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Testimonials
“When the computer I use to run my photography business started acting erratically and kept shutting down, I was in a panic. I depend on that computer to deliver final products to my clients. Fortunately, I brought my HP into Advantage for repair and in one day I had my computer back. Not only did… Read more “They made sure EVERYTHING was working”
Zack is amazing! I have gone to him with computer issues for the past few years now and he always finds a way to fix things and at a reasonable price. This time I went to Advantage Computer Solutions to find a new laptop. I needed help because like most of us I had no… Read more “Amazing!”
Cannot say enough good things about Zack Rahhal and his team. Professional, smart, sensitive to small biz budgets and a helluva good guy. Could not operate my small biz without them!
stars indeed. So reliable and helpful and kind and smart. We call Al and he is “on it” immediately and such a FABULOUS teacher, patient and terrific. So happy with Advantage Computer Solutions and Al and his AMAZINGLY WONDERFUL STAFF.
I’ve been a customer of the staff at Advantage for many years now. They have never let me down! Whatever my need, however big or small my problem, they have been unfailingly helpful, friendly and professional. Services are performed promptly and effectively, and they are very fair with pricing, too. I am lucky to have… Read more “Whatever my need, unfailingly helpful”
I’ve known the Advantage Team for years. They are the absolute best techs in the field, bar none. I couldn’t tell you how many tens thousands of dollars they saved us over the years; they can be trusted to never scam anyone even though they would do so very easily. The turnaround time is also… Read more “Best Kept Secret”
I had an excellent experience with Advantage. Aside from being extremely professional and pleasant generally, Zack was incredibly responsive and helpful, even before and after my appointment, and really resolved IT issues in my home office that had been plaguing me for years. I am so relieved to not have to think about this anymore!… Read more “Excellent Experience”
Simply The Best! Our company has been working with Advantage Computer Solutions for a few years, Zack and his Team are AWESOME! They are super reliable – whether it’s everyday maintenance or emergencies that may arise, The Advantage Team take care of us! Our team is grateful for their knowledgeable and professional services – a… Read more “Simply The Best!”
The engineering team at Advantage Computers is the best in the business. They are nothing short of technical wizards.
Al, Nasser and Zack have been keeping our operations going for over a decade, taking care of our regular upgrades and our emergency system problems. When we have an emergency, they make it their emergency. Its like having a cousin in the business.
In many cases, exceptional people do not receive recognition for their hard work and superior customer service. We do not want this to be one of those times. Zack Rahhal has been our hardware and technical consultant for our servers, Pc’s and other technical equipment since April 2004 and has provided valuable input and courteous service to… Read more “Exceptional People”
I became a customer about 6-7 months and I can say nothing but great things about this business. Zack takes care of me. I am an attorney and operate my own small firm. I have limited knowledge of computers. Zack is very patient in explaining things. He has offered practical and economical solutions to multiple… Read more “Highly Recommended”
THANK GOD for this local computer repair business who saved me hundreds, my hard drive was messed up, i called the company with warranty they said it would be $600, I went in they did a quick diagnostic, and based on his observations he gave me a step by step of the possible problems and… Read more “Life Savers”
I don’t have enough words to express my appreciation for Nassar and Paul, and the other members of Advantage Computer Solutions. I live in Bergen County and travel to Passaic County because of the trust I have in the competence and honesty of Advantage Computers. What a blessing to have such seasoned and caring professionals… Read more “I don’t have enough words to express my appreciation”
Advantage Computer Solutions is absolutely great. They show up, do what they say they are going to, complete the job without issues (my other computer companies had to keep coming back to fix things they “forgot” to do….) and are fairly priced. Zack is awesome, reliable, dependable, knowledgeable….everything you want in a computer solutions vendor.
Knowledgeable, Reliable, Reasonable Working with Advantage Computers since 1997 for both personal and business tech support has been a rewarding and enjoyable experience. Rewarding, in that the staff is very knowledgeable, approaching needs and issues in a very straightforward, common sense manner, resulting in timely solutions and resolutions. Enjoyable, these guys are really friendly (not… Read more “Knowledgeable, Reliable, Reasonable”
Excellent service! I am the administrator for a busy medical office which relies heavily on our computer system. We have used Advantage Computer Solutions for installation, set-up and for service. The response time is immediate and the staff is often able to provide help remotely. Very affordable and honest…. A++!!! Essex Surgical relies on Advantage… Read more “Excellent service!”
