Radar · 2023-07
July 2023
Citrix NetScaler appliances are compromised through an unauthenticated flaw before the patch exists and stay compromised after it, Ivanti's mobile management zero-days are chained against a dozen Norwegian government ministries, a WordPress payments plugin patched in March is mass-exploited in July at 1.3 million attacks against 157,000 sites, OpenAI sets a retirement date for the model string half the early CMS integrations hardcoded and APRA finalises the standard that turns hosting vendors into material service providers.
What's on our radar this month: releases, advisories and standards across the stack we run and the platforms we integrate with.
AI platform and models
Sections- notable OpenAI
GPT-4 is generally available to paying API customers, and Completions models get a retirement date — openai.com
OpenAI made GPT-4 generally available to existing paying API customers on 6 July 2023, giving access to GPT-4 with 8K context — OpenAI did not extend general availability to gpt-4-32k or to vision. GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL-E and Whisper were declared generally available at the same time. OpenAI also set 4 January 2024 as the retirement date for the older Completions API models: ada, babbage, curie, davinci and the text-davinci family including text-davinci-003, with developers directed to babbage-002, davinci-002 or gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct.
If you inherit a 2023-era AI integration, check the model string against this list before anything else — a dead model string fails at runtime with an API error that looks nothing like a deprecation notice.
- fyi Anthropic
Claude 2 ships with a 100K context window — anthropic.com
Released 11 July 2023 with a 100,000-token input context window. Anthropic reported 76.5 per cent on the multiple-choice section of the Bar exam, up from 73.0, and 71.2 per cent on HumanEval Python, up from 56.0 — the coding jump being the largest. API pricing was unchanged from Claude 1.3. A beta chat interface at claude.ai opened to United States and United Kingdom users only, with wider availability promised in the coming months. Jasper and Sourcegraph were named as adopters.
Note the geography, because it dates claims: claude.ai was US and UK only at launch, so the web interface was not open in Australia in mid-2023 and any story from that period about staff using the Claude web interface here needs a second look.
- fyi OWASP
The OWASP LLM Top 10 reaches its v0.5 and v0.9 drafts — owasp.org
The project changelog records v0.1 as the initial straw-man list on 23 May 2023, v0.5 as the first working-group draft on 1 July and v0.9 as the second draft incorporating feedback on 18 July, ahead of v1.0 on 1 August. The v0.5 post states that over 370 experts had joined the group with more than 100 actively contributing, and that about half the original straw-man entries survived into v0.5. The draft PDFs remain published on the project site.
Only worth reaching for if you need to show what was knowable at a point in time — a system designed in July 2023 could reasonably have been assessed against v0.5 or v0.9, but not against v1.0, and half the straw-man entries did not survive. For any current assessment go straight to v1.0 and later.
Security and edge
Sections- critical Citrix
NetScaler appliances stay compromised after the patch — bleepingcomputer.com
CVE-2023-3519 is an unauthenticated remote code execution flaw in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway carrying CVSS 9.8, disclosed 18 July 2023 with Citrix confirming exploits on unmitigated appliances had been observed. Citrix lists 13.1 before 13.1-49.13, 13.0 before 13.0-91.13, 13.1-FIPS before 13.1-37.159, and 12.1-FIPS and 12.1-NDcPP before 12.1-55.297 as affected. Exploitation requires the appliance to be configured as a gateway or as an AAA authentication virtual server, but needs no credentials. CISA reported that actors exploited the flaw as a zero-day in June 2023 to drop a webshell on a critical infrastructure organisation's appliance. BleepingComputer advised looking for web shells newer than the last installation date.
Patching is necessary and not sufficient. Pre-patch compromise persists across the upgrade, so the work is to hunt for webshells and unexpected files under the NetScaler filesystem as a separate task from applying the fix. This is the third month running where the honest answer to an appliance compromise is investigate rather than update, which is worth making explicit in whatever runbook currently says "apply vendor patch" and stops there.
- critical Ivanti
Two chained zero-days take a dozen Norwegian ministries — bleepingcomputer.com
CVE-2023-35078 is a remote unauthenticated API access flaw in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile, formerly MobileIron Core, exploited as a zero-day against the IT systems of roughly a dozen Norwegian government ministries. It allowed theft of personal information including names and phone numbers, and creation of administrative accounts. On 28 July Ivanti patched a second zero-day, CVE-2023-35081, a path traversal permitting arbitrary file writes; chained with the first it bypasses administrator authentication entirely and yields command execution as the tomcat user. Shodan showed over 2,600 internet-exposed portals at the time. CISA ordered US federal agencies to patch by 15 August.
