Radar · 2023-08
August 2023
The FBI tells Barracuda customers the patches did not work and the appliances should be replaced, four medium-severity Juniper flaws compose into an unauthenticated 9.8 on SRX firewalls and EX switches, HashiCorp relicenses Terraform under BUSL and is forked within a fortnight, the SOCI risk management obligation switches on so a CIRMP must consider listing major suppliers, and PHP's August security releases include a PHAR buffer bug and an XXE that another library in the same process can switch on.
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 OWASP
The OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications reaches v1.0 — owasp.org
Published 1 August 2023 by an international team of nearly 500 experts, with over 125 active contributors. The ten entries are prompt injection, insecure output handling, training data poisoning, model denial of service, supply chain vulnerabilities, sensitive information disclosure, insecure plugin design, excessive agency, overreliance and model theft. A v1.0.1 maintenance release on 26 August added spelling, grammar and formatting fixes, a CODEOWNERS file and diagrams mapping the ten onto a typical LLM application.
This is the citable 1 August 2023 baseline for AI security in a tender, review or architecture document — the thing a procurement questionnaire will name. For anyone shipping retrieval over customer content, three of the ten map directly onto the pipeline: prompt injection, insecure output handling and sensitive information disclosure. Assess against those first rather than working the list in order.
- fyi OpenAI
Fine-tuning arrives for GPT-3.5 Turbo, and becomes a cost lever — openai.com
Released 22 August 2023. OpenAI claimed a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 can match or beat base GPT-4 on narrow tasks and can shorten prompts by up to 90 per cent. Pricing was US$0.008 per thousand training tokens, US$0.012 input and US$0.016 output, with a worked example putting a 100,000-token file at three epochs around US$2.40. OpenAI stated that data sent to the fine-tuning API is owned by the customer and is not used by OpenAI or anyone else to train other models. New base models babbage-002 and davinci-002 shipped through a new fine-tuning jobs endpoint.
The 90 per cent prompt-shortening claim is the line that matters at scale, because it turns fine-tuning into a cost decision rather than only a quality one — if a long system prompt is being resent on every request, that is the arithmetic to run. The no-training-on-your-data statement is also the clearest OpenAI made in 2023, and worth citing in preference to vaguer marketing language when answering a data-governance question.
- fyi AWS
Claude 2 becomes available in Amazon Bedrock — aws.amazon.com
AWS added Claude 2 to Amazon Bedrock on 1 August 2023. The announcement cites the 100,000-token context window as about 200 pages of information, longer multi-thousand-token outputs than its predecessor, and use cases spanning document editing, rewriting, summarisation, Q&A content and code generation.
This is the concrete supplier-chain date for anyone running Claude through Bedrock rather than directly. AWS names no regions for it, so confirm where Bedrock actually runs before describing a Bedrock-based AI feature as sovereign.
Update, September 2023: Amazon Bedrock became generally available on 28 September 2023 in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) only.
Update, April 2024: Amazon Bedrock became available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region on 9 April 2024.
Security and edge
Sections- critical Juniper
Four medium Juniper flaws compose into an unauthenticated 9.8 — thehackernews.com
Juniper disclosed four J-Web flaws in Junos OS on SRX firewalls and EX switches in an out-of-cycle advisory on 17 August 2023 — CVE-2023-36844 and CVE-2023-36845 for PHP external variable modification, CVE-2023-36846 and CVE-2023-36847 for missing authentication on a critical function. Each scores only CVSS 5.3 alone, but Juniper rated the chain 9.8 critical: an unauthenticated attacker can modify PHP environment variables and upload arbitrary files through J-Web with no credentials, giving remote code execution. A proof of concept was published.
Patch to the listed builds, and if you cannot, take Juniper's own advice — disable J-Web or restrict it to trusted hosts. The broader point is worth taking to whoever runs vulnerability triage: this is the canonical example of per-CVE severity scoring failing, because four mediums that would each be deferred composed into something that needs an emergency change. A queue sorted by individual CVSS would have put all four below the line.
- critical Barracuda
The FBI says the Barracuda patches did not work — thehackernews.com
In late August the FBI issued a flash stating that patches for CVE-2023-2868 in the Barracuda Email Security Gateway were ineffective, that it continues to observe active intrusions, and that all affected appliances should be considered compromised and still vulnerable. The flaw carries CVSS 9.8 and affects ESG versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006; it had been weaponised as early as October 2022, more than seven months before the hole was plugged. Compromised appliances were used to deploy several malware families providing persistent access, credential harvesting and data exfiltration. The recommended actions were to isolate and replace affected devices immediately and scan for suspicious outbound traffic.
This is the clearest example of the year of an inline security appliance that could not be remediated in place. Write it into the edge incident runbook as a standing question rather than a Barracuda story: for each appliance in the estate, is replacement possible, what is the lead time, and is there a spare.