Advantage offers great advice and service I bought parts for my gaming pc online and they put it together in a day for a great price. They are very professional. I was very satisfied with their service. I am a newbie in terms of PC gaming so they gave me great advice on this new piece… Read more “Great Advice and Service”
Our company has been using the services of Advantage Computers since 2006. It was important to find a reliable company to provide us with the technical support both onsite and offsite. It was through a recommendation that we contacted Advantage to have them provide us with a quote to install a new server and update our… Read more “Great Service, Support and Sales”
Our company has been working with Advantage since the 1990’s and have been a loyal client ever since. Advantage does not make it very difficult to be loyal as they offer services from the most intricate and personalized to the global scale. Our company has grown beyond its doors of a local office to National… Read more “Extremely Professional and Passionate”
Advantage Computer Solutions has handled all of our computer and IT needs for the past 2 years. The staff is always professional and the service is always prompt. When your computers are down or not working properly is affects all aspects of your business, it is wonderful to have such a reliable team on our… Read more “Handles all our Office IT”
Since 1996 the Housing Authority of the City of Passaic has been a client of Advantage Computer Solutions. Our Agency has utilized their outstanding services and expertise to solve our technologic problems and growth over the past eighteen years. We would like to personally thank them for proposing cost effective solutions while reducing labor-intense tasks… Read more “Passaic Housing Authority”
“When the computer I use to run my photography business started acting erratically and kept shutting down, I was in a panic. I depend on that computer to deliver final products to my clients. Fortunately, I brought my HP into Advantage for repair and in one day I had my computer back. Not only did… Read more “They made sure EVERYTHING was working”
Zack is amazing! I have gone to him with computer issues for the past few years now and he always finds a way to fix things and at a reasonable price. This time I went to Advantage Computer Solutions to find a new laptop. I needed help because like most of us I had no… Read more “Amazing!”
How Emotet is changing tactics in response to Microsoft’s tightening of Office macro security
Emotet malware is back with ferocious vigor, according to ESET telemetry in the first four months of 2022. Will it survive the ever-tightening controls on macro-enabled documents?
The post How Emotet is changing tactics in response to Microsoft’s tightening of Office macro security appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
SBOM in Action: finding vulnerabilities with a Software Bill of Materials
Posted by Brandon Lum and Oliver Chang, Google Open Source Security Team
The past year has seen an industry-wide effort to embrace Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs)—a list of all the components, libraries, and modules that are required to build a piece of software. In the wake of the 2021 Executive Order on Cybersecurity, these ingredient labels for software became popular as a way to understand what’s in the software we all consume. The guiding idea is that it’s impossible to judge the risks of particular software without knowing all of its components—including those produced by others. This increased interest in SBOMs saw another boost after the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its Secure Software Development Framework, which requires SBOM information to be available for software. But now that the industry is making progress on methods to generate and share SBOMs, what do we do with them?
Generating an SBOM is only one half of the story. Once an SBOM is available for a given piece of software, it needs to be mapped onto a list of known vulnerabilities to know which components could pose a threat. By connecting these two sources of information, consumers will know not just what’s in their software, but also its risks and whether they need to remediate any issues.
In this blog post, we demonstrate the process of taking an SBOM from a large and critical project—Kubernetes—and using an open source tool to identify the vulnerabilities it contains. Our example’s success shows that we don’t need to wait for SBOM generation to reach full maturity before we begin mapping SBOMs to common vulnerability databases. With just a few updates from SBOM creators to address current limitations in connecting the two sources of data, this process is poised to become easily within reach of the average software consumer.
OSV: Connecting SBOMs to vulnerabilities
The following example uses Kubernetes, a major project that makes its SBOM available using the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) format—an international open standard (ISO) for communicating SBOM information. The same idea should apply to any project that makes its SBOM available, and for projects that don’t, you can generate your own SBOM using the same bom tool Kubernetes created.
