Can you believe that summer is nearly over? The autumn months are getting even closer now, and we're mentally preparing ourselves for the inevitable winter cold to come.

It's been a pretty exciting month for the Queens,  both Sarah and Sophia have been doing their LCHS duties (Ladies of Cheltenham Hacking Society) and recently ran a Summer Software Special "whistle stop tour of software development" and "how coding skills are valuable in the cyber world". It was an awesome evening, and we hope that all attendees enjoyed the workshop - watch out on LCHS' socials for when the recording is uploaded onto YouTube! 

You may have seen the news fluttering about in the Twittersphere, but BSides London has now returned and is going ahead in November! We can't contain our excitement, so much so - we may be applying to give a talk... 

In other news, we're also issuing a gentle reminder that we still have merchandise available here from our RedBubble store. Once enough profits are raised we're setting up a sponsorship fund to help folks around the world attend conferences, meetups and other security events. The more stickers you buy, the more funds we can use to help! 

Now let's get into the nitty-gritty. A recent vulnerability was identified by Benny Jacobs through the Atlassian bug bounty program. An injection vulnerability found in the Confluence Server Webwork Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a Confluence Server. This has been rated as a critical vulnerability... get upgrading.

 The Fortinet's management interface for the FortiWeb web app firewall was reported as vulnerable to command injection. It was reported a backtick used in the name field would allow an attacker to execute commands on the server as root. An attacker would need to gain access to the firewall to be able to execute this attack.

Furthermore, ransomware has been floating about in the news, and at this point, it seems as if anyone can be a target. A school in the Isle of Wight was hit by ransomware. Sensitive information has been encrypted and it is not yet clear how the incident occurred. Hold onto your data folks!

Hack the planet, hack the... tractors? Yep - you heard us right. The rise in connected and automated farming has now left the world's food supply chain vulnerable to a cyberattack that could allow attackers to damage crops, property and farmland - potentially for years. Recently researcher group "Sick Codes" were able to breach John Deere, and were able "to make changes to supply networks, equipment reservations and even the contact details of those who received demo units" . This prompted John Deere to publish a security advisory and address the mitigations. If you fancy reading more about cyber security in the agricultural space, (shameless plug) you can find an NCC Group research paper Sophia contributed to not too long ago here. 

To round things off, a security researcher recently found a zero-day vulnerability in Razer's in-house software Razer Synapse. As any Windows 10 or 11 device will automatically download the Razer Synapse software upon first use, the vulnerability allows any user that plugs in a a Razer device to gain SYSTEM privileges. 

We hope you enjoyed the bank holiday weekend (at least those UK-based folks) and as always, you can find our most recent blog posts below.

Lots of love,

The Security Queens xxx