Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

First time ever in the History, Apple Inc. has pushed out an automatic security update for Macintosh OS X computers to address a critical security issue that, according to the company, was too risky to wait for users to patch after seeking their prior approval. Despite having the ability for years to silently and automatically update its users computers, Apple typically asks its users' permission to approve them manually or automatically before installing any security update of this kind. But, the company has exercised its ability for the very first time to patch a critical security flaw in a component of its OS X operating system called the Network Time Protocol (NTP) . This newly discovered security vulnerability, assigned CVE-2014-9295, became public late last week and affects all operating systems, including OS X and other Linux and Unix distributions, running versions of NTP4 prior to 4.2.8. NTP is used for synchronizing clocks between computer systems and across the globa

More than 12 million routers in homes and businesses around the world are vulnerable to a critical software bug that can be exploited by hackers to remotely monitor users' traffic and take administrative control over the devices, from a variety of different manufacturers. The critical vulnerability actually resides in web server " RomPager " made by a company known as AllegroSoft , which is typically embedded into the firmware of router , modems and other " gateway devices " from about every leading manufacturer. The HTTP server provides the web-based user-friendly interface for configuring the products. Researchers at the security software company Check Point have discovered that the RomPager versions prior to 4.34 — software more than 10 years old — are vulnerable to a critical bug, dubbed as Misfortune Cookie . The flaw named as Misfortune Cookie because it allows attackers to control the "fortune" of an HTTP request by manipulating cook

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Developers running the open source Git code-repository software and tools, like GitHub, on Mac OS X and Windows computers are highly being recommended to install a security update that patches a major security vulnerability in Git clients that leverages an attacker to hijack end-user computers. The critical Git vulnerability affects all versions of the official Git client and all the related software that interacts with Git repositories, including GitHub for Windows and Mac OS X, according to a GitHub advisory published Thursday. HOW GIT BUG WORKS The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute remote code on a client's computer when the client software accesses Git repositories. The GitHub engineering team gave a detailed explanation on how attackers might exploit the vulnerability: "An attacker can craft a malicious Git tree that will cause Git to overwrite its own .git/config file when cloning or checking out a repository, leading to arbitrary command execution

Back in june this year, Google announced an alpha Google Chrome extension called " End-to-End " for sending and receiving emails securely, in wake of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about the global surveillance conducted by the government law-enforcements. Finally, the company has announced that it made the source code for its End-to-End Chrome extension open source via GitHub . Google is developing a user-friendly tool for individuals to implement the tough encryption standard known as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) in an attempt to fully encrypt people's Gmail messages that can't even be read by Google itself, nor anyone else other than the users exchanging the emails. PGP is an open source end-to-end encryption standard for almost 20 years, used to encrypt e-mail over the Internet providing cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication, which makes it very difficult to break. But implementing PGP is too complicated for m

The year is about to end, but serious threats like  Shellshock is " far from over ". Cyber criminals are actively exploiting this critical GNU Bash vulnerability to target those network attached storage devices that are still not patched and ready for exploitation. Security researchers have unearthed a malicious worm that is designed to plant backdoors on network-attached storage (NAS) systems made by Taiwan-based QNAP and gain full access to the contents of those devices. The worm is spread among QNAP devices, which run an embedded Linux operating system, by the exploitation of the GNU Bash vulnerability known as ShellShock or Bash, according to security researchers at the Sans Institute. QNAP vendor released a patch in early October to address the flaw in its Turbo NAS product, but because the patches are not automatic or easy to apply for many users, so a statistically significant portion of systems remain vulnerable and exposed to the Bash bug . Sh

Alibaba Group has patched a major security vulnerability in one of its e-commerce portals that exposed account details of tens of millions of Merchants and shoppers to cyber criminals. An Israeli application security firm, AppSec Labs, found a Cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in AliExpress, the company's English language e-commerce site that was found vulnerable to similar flaw a week ago that compromised personal information of Alibaba customers. The flaw was fixed shortly after Cybermoon security firm disclosed it to Alibaba. AliExpress is an online marketplace owned by Chinese E-Commerce giant Alibaba.com, also known as Google of China. The company serves more than 300 Million active users from more than 200 countries including the U.S., Russia and Brazil. But the critical vulnerability found by the researcher could allow an attacker to hijack merchant's account. Using AliExpress XSS vulnerability an attacker can inject any malicious payload script as value