We have chosen to map the SBOM to the Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV) database, which describes vulnerabilities in a format that was specifically designed to map to open source package versions or commit hashes. The OSV database excels here as it provides a standardized format and aggregates information across multiple ecosystems (e.g., Python, Golang, Rust) and databases (e.g., Github Advisory Database (GHSA), Global Security Database (GSD)).
To connect the SBOM to the database, we’ll use the SPDX spdx-to-osv tool. This open source tool takes in an SPDX SBOM document, queries the OSV database of vulnerabilities, and returns an enumeration of vulnerabilities present in the software’s declared components.
Example: Kubernetes’ SBOM
The first step is to download Kubernetes’ SBOM, which is publicly available and contains information on the project, dependencies, versions, and licenses. Anyone can download it with a simple curl command:
# Download the Kubernetes SPDX source document
$ curl -L https://sbom.k8s.io/v1.21.3/source > k8s-1.21.3-source.spdx
The next step is to use the SPDX spdx-to-osv tool to connect the Kubernetes’ SBOM to the OSV database:
# Run the spdx-to-osv tool, taking the information from the SPDX SBOM and mapping it to OSV vulnerabilities
$ java -jar ./target/spdx-to-osv-0.0.4-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar -I k8s-1.21.3-source.spdx -O out-k8s.1.21.3.json
# Show the output OSV vulnerabilities of the spdx-to-osv tool
$ cat out-k8s.1.21.3.json
…
{
“id”: “GHSA-w73w-5m7g-f7qc”,
“published”: “2021-05-18T21:08:21Z”,
“modified”: “2021-06-28T21:32:34Z”,
“aliases”: [
“CVE-2020-26160”
],
“summary”: “Authorization bypass in github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go”,
“details”: “jwt-go allows attackers to bypass intended access restrictions in situations with []string{} for m[\”aud\”] (which is allowed by the specification). Because the type assertion fails, \”\” is the value of aud. This is a security problem if the JWT token is presented to a service that lacks its own audience check. There is no patch available and users of jwt-go are advised to migrate to [golang-jwt](https://github.com/golang-jwt/jwt) at version 3.2.1″,
“affected”: [
{
“package”: {
“name”: “github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go”,
“ecosystem”: “Go”,
“purl”: “pkg:golang/github.com/dgrijalva/jwt-go”
},
…
The output of the tool shows that v1.21.3 of Kubernetes contains the CVE-2020-26160 vulnerability. This information can be helpful to determine if any additional action is required to manage the risk of operating this software. For example, if an organization is using v1.21.3 of Kubernetes, measures can be taken to trigger company policy to update the deployment, which will protect the organization against attacks exploiting this vulnerability.
To get the spdx-to-osv tool to work we had to make some minor changes to disambiguate the information provided in the SBOM:
These are relatively minor hurdles, though, and we were able to successfully run the tool with only small manual adjustments. To make the process easier in the future, we have the following recommendation for improving SBOM generation tooling:
SBOM in the future
It’s clear that we’re getting very close to achieving the original goal of SBOMs: using them to help manage the risk of vulnerabilities in software. Our example queried the OSV database, but we will soon see the same success in mapping SBOM data to other vulnerability databases and even using them with new standards like VEX, which provides additional context around whether vulnerabilities in software have been mitigated.
Continuing on this path of widespread SBOM adoption and tooling refinement, we will hopefully soon be able to not only request and download SBOMs for every piece of software, but also use them to understand the vulnerabilities affecting any software we consume. This example is a peek into a possible future of what SBOMs can offer when we bridge the gap to connect them with vulnerability databases: a new normal of worrying less about the risks in the software we use.
A special thanks to Gary O’Neall of Source Auditor for creating the spdx-to-osv tool and contributing to this blog post.