Standards and compliance
Sections- critical SOCI
The SOCI risk management obligation switches on — cisc.gov.au
From 17 August 2023, the CIRMP Rules required responsible entities for covered critical infrastructure assets to have adopted a written Critical Infrastructure Risk Management Program, with material risks and controls documented across cyber, physical, personnel and supply chain hazards. The separate cyber-framework element — one of ISO 27001, Essential Eight Maturity Level 1, NIST CSF, DoE C2M2 MIL1 or AESCSF SP1 — had a further twelve months. Each year a board-approved annual report is due within 90 days after the end of the financial year.
This is the date the paperwork became real. A captured entity asked to show its CIRMP now had to produce a document, and that document is expected to list the entity's major suppliers — vendors with a significant influence over the security of the asset. If you supply a covered critical-infrastructure asset, expect to be described in a document you do not control, and to be asked to confirm the description.
Update, March 2025: CISC's CIRMP guidance reports 457 annual reports received for 2023-24 and makes 2024-25 the first period in which entities must report on their cyber security framework.
- fyi OAIC
Three-quarters of Australians name data breaches among their biggest privacy risks — oaic.gov.au
The OAIC released the Australian Community Attitudes to Privacy Survey 2023 on 8 August, based on fieldwork in March with 1,916 respondents. Three-quarters see data breaches as one of the biggest privacy risks, up thirteen points since 2020. Forty-seven per cent said their information was caught in a breach in the prior year and three-quarters of those reported harm. Only 32 per cent feel in control of their privacy and half think accepting unfavourable data practices is unavoidable. Ninety-six per cent want conditions set before AI makes decisions about them, 84 per cent want more control over collection and use, and 70 per cent rank data privacy highly when choosing a product, behind only quality and price.
This is the most quotable Australian source for making a commercial rather than a compliance case for privacy work — 70 per cent weighing privacy in a purchase decision is a sales argument, not a legal one. The OAIC said it would use the findings in its input into the Privacy Act review.
- fyi NIST
The full public draft of NIST CSF 2.0 lands — nist.gov
NIST published a draft of CSF 2.0 on 8 August 2023. It added the new GOVERN function, broadened scope from critical infrastructure to organisations of every size and sector, expanded supply-chain risk management guidance, and added implementation examples and improved guidance on creating Profiles. Comments were open until 4 November 2023, and NIST planned to publish the final version in early 2024.
NIST CSF is one of the cyber frameworks a SOCI responsible entity may nominate in its CIRMP, so a substantive CSF change is a substantive Australian compliance change for anyone who chose it. GOVERN is the part to read.
Update, February 2024: NIST released the final CSF 2.0 on 26 February 2024.
CMS and platforms
Sections- notable WordPress
WordPress 6.3 makes the Site Editor primary and drops PHP 5 — wordpress.org
Released 8 August 2023 and named for Lionel Hampton. It unified the Site Editor so content, templates and patterns are managed in one place, added block theme previews, a My Patterns section with synced patterns, the Command Palette, style revisions with an audit trail, and Footnotes and Details blocks. More than 170 performance updates shipped, including defer and async script support and image optimisation. The minimum supported PHP version became 7.0.0. More than 650 contributors from at least 52 countries took part.
Check any site still on PHP 5 before applying this, because the platform requirement is the part that bites rather than the features. Beyond that, this is the release that makes the Site Editor the primary editing surface, which is a training and support consideration as much as a technical one — the editing experience a client was shown at handover may not be the one they now see.
- notable Drupal
Drupal 7's reduced-support measures take effect — drupal.org
From 1 August 2023, the date set in June's PSA-2023-06-07, the Drupal Security Team may now choose to post moderately critical and less critical Drupal 7 issues publicly in the issue queue, so long as they are not mass-exploitable, stopped accepting new maintainers for Drupal 7 branches of unsupported contributed projects, dropped support for PHP below 5.6, ceased Windows-specific security fixes, and stopped packaging Drupal 7 distributions from Drush make files.
This is the date the Drupal 7 security posture materially weakened, seventeen months before the end of life itself — worth separating in anyone's head from the January 2025 date, because the risk profile changed here. Two consequences are concrete: from this date the Security Team may choose to post moderately critical and less critical Drupal 7 issues in the public queue, so long as they are not mass-exploitable, and Drupal 7 on Windows is effectively unsupported for security purposes. Any remaining site needed a monitored migration plan from this point, not a diary entry for 2025.
Supply chain, CI/CD and IaC
Sections- notable Terraform
HashiCorp relicenses Terraform under the Business Source License — hashicorp.com
Announced 10 August 2023: all future releases of HashiCorp products move from Mozilla Public License v2.0 to Business Source License v1.1. BUSL permits copying, modification, redistribution and both non-commercial and commercial use except where providing a competitive offering to HashiCorp, so vendors offering competing services can no longer take future releases, bug fixes or security patches. The post states that HashiCorp APIs, SDKs and almost all other libraries remain MPL 2.0.
Inventory where Terraform binaries are embedded — CI images are the usual place, and they are rarely in a dependency manifest — and pin to an MPL-era version if you need licence certainty for a hosted or managed offering. HashiCorp's SDK carve-out is the clause that matters if you ship a provider: APIs, SDKs and almost all other libraries stay MPL 2.0.
