remote code execution | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

New research has found that the DOS-to-NT path conversion process could be exploited by threat actors to achieve rootkit-like capabilities to conceal and impersonate files, directories, and processes. "When a user executes a function that has a path argument in Windows, the DOS path at which the file or folder exists is converted to an NT path," SafeBreach security researcher Or Yair  said  in an analysis, which was  presented  at the Black Hat Asia conference last week. "During this conversion process, a known issue exists in which the function removes trailing dots from any path element and any trailing spaces from the last path element. This action is completed by most user-space APIs in Windows." These so-called MagicDot paths allow for rootkit-like functionality that's accessible to any unprivileged user, who could then weaponize them to carry out a series of malicious actions without having admin permissions and remain undetected. They include the ab

Users of the CrushFTP enterprise file transfer software are being urged to update to the latest version following the discovery of a security flaw that has come under targeted exploitation in the wild. "CrushFTP v11 versions below 11.1 have a vulnerability where users can escape their VFS and download system files," CrushFTP  said  in an advisory released Friday. "This has been patched in v11.1.0." That said, customers who are operating their CrushFTP instances within a  DMZ  ( demilitarized zone ) restricted environment are protected against the attacks. Simon Garrelou of Airbus CERT has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. It has yet to be assigned a CVE identifier. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, in a post shared on Reddit, said it has observed an exploit for the flaw being used in the wild in a "targeted fashion." These intrusions are said to have mainly targeted U.S. entities, with the intelligence gathering activity suspe

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Threat actors are actively exploiting critical vulnerabilities in OpenMetadata to gain unauthorized access to Kubernetes workloads and leverage them for cryptocurrency mining activity. That's according to the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team, which  said  the flaws have been weaponized since the start of April 2024. OpenMetadata is an  open-source platform  that operates as a metadata management tool, offering a unified solution for data asset discovery, observability, and governance. The flaws in question – all discovered and credited to security researcher Alvaro Muñoz – are listed below - CVE-2024-28847  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A Spring Expression Language (SpEL) injection vulnerability in PUT /api/v1/events/subscriptions (fixed in version 1.2.4) CVE-2024-28848  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A SpEL injection vulnerability in GET /api/v1/policies/validation/condition/<expr> (fixed in version 1.2.4) CVE-2024-28253  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A SpEL injection vulnerability in PUT /api/v

"Test files" associated with the  XZ Utils backdoor  have made their way to a Rust crate known as  liblzma-sys , new  findings  from Phylum reveal. liblzma-sys, which has been downloaded over 21,000 times to date, provides Rust developers with bindings to the liblzma implementation, an underlying library that is part of the  XZ Utils  data compression software. The impacted version in question is 0.3.2. "The current distribution (v0.3.2) on Crates.io contains the test files for XZ that contain the backdoor," Phylum  noted  in a GitHub issue raised on April 9, 2024. "The test files themselves are not included in either the .tar.gz nor the .zip tags  here on GitHub  and are only present in liblzma-sys_0.3.2.crate that is installed from Crates.io." Following responsible disclosure, the files in question ("tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz" and "tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma") have since been removed from liblzma-sys version

Fortinet has released patches to address a critical security flaw impacting FortiClientLinux that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. Tracked as CVE-2023-45590, the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.4 out of a maximum of 10. "An Improper Control of Generation of Code ('Code Injection') vulnerability [CWE-94] in FortiClientLinux may allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code via tricking a FortiClientLinux user into visiting a malicious website," Fortinet  said  in an advisory. The shortcoming, which has been described as a case of remote code execution due to a "dangerous nodejs configuration," impacts the following versions - FortiClientLinux versions 7.0.3 through 7.0.4 and 7.0.6 through 7.0.10 (Upgrade to 7.0.11 or above) FortiClientLinux version 7.2.0 (Upgrade to 7.2.1 or above) Security researcher CataLpa from Dbappsecurity has been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability. Fortinet&