Last week Microsoft released its Advance Notification for the month of December 2014 Patch Tuesday Updates, and finally today released a total of seven security bulletins, which will address several vulnerabilities in its products, out of which three are marked 'critical' and rest are 'important' in severity. Last month after a big pile of security patches , the company released an an unusual emergency patch to fix a critical vulnerability in Microsoft Windows Kerberos KBC, authentication system used by default in the operating system, that cybercriminals exploited to compromise whole networks of computers. The three critical bulletins affect Internet Explorer, Office and Windows. All the versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) are affected except Server Core, which does not include IE. The critical zero-day IE vulnerability (CVE-2014-8967) was discovered by security researcher Arthur Gerkis of Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) in June this year. By explo

POODLE , a critical SSL flaw discovered in October that was patched and fixed by webmasters around the world after Google alerted software and hardware vendors, has again made its way and this time the vulnerability affects implementations of the newer Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol . Yes, the serious POODLE vulnerability that affected the most widely used web encryption standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0 has once again returned and is likely to affect some of the most popular web sites in the world — including those owned or operated by Bank of America, the US Department of Veteran's Affairs, and Accenture. POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) flaw, disclosed two months ago by Google security team, allowed attackers to perform Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack in order to intercept traffic between a user's browser and an HTTPS website to decrypt sensitive information, like the user's authentication cookies. Now, the dangerous flaw

Security researchers have discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities in the Java environment of the Google App Engine (GAE) that enables attackers to bypass critical security sandbox defenses. Google App Engine is Google's PaaS (Platform as a Service) Cloud computing Platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. GAE offers to run custom-built programs using a wide variety of popular languages and frameworks, out of which many are built on the Java environment. The vulnerabilities was reported by Security Explorations, the same security research company that carried out multiple researches related to Java in past. The discovery was announced on the Full Disclosure security mailing list by Adam Gowdiak , founder and CEO of Security Explorations. According to the security firm, the flaws can be exploited by attackers to achieve a complete Java VM security sandbox escape, as well as to execute an arbitrary code. The researchers

A critical, but easily exploitable personal information disclosure vulnerability has been discovered in the widely popular online marketplace AliExpress website that affects its millions of users worldwide. The reported vulnerability could allow anyone to steal personal information of hundreds of millions of AliExpress users without knowing their account passwords. AliExpress is an online marketplace owned by Chinese E-Commerce giant Alibaba.com , which offers more than 300 Million active users from more than 200 countries and regions to order items in bulk or one at a time at low wholesale prices. Amitay Dan , an Israeli application security researcher working at Cybermoon.cc, reported the vulnerability to The Hacker News after providing full disclosure of the flaw to the AliExpress team and Israeli media. According to the Proof-of-Concept video and screenshots provided by the security researcher to The Hacker News , AliExpress website allows logged in user to add

The eBay owned popular digital payment and money transfer service, PayPal has been found to be vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control over users' PayPal account with just a click , affecting more than 156 millions PayPal users. An Egyptian security researcher, Yasser H. Ali has discovered  three critical vulnerabilities in PayPal website including CSRF , Auth token bypass and Resetting the security question, which could be used by cybercriminals in the targeted attacks. Cross-Site Request Forgery ( CSRF or XSRF) is a method of attacking a website in which an attacker need to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted HTML exploit page that will make a request to the vulnerable website on their behalf. Mr.Yasser demonstrated the vulnerability step-by-step in the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) video using a single exploit that combines all the three vulnerabilities. According to the demo, using Paypa

A Vulnerability has been discovered in the wildly popular messaging app WhatsApp , which allows anyone to remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially crafted message, two security researchers reported ' The Hacker News '. Two India based independent security researchers, Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar, both 17-year old teenagers demonstrated the WhatsApp Message Handler vulnerability to one of our security analyst. In a video demonstration, they showed that how a 2000 words (2kb in size) message in special character set can crash Whatsapp messenger app. Previous it was discovered that sending a huge message ( greater than 7mb in size) on Whatsapp could crash victim device and app immediately, but using this new exploit attacker only need to send a very small size (approx 2kb) message to the victim. The worried impact of the vulnerability is that the user who received the specially crafted message will have to delete his/her whole conversation and start a fresh

Adobe has rolled-out an urgent out-of-band update for a critical remote code-execution vulnerability in its popular Flash Player that is currently being exploited by hackers. The critical vulnerability ( CVE 2014-8439 ) in Flash Player for Windows, Mac and Linux was originally mitigated more than a month ago in October 14, 2014 patch release, but a French researcher Kafeine found its exploits in the Angler and Nuclear malware kits after Adobe released a patch, according to security vendor F-Secure. " The vulnerability is being exploited in blind mass attack. No doubt about it : the team behind Angler is really good at what it does ," Kafeine said in a blog post . The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code due to a weakness in the way a dereferenced pointer to memory is handled. An attacker could serve a specially crafted Flash file to trigger the vulnerability, which would lead to the execution of attacker's code in order to take control

