The Windows registry is full of information, and with the proper tools, can be a gold mine for attackers and defenders alike. Attackers look to find specific configurations, credentials, or any information that can help them further attack systems, while defenders can use the registry to ensure that settings are configured as they are expected to. This is something that is not always easy to do with standard tools in Windows, or with the right level of performance. Fortunately, osquery solves that for us.

2018: The year of speculative execution bugs

A year ago, in January 2018, three hardware vulnerabilities known as Meltdown, Spectre Variant 1, and Spectre Variant 2 were disclosed to the public.

Although disclosure was supposed to occur on January 9, news outlets found updates in the Linux Kernel and broke word early on January 3, kicking off the year with a pretty big headache for IT and security teams across the globe.

Last week, Malwarebytes posted an article highlighting new malware discovered by John Lambert (Microsoft), Patrick Wardle (Objective-See and Digita Security) and Adam Thomas (Malwarebytes), and sure enough, persistence using launchd is still a common thing.

Dark Reading and Forbes, among various other sources, have recently reported that Windows computers using the hardware encryption feature of many different types of solid-state drives (SSDs) are vulnerable to attacks that defeat it completely. These vulnerabilities, discovered by Radboud University researchers Carlo Meijer and Bernard van Gastel, affect multiple models including some made by the popular brands Crucial and Samsung.