Industroyer: A cyber‑weapon that brought down a power grid
Five years ago, ESET researchers released their analysis of the first ever malware that was designed specifically to attack power grids
The post Industroyer: A cyber‑weapon that brought down a power grid appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
3 takeaways from RSA Conference 2022 – Week in security with Tony Anscombe
Here are three themes that stood out at the world’s largest gathering of cybersecurity professionals
The post 3 takeaways from RSA Conference 2022 – Week in security with Tony Anscombe appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
RSA – APIs, your organization’s dedicated backdoors
API-based data transfer is so rapid, there’s but little time to stop very bad things happening quickly
The post RSA – APIs, your organization’s dedicated backdoors appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
RSA – Creepy real‑world edition
Digital fiddling somehow got mixed up in a real war
The post RSA – Creepy real‑world edition appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
RSA – Digital healthcare meets security, but does it really want to?
Technology is understandably viewed as a nuisance to be managed in pursuit of the health organizations’ primary mission
The post RSA – Digital healthcare meets security, but does it really want to? appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
RSA – Spot the real fake
How erring on the side of privacy might ultimately save you from chasing down a virtual rendition of you doing the bidding of a scammer
The post RSA – Spot the real fake appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Cybersecurity awareness training: What is it and what works best?
Give employees the knowledge needed to spot the warning signs of a cyberattack and to understand when they may be putting sensitive data at risk
The post Cybersecurity awareness training: What is it and what works best? appeared first on WeLiveSecurity
Announcing the winners of the 2021 GCP VRP Prize
Posted by Harshvardhan Sharma, Information Security Engineer, Google
2021 was another record-breaking year for our Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP). We paid a total of $8.7 million in rewards, our highest amount yet. 2021 saw some amazing work from the security research community. It is worth noting that a significant portion of the reports we received were for findings in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products. It is heartening to see an increasing number of talented researchers getting involved in cloud security.
We first announced the GCP VRP Prize in 2019 to encourage security researchers to focus on the security of GCP, in turn helping us make GCP more secure for our users, customers, and the internet at large. Even 3 years into the program, the submissions we are getting never cease to amaze us. After careful evaluation of the submissions, we are excited to announce the 2021 winners:
First Prize, $133,337: Sebastian Lutz for the report and write-up Bypassing Identity-Aware Proxy. Sebastian’s excellent write-up outlines how he found a bug in Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) which an attacker could have exploited to gain access to a user’s IAP-protected resources by making them visit an attacker-controlled URL and stealing their IAP auth token.
Second Prize, $73,331: Imre Rad for the report and write-up GCE VM takeover via DHCP flood. The flaw described in the write-up would have allowed an attacker to gain access to a Google Compute Engine VM by sending malicious DHCP packets to the VM and impersonating the GCE metadata server.
Third Prize, $73,331: Mike Brancato for the report and write-up Remote Code Execution in Google Cloud Dataflow. Mike’s write-up describes how he discovered that Dataflow nodes were exposing an unauthenticated Java JMX port and how an attacker could have exploited this to run arbitrary commands on the VM under some configurations.
Fourth Prize, $31,337: Imre Rad for the write-up The Speckle Umbrella story — part 2 which details multiple vulnerabilities that Imre found in Cloud SQL.
(Remember, you can make multiple submissions for the GCP VRP Prize and be eligible for more than one prize!)
Fifth Prize, $1,001: Anthony Weems for the report and write-up Remote code execution in Managed Anthos Service Mesh control plane. Anthony found a bug in Managed Anthos Service Mesh and came up with a clever exploit to execute arbitrary commands authenticated as a Google-managed per-project service account.
Sixth Prize, $1,000: Ademar Nowasky Junior for the report and write-up Command Injection in Google Cloud Shell. Ademar found a way to bypass some of the validation checks done by Cloud Shell. This would have allowed an attacker to run arbitrary commands in a user’s Cloud Shell session by making them visit a maliciously crafted link.
Congratulations to all the winners!
Here’s a video that with more details about each of the winning submissions:
New Details About 2022 GCP VRP
We will pay out a total of $313,337 to the top seven submissions in the 2022 edition of the GCP VRP Prize. Individual prize amounts will be as follows:
If you are a security researcher, here’s how you can enter the competition for the GCP VRP Prize 2022:
Make sure to submit your VRP reports and write-ups before January 15, 2023 at 23:59 PT. VRP reports which were submitted in preceding years but fixed only in 2022 are also eligible. You can check out the official rules for the prize here. Good luck!