Security researchers have discovered a new type of "Man-in-the-Middle" (MitM) attack in the wild targeting smartphone and tablets users on devices running either iOS or Android around the world. The MitM attack, dubbed DoubleDirect , enables an attacker to redirect a victim's traffic of major websites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to a device controlled by the attacker. Once done, cyber crooks can steal victims' valuable personal data, such as email IDs, login credentials and banking information as well as can deliver malware to the targeted mobile device. San Francisco-based mobile security firm Zimperium detailed the threat in a Thursday blog post , revealing that the DoubleDirect technique is being used by attackers in the wild in attacks against the users of web giants including Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Live.com and Twitter, across 31 countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. DoubleDirect makes use of ICMP (Internet Control Message P

Google on Tuesday launched a Security testing tool "Firing Range" , which aimed at improving the efficiency of automated Web application security scanners by evaluating them with a wide range of cross-site scripting (XSS) and a few other web vulnerabilities seen in the wild. Firing Range basically provides a synthetic testing environment mostly for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that are seen most frequently in web apps. According to Google security engineer Claudio Criscione, 70 percent of the bugs in Google's Vulnerability Reward Program are cross-site scripting flaws . In addition to XSS vulnerabilities , the new web app scanner also scans for other types of vulnerabilities including reverse clickjacking , Flash injection , mixed content, and cross-origin resource sharing vulnerabilities. Firing Range was developed by Google with the help of security researchers at Politecnico di Milano in an effort to build a test ground for automated scanners

A security weakness in Android mobile operating system versions below 5.0 that puts potentially every Android device at risk for privilege escalation attacks, has been patched in  Android 5.0 Lollipop  – the latest version of the mobile operating system. The security vulnerability ( CVE-2014-7911 ), discovered by a security researcher named Jann Horn , could allow any potential attacker to bypass the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) defense and execute arbitrary code of their choice on a target device under certain circumstances. ASLR is a technique involved in protection from buffer overflow attacks. The flaw resides in java.io.ObjectInputStream , which fails to check whether an Object that is being deserialized is actually a serializable object. The vulnerability was reported by the researcher to Google security team earlier this year. According to the security researcher, android apps can communicate with system_service, which runs under admin privileges

Microsoft today released an " out-of-band " security updates to fix a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of its Windows Server software that cyber criminals are exploiting to compromise whole networks of computers. The Emergency patch release comes just one week after Microsoft provided its monthly security patch updates. The November 2014 Patch Tuesday updates included 16 security patches, five of which were rated by Redmond as "critical." The security update (MS14-068) addresses a vulnerability in the Windows component called Microsoft Windows Kerberos KBC , authentication system used by default in the operating system. The flaw allows an attacker to elevate domain user account privileges and access rights to that of a domain administrator account. As a result, if users unknowingly or accidentally run a malicious software on their system, it could therefore be used to compromise the entire network, which could be more dangerous for those who

Do you wanna hack Nokia Lumia phone running the latest mobile operating system Windows 8.1 ?? Hackers have made it very easy for you all..!! Just few weeks after Microsoft announced a 19 year-old critical security hole existed in almost every version of its Windows operating system, XDA-developers have discovered a new vulnerability in Microsoft's youngest OS Windows 8.1 that could easily be exploited by hackers to hack a Nokia Lumia phone. XDA Developers hacker who go by the name DJAmol has found a wide open hole in OS Windows Phone 8.1 which makes the operating system very easy to hack. The vulnerability allows attackers to run their application with other user's privileges and edit the registry. DJAmol realized that simply by replacing the contents of a trusted OEM app that has been transferred over to the SD card, the app will inherit the privileges of the original app. Once done, an attacker could then delete the existing directory and create a new directory wi

Cyber criminals are using new malware variants by exploiting GNU Bash vulnerability referred to as ShellShock ( CVE-2014-6271 ) in order to infect embedded devices running BusyBox software, according to a researcher. A new variant of " Bashlite " malware targeting devices running BusyBox software was spotted by the researchers at Trend Micro shortly after the public disclosure of the ShellShock vulnerability. BusyBox provides set of command line utilities that are specifically designed to run in constrained embedded environments. At compile time, different capabilities can be left out, reducing the size of the binaries, and efforts are made to make them memory efficient. This makes the software an excellent candidate for use in consumer electronics devices, which seem to have been the items of interest in this case. The malware variant, detected as ELF_BASHLITE.A (ELF_FLOODER.W) , when executed on victim's machine, scans compromised networks for device