Upgrade to the latest build, but treat the exposure itself as the defect worth fixing — the chain only works because a mobile device management API is reachable from the public internet. Worth asking of every management plane in the estate rather than only this one: does it need to be internet-facing, and if the answer is "for remote staff", whether that is better served by putting it behind something that authenticates first.
- critical TLS
NSS 3.92 removes the e-Tugra v3 roots and the expired e-Tugra CA root — mozilla.org
Mozilla opened public discussion of e-Tugra's root store inclusion on 5 June 2023 and decided on 11 July 2023 to remove both e-Tugra v3 roots, plus the expired E-Tugra Certification Authority root as previously planned. The public discussion recorded default passwords on some administrative tools. The removal shipped in NSS 3.92 on 27 July 2023. This is a removal: the roots stop validating for everything, whatever the issuance date.
A removal has no grace period, so a certificate chaining to e-Tugra needed replacing before Firefox picked up NSS 3.92 rather than at its next renewal. The transferable check is whether you can answer "which CA issued this" for every certificate you terminate — if that takes more than a query, the next root removal is an outage rather than a task.
- fyi OpenSSL
Three Low-severity OpenSSL advisories cluster in July — openssl-library.org
CVE-2023-2975 on 7 July — the AES-SIV implementation ignores empty associated data entries, so applications relying on AES-SIV for authenticated encryption with associated data may not get the integrity guarantee they expect. CVE-2023-3446 on 13 July — excessive time checking Diffie-Hellman keys and parameters, a denial of service against applications calling DH_check on untrusted parameters. CVE-2023-3817 on 31 July — the same class again, against the DH q parameter. All rated Low, all fixed in 3.0.10 and 3.1.2.
None of these are reachable through ordinary TLS server termination with standard ciphersuites, so this is routine maintenance rather than a scheduled change — land 3.0.10 or 3.1.2 on the normal cycle. They matter only if you accept untrusted Diffie-Hellman parameters or use AES-SIV, which is worth checking once and then knowing.
Standards and compliance
Sections- notable APRA
APRA finalises CPS 230 on operational risk — apra.gov.au
APRA released the final Prudential Standard CPS 230 Operational Risk Management on 17 July 2023, to take effect 1 July 2025. It requires APRA-regulated entities — banks, insurers and superannuation trustees — to manage operational risks including those from material service providers. APRA also released draft Prudential Practice Guide CPG 230 the same day.
Expect Australian financial-sector clients to ask web, CMS, hosting and integration vendors much harder questions — are you a material service provider, what are your tolerance levels for outage, what must you notify us of and how fast, and can we exercise step-in and audit rights. The 2025 effective date is misleading: a two-year lead time is roughly one renewal cycle, so contracts signed or renewed now will be in force when it commences. It is the enterprise counterpart to SOCI's CIRMP.
- notable Home Affairs
Australia gets a National Cyber Security Coordinator — minister.homeaffairs.gov.au
Air Marshal Darren Goldie commenced as Australia's first National Cyber Security Coordinator on 3 July 2023, appointed by the Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security on 23 June. The role sits with the National Office of Cyber Security in Home Affairs and covers national cyber security policy, coordination of responses to major cyber incidents, whole-of-government incident preparedness and strengthening Commonwealth cyber capability.
For anyone running government-facing systems this changed who to notify and in what order during a significant incident — a single Commonwealth point of contact sitting above but separate from ASD and ACSC's technical role and the OAIC's privacy role. Worth checking that incident runbooks written before mid-2023 name the office rather than the person.
Update, November 2023: Air Marshal Darren Goldie was recalled to Defence in November 2023.
- notable W3C
WCAG 2.2 reaches Proposed Recommendation — w3.org
W3C advanced WCAG 2.2 to Proposed Recommendation on 20 July 2023, following Candidate Recommendation Drafts in January and May 2023.
This is the point where "WCAG 2.2 might still change" stops being a defensible reason to defer remediation. Australian agencies procuring or accepting new web work from July onward have a stable target to write into contracts and acceptance criteria.
Update, October 2023: W3C published WCAG 2.2 as a Recommendation on 5 October 2023.
