Source: https://medium.com/workday-engineering/leveraging-raw-disk-reads-to-bypass-edr-f145838b0e6d

Author : Christopher EllisAnalysis of a highly advanced Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) evasion technique that leverages raw disk reads to bypass security monitoring.

It explains that EDR systems rely on hooking high-level Operating System (OS) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to gain visibility, but raw disk access circumvents this by interacting directly with low-level disk drivers.

The report details the attack mechanics, which often require kernel-level privilege escalation via the Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) method, allowing attackers to reconstruct sensitive files like credential stores without triggering file access logs.

Furthermore, the text outlines robust defense-in-depth strategies, emphasizing the need for Full-Disk Encryption (FDE) and deploying specialized low-level monitoring tools like Sysmon to detect the resulting "RawAccessRead" events.

Ultimately, the source argues that defense must shift toward hardware-assisted security to counter the trend of adversaries moving "down the stack."

Strategic analysis of the Cloud ERP Finance market, primarily focusing on the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant. It details the pivotal market shift driven by the aggressive integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and composable architectures, which transforms core financial operations.

The document breaks down Gartner’s methodology for evaluating vendors based on their "Ability to Execute" and "Completeness of Vision" and profiles the competitive positioning of major players like Workday, Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle.

Crucially, the analysis offers strategic recommendations for organizations, emphasizing the need for rigorous Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) modeling and substantial investment in change management to successfully navigate complex cloud ERP implementations and realize the competitive advantages promised by AI.

Modern data lakehouse architecture, which resolves the shortcomings of earlier data lakes by integrating data warehouse features.

Central to this new paradigm is Apache Iceberg, an open table format that sits atop low-cost cloud object storage, enabling crucial features like ACID transactions, safe schema evolution, and high-performance querying through a sophisticated metadata layer.

The text thoroughly details Iceberg's three-layer architecture—Catalog, Metadata, and Data—and contrasts it with the physical foundation provided by scalable object storage and efficient columnar file formats like Parquet and ORC.

Finally, the analysis explores the diverse compute ecosystem, profiling specialized query engines—including Spark for ETL, Trino for interactive analytics, Flink for streaming, and managed platforms like Snowflake and Dremio—that leverage Iceberg's open standard to operate concurrently on a single, consistent data source.

Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) for querying Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) databases over the internet. It explores the architectural framework of JDBC, including its core components and the evolution of driver types, emphasizing the suitability of Type 4 drivers for cloud environments.

The text details the benefits and challenges of using JDBC in a cloud SaaS paradigm, focusing on performance issues due to network latency and the critical need for robust security measures in a zero-trust internet environment.

Furthermore, it outlines optimization techniques like connection pooling and batch updates, discusses security fortifications such as SSL/TLS and VPCs, compares JDBC with other connectivity solutions like ODBC and REST, and examines the future of cloud database connectivity, including serverless architectures and data APIs.

Bias Evaluation: April 2025 Findings

Analysis of Fidel API, a financial infrastructure platform designed to unlock programmable money by providing real-time card transaction data. It highlights the challenges of the fragmented, legacy payments ecosystem, emphasizing the critical need for real-time, granular data that traditional Open Banking aggregators like Plaid often lack.

Fidel API's core innovation lies in its direct integrations with major card networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express), abstracting complexity and providing a single API for developers. The document outlines its key products—Select Transactions API and Transaction Stream API—and illustrates their impact across various use cases, including loyalty programs, expense management, and digital receipts, all while emphasizing its robust security and PCI DSS compliance handling.

Ultimately, the text positions Fidel API as a foundational enabler for the burgeoning trends of Open Finance and Embedded Finance, allowing non-financial applications to trigger services instantly based on purchasing behavior.

Comprehensive overview of homomorphic encryption (HE), a revolutionary cryptographic method that allows computations on encrypted data without decryption.

It traces HE's historical evolution from its 1978 concept to Craig Gentry's 2009 breakthrough, which enabled Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and catalyzed subsequent advancements in schemes like BFV, BGV, CKKS, and TFHE.

The document highlights HE's core technical challenge of noise management and the significant performance overhead, detailing how bootstrapping and hardware acceleration (GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, and specialized CPU instructions like Intel HEXL) are addressing these issues.

Finally, it explores practical applications across finance, healthcare, and machine learning, alongside the evolving commercial and open-source ecosystem, and the critical legal, ethical, and standardization efforts shaping HE's future as a post-quantum security solution.

The Pwn2Own Automotive 2025 event highlighted the increasing security challenges in modern vehicles, where ethical hackers successfully identified 49 previously unknown vulnerabilities across various systems including IVI units, EV chargers, and operating systems.

The competition underscores the critical need for proactive vulnerability discovery and industry collaboration to address threats amplified by vehicle connectivity and software complexity.

Findings consistently point to persistent issues in secure software development and the need for continuous, external testing despite growing regulatory pressures and manufacturer efforts. Ultimately, the event serves as a vital platform for exposing real-world security weaknesses and driving stronger security-by-design practices throughout the automotive ecosystem.

Analyzes Pwn2Own Berlin 2025, a significant cybersecurity competition focused on uncovering zero-day vulnerabilities in various technologies, notably virtualization servers, enterprise applications, and, for the first time, AI systems.

It highlights the large sums awarded to researchers for successful exploits, such as the historic VMware ESXi compromise.

The document details the competition's role, managed by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), in promoting coordinated vulnerability disclosure to compel vendors to patch critical flaws.

Furthermore, it discusses how the competition showcases the increasing complexity of exploits, often involving multi-bug chains, and its broader significance in driving security research and improving defensive measures across the industry.

Explain the various security challenges posed by large language models (LLMs) as they become more widespread and integrated into critical systems. They categorize and describe different types of attacks, such as those focused on breaching privacy, compromising integrity through data poisoning, disrupting availability, and enabling misuse through techniques like prompt injection and jailbreaking.

The sources also highlight the importance of evaluating LLM robustness using frameworks and discuss emerging vulnerabilities in advanced architectures, including multi-modal models and federated learning. Finally, they outline best practices for securing LLMs through careful training data management, model evaluation, and the implementation of multi-layered defense strategies.