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Articles by Michael Stepankin
Safeguarding VS Code against prompt injections
Home / Security / Vulnerability research When a chat conversation is poisoned by indirect prompt injection, it can result in the exposure of GitHub tokens, confidential files, or even the execution of arbitrary code without the user’s explicit consent. In this blog post, we’ll explain which VS Code features may reduce these risks. August 25, 2025 | 15 minutes Share: Related posts Strengthen your repositories against actions workflow injections — one of the most common vulnerabilities.
From finding to fixing: GitHub Advanced Security integrates Endor Labs SCA
The partnership between GitHub and Endor Labs enables application security engineers and developers to drastically reduce time spent on open source vulnerabilities, and gives them the tools to go from finding to fixing. & February 7, 2025 | Updated February 6, 2025 | 3 minutes Share: It’s no wonder developers are increasingly overwhelmed. The number of new CVEs published each year has increased by nearly 500% in the last decade.
Cybersecurity researchers: Digital detectives in a connected world
Home / Security / Vulnerability research Discover the exciting world of cybersecurity research: what researchers do, essential skills, and actionable steps to begin your journey toward protecting the digital world. January 29, 2025 | Updated January 28, 2025 | 11 minutes Share: Related posts Learn how specially crafted artifacts can be used to attack Maven repository managers.
Attacks on Maven proxy repositories
Home / Security / Vulnerability research Learn how specially crafted artifacts can be used to attack Maven repository managers. This post describes PoC exploits that can lead to pre-auth remote code execution and poisoning of the local artifacts in Sonatype Nexus and JFrog Artifactory. January 22, 2025 | 19 minutes Share: Related posts In the last few months, we secured 75+ GitHub Actions workflows in open source projects, disclosing 90+ different vulnerabilities.
Kicking off Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Researcher spotlights and additional incentives!
Home / Security / Vulnerability research For this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, GitHub’s Bug Bounty team is excited to offer some additional incentives to security researchers! September 26, 2024 | 2 minutes Share: Related posts In this post, I’ll exploit CVE-2024-5830, a type confusion in Chrome that allows remote code execution (RCE) in the renderer sandbox of Chrome by a single visit to a malicious site.
From object transition to RCE in the Chrome renderer
Home / Security / Vulnerability research In this post, I’ll exploit CVE-2024-5830, a type confusion in Chrome that allows remote code execution (RCE) in the renderer sandbox of Chrome by a single visit to a malicious site. August 13, 2024 | 13 minutes Share: Related posts Introducing the generally available capability of GitHub Artifact Attestations to secure your cloud-native supply chain packages and images.
Configure GitHub Artifact Attestations for secure cloud-native delivery
Home / Security / Supply chain security Introducing the generally available capability of GitHub Artifact Attestations to secure your cloud-native supply chain packages and images. July 30, 2024 | 6 minutes Share: When deploying in a truly cloud-native way, we need to ensure that we can trust what we’re deploying at every step of our supply chain. We need to be certain that what we think we are deploying is what we are actually deploying.
The latest blogs from GitHub
News & insights Keep up with what’s new and notable from inside GitHub. Company news An inside look at news and product updates from GitHub. Product The latest on GitHub’s platform, products, and tools. Octoverse Insights into the state of open source on GitHub. Policy The latest policy and regulatory changes in software. Research Data-driven insights around the developer ecosystem. Surveys What developers and industry leaders say matters most. The library Older news and updates from GitHub.
3 ways to get Remote Code Execution in Kafka UI
Kafka UI is a popular open source web application designed to manage and monitor Apache Kafka clusters. It is used mainly by developers and administrators to provide visual representation of the connected Kafka clusters. Some users may not be aware that in its default configuration, Kafka UI does not require authentication to read and write data. This results in many unprotected Kafka UI instances deployed in internal networks or even being exposed to the internet.
The GitHub Security Lab’s journey to disclosing 500 CVEs in open source projects
When I stepped onto the scale this morning, I remembered that there are some numbers that feel awkward to celebrate, while perhaps some others are worth celebrating! Recently, the GitHub Security Lab passed the milestone of 500 CVEs disclosed to open source projects. What’s a CVE? In short, it’s the record of a security vulnerability, under the CVE program, intended to inform impacted users. So, finding more vulnerabilities in open source shouldn’t be good news, right?
mTLS: When certificate authentication is done wrong
Although X.509 certificates have been here for a while, they have become more popular for client authentication in zero-trust networks in recent years. Mutual TLS, or authentication based on X.509 certificates in general, brings advantages compared to passwords or tokens, but you get increased complexity in return. In this post, I’ll deep dive into some interesting attacks on mTLS authentication.
ForgeRock / OpenAM Jato Java Deserialization
## # This module requires Metasploit: https://metasploit.com/download # Current source: https://github.com/rapid7/metasploit-framework ## class MetasploitModule < Msf::Exploit::Remote Rank = ExcellentRanking prepend Msf::Exploit::Remote::AutoCheck include Msf::Exploit::Remote::HttpClient include Msf::Exploit::CmdStager def initialize(info = {}) super( update_info( info, 'Name' => 'ForgeRock / OpenAM Jato Java Deserialization', 'Description' => %q{ This module leverages a pre-authentication...
nOtWASP bottom 10: vulnerabilities that make you cry
Published: 01 April 2021 at 10:59 UTC Updated: 01 April 2021 at 11:10 UTC Everyone's heard of the OWASP Top 10 - the often-cited list of major threats that every web developer should be conscious of. But if you cast your gaze across pentest reports and bug bounty findings, you'll discover another insidious theme emerges: 'vulnerabilities' that simply don't make sense. Why? It varies. Some are simply misunderstandings, or even just beg-bounties.
Hidden OAuth attack vectors
Published: 24 March 2021 at 14:59 UTC Updated: 25 March 2021 at 14:49 UTC Intro The OAuth2 authorization protocol has been under fire for the past ten years. You've probably already heard about plenty of "return_uri" tricks, token leakages, CSRF-style attacks on clients, and more. In this post, however, we're going to present three brand new OAuth2 and OpenID Connect vulnerabilities: "Dynamic Client Registration: SSRF by design", "redirect_uri Session Poisoning", and "WebFinger User Enumeration".
Exploiting Spring Boot Actuators
This article is in the Product Showcase section for our sponsors at CodeProject. These articles are intended to provide you with information on products and services that we consider useful and of value to developers. The Spring Boot Framework includes a number of features called actuators to help you monitor and manage your web application when you push it to production.
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