Update, December 2024: W3C published an updated WCAG 2.2 Recommendation on 12 December 2024.
CMS and platforms
Sections- critical WooCommerce
A payments plugin patched in March is mass-exploited in July — thehackernews.com
CVE-2023-28121, CVSS 9.8, is an authentication bypass in the WooCommerce Payments plugin, installed on over 600,000 sites and affecting versions 4.8.0 to 5.6.1. Attackers sent the HTTP header X-Wcpay-Platform-Checkout-User set to 1 so requests were processed with administrator identity, then installed the WP Console plugin to run code and plant persistent backdoors. Wordfence recorded the campaign starting on 14 July and peaking on 16 July with roughly 1.3 million attacks against 157,000 sites. Patches had been available since March 2023 — the wave hit sites that had not applied them.
Confirm the plugin is at or past 4.8.2, 4.9.1, 5.0.4, 5.1.3, 5.2.2, 5.3.1, 5.4.1, 5.5.2 or 5.6.2 for its branch, then do the part patching does not cover: hunt for rogue administrator accounts, rotate admin passwords, and rotate payment gateway and WooCommerce API keys. The gap between the March patch and the July campaign is the durable lesson — attackers wait for the patch window to close and for attention to move on.
- notable Drupal
Drupal stops issuing advisories for lower-risk core issues — drupal.org
PSA-2023-07-12 announced that issues rated Not Critical, Less Critical or Moderately Critical may now be handled as ordinary public bugs in the issue queue rather than as private security issues with an advisory and a CVE. Critical and Highly Critical issues continue to be handled privately, as do some lower-risk issues at the team's discretion. Three categories are explicitly eligible for public treatment — information disclosure where the data is already publicly reachable, content injection, and denial of service. Researchers should still report privately first so the team can classify.
A monitoring process that watches only SA-CORE advisories will miss security fixes from mid-2023 onward, and will not notice it is missing them. Add the public Drupal core issue queue on the security-related tags, and adjust the inference you draw from a quiet month: "no advisory" became weaker evidence of "nothing to patch" from this date, which matters when a client asks you to attest to currency.
- fyi GovCMS
GovCMS's February plan aimed at a July to September Drupal 10 window — govcms.gov.au
The 27 February 2023 Path to Drupal 10 update said GovCMS was aiming for all D9 sites to be upgraded to D10 between July and September 2023.
Treat the July to September 2023 window as GovCMS's published aim, not as confirmation that a given site was cut over.
Supply chain, CI/CD and IaC
Sections- notable npm
npm starts flagging provenance that points at a repository that is gone — github.blog
From 11 July 2023, npmjs.com displays an error at the top of a package page, and alongside the provenance panel, when the linked source commit or repository cannot be found — typically because the repository was deleted or made private after publication. The announcement explicitly foreshadowed the next step.
If you publish with provenance, the source repository is now part of the published artefact. Deleting the repository or making it private silently degrades every package you have already shipped from it, and nothing in your own tooling will tell you — the error appears on the public package page, to your consumers. Worth adding to whatever checklist covers deleting a repository or making it private.
- notable npm
Provenance from private source repositories is withdrawn — github.blog
Two weeks after the warning shipped, npm made it a hard rule: publishing with provenance is restricted to public source repositories only, and private source repositories are no longer supported for provenance on public packages.
Check this before planning any provenance adoption, because it is a constraint rather than a configuration problem: a public npm package built from a private repository cannot carry provenance at all. The choice is to open the source repository or to publish without an attestation, and that is a decision for whoever owns the repository rather than the release engineer who discovers it.
Languages, runtimes and frameworks
Sections- notable Go
Go's HTTP/1 client starts rejecting invalid Host headers — pkg.go.dev
CVE-2023-29406, CVSS 6.5: the HTTP/1 client did not fully validate the Host header, so a crafted Host could inject additional headers or entire requests. Go 1.19.11 and 1.20.6, released on 11 July 2023, fix it: the client now refuses to send requests containing an invalid Request.Host or Request.URL.Host. Affects Go before 1.19.11 and Go 1.20.0 through 1.20.5. The stricter check broke working code: Docker's engine used a unix socket path as the Host value, which the patched client rejects with "http: invalid Host header".
Upgrade the toolchain. Test client code that sets non-standard Host values before rolling out, because the failure is a rejected request rather than a warning. The exposure worth checking for is any outbound request constructed from a user-influenced host value.
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