Page 78 - Cyber Defense eMagazine August 2024

RegreSSHion, Critical RCE Vulnerabilities, and When Should

You Be Scared?

By Jonathan Jacobi, CTO Office, Dazz

On July 1st, 2024, the cybersecurity community was rocked by the discovery of a critical Remote Code
Execution (RCE) vulnerability in OpenSSH, aptly named regreSSHion. This revelation triggered a frenzy
among security teams who scrambled to locate and secure their SSH servers, while security vendors
rushed to develop and deploy fixes and detections. The chaos was palpable, underscoring the need for
a deeper understanding of such vulnerabilities. In this article, we will explore the nature of RCE
vulnerabilities, their potential impact, and how to assess their severity and urgency.

Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities enable attackers to execute arbitrary code on a target
machine remotely due to a software bug. These vulnerabilities can vary widely in their criticality,
influenced by several key factors that you should check, before you panic.

One of the most critical aspects of RCE vulnerabilities is whether they are pre-authentication (pre-auth).
Pre-auth vulnerabilities do not require any form of authentication, allowing attackers to execute code
without needing to know any passwords, keys, or secrets. This dramatically lowers the barrier to

Cyber Defense eMagazine – August 2024 Edition 78
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