DeFi operators can cancel the tokens (or simply not create a pool to back them in the first place), and this, Sophos observes, offers "ample opportunity for digital Ponzi schemes, fraudulent tokens, and flat-out theft."

CMS vulnerabilities disclosed and patched.
The Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC) has identified two vulnerabilities in Strapi. Strapi is an open-source headless content management system (CMS) Javascript software that enables developers to quickly design and build content-rich APIs. Both vulnerabilities involve authenticated users with access to the Strapi admin panel having access to private and sensitive data, such as email and password reset tokens. The first vulnerability allows for the authenticated user to view private and sensitive data for other admin panel users that have a relationship with content accessible to the authenticated user. The second vulnerability allows for the authenticated user to view private and sensitive data for API users if content types accessible to the authenticated user contains relationships to API users. The vulnerabilities are fixed in newer, updated versions of Strapi, and Synopsys has commended Strapi for its quick response to the discovery.

Texas Department of Insurance clarifies facts surrounding its data incident.
The Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) has sent around a fact sheet that clarifies a data incident the agency sustained earlier this year: "In January 2022, TDI found the issue was due to a programming code error that allowed internet access to a protected area of the application. TDI promptly disconnected the web application from the internet. After correcting the programming code, TDI placed the web application back online. The forensic investigation could not conclusively rule out that certain information on the web application was accessed outside of TDI. This does not mean all the information was viewed by people outside TDI. Because we couldn't rule out access, we took steps to notify those who may have been affected." While data could have been accessed by unauthorized personnel, TDI has investigated and found that, "There is no evidence to date that there was a misuse of information."