Sunday Cybersecurity Report

September 24, 2023

Welcome reader to your Sunday CybersecurityHQ report.

Headlines

● Cisco just made its largest acquisition ever, buying cybersecurity company Splunk for $28 billion. That amounted to buying the company for $157 per share — something they did in a cash deal on Thursday. Splunk monitors data for businesses in order to reduce their risk of hacks and to quickly address technical issues. These services overlap with Cisco, the world’s largest computer networking equipment maker.

A large part of the reasoning for the purchase was Splunk’s use of AI. Cisco hopes this will improve its threat detection, prediction, and prevention. The sale resulted in a 4% dip in Cisco stock on the day and a 21% surge in stock price for Splunk.

● A new report claims to document for the first time a backdoor named Deadglyph. While most malware uses a single programming language to create its components, this proves an unusual architecture, featuring native x64 binary and a .NET assembly, according to the report.

That more complex structure is believed to be a strategy meant to make analysis and debugging more difficult. Along with its many counter-detection mechanisms, Deadglyph is uniquely challenging malware to detect and combat.

● Ukraine’s cyber defense chief, Yurii Schyhol, claims that Kremlin-backed hackers are trying to discover evidence the country might have for alleged war crimes committed by the Russian Federation.

Earlier in the war, Russian hackers were known to attack energy facilities, but now their tactics are apparently shifting, Schyhol says. This move from infrastructure attacks to law enforcement marks a major change in the cybersecurity dimension of the war. Overall, incidents in Ukraine have risen by 123% from the second half of 2022 to the first half of 2023.

Long Read

Data is a central, if under-discussed, element of cybersecurity — and data pipelining is a crucial process protecting it. In this blog post from Palo Alto Networks, Peter Haven (Cortex product marketing) and Isaac Krzywanoswki (staff security engineer) go through the difficulties that large networks face in dealing with their data.

For organizations that work with terabytes (and beyond) of data every day, quickly flagging the source of content from multiple sources and making sure that all the elements are relevant can be both challenging and essential.

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