Cybersecurity Weekly Briefing — July 12, 2024
RegreSSHion remediation, Oregon’s privacy law enforcement, and new PRC living-off-the-land advisories drove this week’s cyber runbooks; Zeph Tech aggregates the controls, incident playbooks, and board updates you need in place.
Executive briefing: The week ending July 12, 2024 forced defenders to juggle newly weaponized OpenSSH flaws, state-level privacy enforcement, and cross-sector operational technology (OT) resilience updates. The RegreSSHion vulnerability (CVE-2024-6387) arrived with proof-of-concept exploits just as Oregon regulators began enforcing the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act. Meanwhile, U.S. and allied agencies outlined how People’s Republic of China (PRC) operators are exploiting built-in binaries to avoid detection, and NIST released fresh OT cybersecurity guidance that boards will expect to see in resilience roadmaps.
Week of July 8 highlights
- July 1 — RegreSSHion (CVE-2024-6387) disclosure. OpenSSH maintainers shipped patches for a signal handler race condition that allows unauthenticated remote code execution on glibc-based systems; proof-of-concept exploits were public by July 3.
- July 1 — Oregon Consumer Privacy Act enforcement. The law entered into force with obligations for opt-out signals, purpose limitation, and vendor contracts—privacy teams must now evidence compliance to the Oregon Department of Justice.
- July 2 — Joint PRC living-off-the-land advisory. CISA, the FBI, NSA, and international partners detailed how PRC actors abuse remote management tools and Windows utilities to persist across critical infrastructure networks.
- July 9 — NIST OT cybersecurity practice guide. NIST’s Guide to Operational Technology (OT) Cybersecurity outlined updated detection engineering, segmentation, and incident response playbooks mapped to SP 800-82 Revision 3.
Immediate response actions
- Accelerate RegreSSHion remediation across internet-facing bastion hosts, enabling
LoginGraceTimehardening and backport patches for vendor appliances that cannot yet upgrade to OpenSSH 9.8p1. - Deploy living-off-the-land detection content referencing the joint advisory’s command-line sequences, Sysinternals abuse cases, and remote monitoring agent misuse.
- Log all Oregon Consumer Privacy Act data subject requests and establish 45-day fulfillment SLAs with clear evidence trails for regulators.
Program and board updates
- Brief audit committees on RegreSSHion exposure, showing asset counts, remediation coverage, and compensating controls for operational technology and network appliances pending vendor patches.
- Refresh privacy governance charters so Oregon-specific opt-out flows, vendor due diligence, and profiling disclosures align with existing California and Colorado compliance inventories.
- Integrate NIST’s OT guidance into resilience roadmaps, mapping segmentation, continuous monitoring, and incident response metrics to NERC CIP-013, IEC 62443-3-3, and corporate risk registers.
Detection and readiness tasks
- Instrument packet captures and Zeek signatures for anomalous SSH negotiation retries that indicate RegreSSHion exploitation attempts.
- Update purple team scenarios to include PRC tradecraft abusing
wmic,netsh, and remote monitoring tools, ensuring detection pipelines cover both Windows and Linux log sources. - Extend OT tabletop exercises with NIST’s revised recovery and communications checklists so operators rehearse downtime thresholds, failover plans, and regulator notification cadences.