- notable PyPI
PyPI requires 2FA for every new account — blog.pypi.org
From 8 August 2023 every newly registered PyPI account must enable two-factor authentication before it can perform most management actions on the index. PyPI announced in May that all users would need 2FA by the end of 2023. A related change on 17 August extended GitHub secret scanning for PyPI API tokens to the issues of public repositories, not only their code.
Any PyPI publishing account used by CI should already be on 2FA with an API token scoped to a single project, or moved to Trusted Publishing and the long-lived token deleted. The secret-scanning extension is the quieter useful one: tokens get pasted into issue threads while debugging a failing release, not only committed to code.
- fyi OpenTofu
Terraform is forked a fortnight after the licence change — opentofu.org
Published 25 August 2023, two weeks after the BUSL announcement. The manifesto — which had appealed to HashiCorp to return Terraform to the community and revert the licence change — had by then attracted pledges from over 100 companies, 10 projects and 400 individuals, with its repository past 4,000 GitHub stars. At announcement the team was almost through a repository-wide rename, had selected an initial steering committee, had CI green, and had completed the paperwork to join the Linux Foundation.
Nothing operational yet, which is why this sits below the licence change itself — but it is the pivot point for a divergence worth tracking from here. If you maintain a provider, the question to start watching is the registry: a fork implies a second registry to publish to, and that is the practical cost that arrives later rather than now.
Languages, runtimes and frameworks
Sections- notable PHP
PHP's August security releases include a PHAR overflow and an inherited XXE — php.net
PHP's security releases landed as 8.1.22 on 3 August, 8.0.30 on 4 August and 8.2.9 on 16 August, with two serious CVEs. CVE-2023-3824, scored 9.8 by NIST, is a buffer overflow in phar_dir_read() when reading PHAR directory entries, with potential memory corruption or remote code execution. CVE-2023-3823 is external entity loading through libxml's process-global state: another module in the same process — ImageMagick is NVD's example — can leave external-entity loading enabled, and PHP's XML parsing inherits that state for the life of the process. NIST scores it 7.5, the PHP Group 8.6.
The XXE is the one to understand rather than just patch, because the vulnerable configuration is created by a library you did not call. Patch rather than wait for the normal cycle.
- notable Python
Python's TLS handshake can be bypassed — python.org
Released 24 August 2023 across 3.11.5, 3.10.13, 3.9.18 and 3.8.18. The fix is CVE-2023-40217, where instances of ssl.SSLSocket were vulnerable to a bypass of the TLS handshake — meaning protections such as certificate verification could be skipped entirely. Reported by Aapo Oksman and patched by Gregory P. Smith. The python.org release page carries this as a security section rather than labelling the whole release a security release.
Do not let the presentation set the priority — this is a transport-security failure rather than an experimental-feature issue. Python's security advisory puts the main risk on servers that rely on TLS client certificates, such as mTLS, and says client-side connections such as pip and requests are not affected. Any Python service terminating TLS should move to 3.11.5, 3.10.13, 3.9.18 or 3.8.18 on its branch. Client-certificate checks silently not happening is close to the worst failure mode available, because everything continues to appear to work.
- notable Go
Go 1.21 lands PGO and puts Go 1.19 out of support — go.dev
Released 8 August 2023. Profile-guided optimisation reached general availability after its 1.20 preview with measured gains of 2 to 7 per cent, and the compiler itself was rebuilt with PGO for 2 to 4 per cent faster builds. New built-ins min, max and clear arrived, along with improved generic type inference and four new standard-library packages — log/slog for structured logging, plus slices, maps and cmp. Garbage collector tuning may cut tail latency by up to 40 per cent, and an experimental WASI port landed. The go tool also gained toolchain management, so a module can declare a Go version newer than the installed toolchain and have it fetched.
The lifecycle consequence is the one to diarise: under the two-most-recent-majors policy, 1.21 arriving puts Go 1.19 out of support, which is the event that matters for an SDK support matrix rather than any single feature. Of the features, log/slog is the one that changes a dependency list, since structured logging no longer needs a third-party package for straightforward cases.
Static site and web tooling
Sections- notable Astro
Astro 3.0 ships View Transitions and changes the build output — astro.build
Released 30 August 2023 and, per the announcement, the first major web framework to support the View Transitions API — fade, slide and morph effects across page navigation using native browser capability rather than an SPA shell. Most components render 30 per cent faster than 2.9, up to 75 per cent on complex benchmarks. The Image component and image optimisation shipped unflagged and stable. SSR gained per-route code splitting, edge middleware bundling and host customisation APIs, and React Fast Refresh now preserves component state during hot module replacement. The build output also changed — HTML minification, CSS inlining and updated component identifier attributes.
The build output change is the one that breaks things quietly. Anything asserting on Astro's generated markup needs revisiting before the bump — snapshot tests, CSS selectors keyed to astro-* attributes, and any HTML post-processing step in a deploy pipeline. Read the v3 upgrade guide first. View Transitions are the strategically interesting part: they give a static multi-page build SPA-feeling navigation without an SPA hydration cost.
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