Internet Explorer CVE-2020-0674: The Zero-Day Advisory That Opened 2020

On 17 January 2020, Microsoft published ADV200001, a rare out-of-band advisory for CVE-2020-0674, a remote code execution flaw in the scripting engine used by Internet Explorer 9 and 11 that the company confirmed was being exploited in limited targeted attacks. There was no patch yet, only mitigations and workarounds, and defenders spent nearly a month exposed until the 11 February 2020 cumulative update shipped the fix. This piece reconstructs the advisory, the memory-corruption mechanics in the script engine, why IE was still a live attack surface in 2020, and what the episode taught about mitigations-first disclosure.

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Cisco SSM On-Prem Flaws: CVSS 10.0 and a CLI Zero-Day in One Week

In early October 2024, Cisco’s disclosure cadence stacked two unrelated but equally urgent problems: CVE-2024-20419, a CVSS 10.0 unauthenticated password-change flaw in Smart Software Manager On-Prem that let anyone with network access reset the admin API account, and CVE-2024-20399, a CLI command-injection bug in NX-OS already being exploited in the wild per the CISA KEV catalog. This account reconstructs both flaws’ mechanics, the patch timelines, and what this pairing says about authentication surface area in management tooling.

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BGP Hijacking’s 2023 Resurgence, and What RPKI Fixed

All through 2023, route leaks and suspected BGP hijacks kept redirecting chunks of internet traffic — events touching Rostelecom-linked infrastructure, financial services, and a persistent streak of cryptocurrency-targeting interception paths. None matched the famed mass redirections of prior years, but the pattern of brief, deniable, hard-to-attribute incidents kept routing security in the research headlines. This year-end review explains how BGP trust fails, walks the 2023 incident ledger with appropriately hedged attribution, and covers the defensive state of the art: RPKI signing crossing majority coverage, MANRS norms, and external route monitoring.

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Magecart’s 2024 Resurgence: Skimming in the Polyfill.io Aftermath

Through 2024, digital skimming returned to threat reports’ front pages: Magecart-style attacks compromised hundreds of storefronts via compromised third-party JavaScript, supply-chain infections like polyfill.io’s June domain takeover injected malicious scripts into vast numbers of pages, and PCI DSS 4.0’s script-integrity requirements (6.4.3 and 11.6.2) approached their March 2025 enforcement deadline. This survey digests the modern skimming kill chain — injection, exfiltration, and evasion — the major 2024 campaigns, and the compliance clock turning client-side risk into boardroom math.

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FortiManager Zero-Day (FortiJump): CISA Escalation Explained

On October 23, 2024, Fortinet confirmed CVE-2024-47575 — a CVSS 9.8 missing-authentication flaw in the FortiManager FGFM protocol that China-nexus actor UNC5850 had exploited since summer to jump from exposed managers into fleets of managed FortiGates with a custom DeepMove implant. CISA KEV-listed it within days, forcing two-week patch deadlines across federal and enterprise fleets. This account reconstructs the protocol bug, the DeepMove persistence, the fleet-jump blast radius, and the management-plane hardening it made mandatory.

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PAN-OS GlobalProtect Zero-Day: CVE-2024-3400 Explained

On April 12, 2024, WatchTowr disclosed CVE-2024-3400 — a CVSS 10.0 pre-auth command injection in PAN-OS GlobalProtect that state-sponsored actors had exploited since late March by chaining a cookie-controlled file write into Tcl execution as root. This account walks the two-flaw exploit chain, the scramble after the 10.2.9-h1 hotfix, CISA’s KEV clock, config-hidden persistence that survived reboots, the mitigation-versus-remediation confusion, and why 2024 made appliances patch with server-grade urgency.

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Ivanti Connect Secure Zero-Days: The Edge-Appliance Crisis

January 2024 opened with the year’s first appliance crisis: two pre-authentication zero-days in Ivanti Connect Secure that nation-state actors had already exploited, followed by integrity-check failures and a reset wave across thousands of enterprise VPNs. This account covers CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887, the mass exploitation between disclosure and patch, the customers whose breaches surfaced weeks later, and why edge appliances became the year’s most contested patch surface.

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