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Multiple security flaws have been disclosed in Apache OpenMeetings, a web conferencing solution, that could be potentially exploited by malicious actors to seize control of admin accounts and run malicious code on susceptible servers. "Attackers can bring the application into an unexpected state, which allows them to take over any user account, including the admin account," Sonar vulnerability researcher Stefan Schiller  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The acquired admin privileges can further be leveraged to exploit another vulnerability allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code on the Apache OpenMeetings server." Following responsible disclosure on March 20, 2023, the vulnerabilities were addressed with the release of  Openmeetings version 7.1.0  that was released on May 9, 2023. The list of three flaws is as follows - CVE-2023-28936  (CVSS score: 5.3) - Insufficient check of invitation hash CVE-2023-29032  (CVSS score: 8.1) - An authenti

The maintainers of the  Apache Superset  open source data visualization software have released fixes to plug an insecure default configuration that could lead to remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2023-27524  (CVSS score: 8.9), impacts versions up to and including 2.0.1 and relates to the use of a default SECRET_KEY that could be abused by attackers to authenticate and access unauthorized resources on internet-exposed installations. Naveen Sunkavally, the chief architect at Horizon3.ai, described the issue as "a dangerous default configuration in Apache Superset that allows an unauth attacker to gain remote code execution, harvest credentials, and compromise data." It's worth noting that the flaw does not affect Superset instances that have changed the default value for the SECRET_KEY config to a more cryptographically secure random string. The cybersecurity firm, which found that the SECRET_KEY is defaulted to the value "\x02\x01thisismy

WordPress security company Wordfence on Thursday said it started detecting exploitation attempts targeting the newly disclosed flaw in Apache Commons Text on October 18, 2022. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-42889  aka Text4Shell , has been assigned a severity ranking of 9.8 out of a possible 10.0 on the CVSS scale and affects versions 1.5 through 1.9 of the library. It's also similar to the now infamous  Log4Shell  vulnerability in that the  issue  is rooted in the manner  string substitutions  carried out during  DNS, script, and URL lookups  could lead to the execution of arbitrary code on susceptible systems when passing untrusted input. "The attacker can send a crafted payload remotely using 'script,' 'dns,' and 'url' lookups to achieve arbitrary remote code execution," the Zscaler ThreatLabZ team explained . A  successful exploitation of the flaw  can enable a threat actor to open a reverse shell connection with the vulnerable

Network-attached storage (NAS) appliance maker QNAP on Thursday said it's investigating its lineup for potential impact arising from two security vulnerabilities that were addressed in the Apache HTTP server last month. The critical flaws, tracked as  CVE-2022-22721 and CVE-2022-23943 , are rated 9.8 for severity on the CVSS scoring system and impact Apache HTTP Server versions 2.4.52 and earlier - CVE-2022-22721  - Possible buffer overflow with very large or unlimited LimitXMLRequestBody CVE-2022-23943  - Out-of-bounds Write vulnerability in mod_sed of Apache HTTP Server Both the vulnerabilities, alongside CVE-2022-22719 and CVE-2022-22720, were remediated by the project maintainers as part of  version 2.4.53 , which was shipped on March 14, 2022. "While CVE-2022-22719 and CVE-2022-22720 do not affect QNAP products, CVE-2022-22721 affects 32-bit QNAP NAS models, and CVE-2022-23943 affects users who have enabled mod_sed in Apache HTTP Server on their QNAP device,"

Researchers have revealed details of a now-patched high-severity security vulnerability in Apache Cassandra that, if left unaddressed, could be abused to gain remote code execution (RCE) on affected installations. "This Apache security vulnerability is easy to exploit and has the potential to wreak havoc on systems, but luckily only manifests in non-default configurations of Cassandra," Omer Kaspi, security researcher at DevOps firm JFrog,  said  in a technical write-up published Tuesday. Apache Cassandra is an open-source, distributed, NoSQL database management system for managing very large amounts of structured data across commodity servers. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44521  (CVSS score: 8.4), the vulnerability concerns a specific scenario where the configuration for user-defined functions ( UDFs ) are enabled, effectively allowing an attacker to leverage the  Nashorn  JavaScript engine, escape the sandbox, and achieve execution of untrusted code. Specifically, it was fou

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) on Tuesday rolled out fresh patches to contain an arbitrary code execution flaw in Log4j that could be abused by threat actors to run malicious code on affected systems, making it the fifth security shortcoming to be discovered in the tool in the span of a month. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44832 , the vulnerability is rated 6.6 in severity on a scale of 10 and impacts all versions of the logging library from 2.0-alpha7 to 2.17.0 with the exception of 2.3.2 and 2.12.4. While Log4j versions 1.x are not affected, users are recommended to upgrade to Log4j 2.3.2 (for Java 6), 2.12.4 (for Java 7), or 2.17.1 (for Java 8 and later). "Apache Log4j2 versions 2.0-beta7 through 2.17.0 (excluding security fix releases 2.3.2 and 2.12.4) are vulnerable to a remote code execution (RCE) attack where an attacker with permission to modify the logging configuration file can construct a malicious configuration using a JDBC Appender with a data source referencing a JND

UPDATE — The severity score of CVE-2021-45046, originally classified as a DoS bug, has since been revised from 3.7 to 9.0, to reflect the fact that an attacker could abuse the vulnerability to send a specially crafted string that leads to "information leak and remote code execution in some environments and local code execution in all environments." The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has pushed out a new fix for the Log4j logging utility after the previous patch for the recently disclosed  Log4Shell  exploit was deemed as "incomplete in certain non-default configurations." The second vulnerability — tracked as  CVE-2021-45046  — is rated 3.7 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS rating system and affects all versions of Log4j from 2.0-beta9 through 2.12.1 and 2.13.0 through 2.15.0, which the project maintainers shipped last week to address a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228) that could be abused to infiltrate and take over systems. The

The Apache Software Foundation on Thursday released additional security updates for its HTTP Server product to remediate what it says is an "incomplete fix" for an  actively exploited  path traversal and remote code execution flaw that it patched earlier this week. CVE-2021-42013 , as the new vulnerability is identified as, builds upon  CVE-2021-41773 , a flaw that impacts Apache web servers running version 2.4.49 and involves a  path normalization  bug that could enable an adversary to access and view arbitrary files stored on a vulnerable server. Although the flaw was addressed by the maintainers in version 2.4.50, a day after the patches were released it became known that the weakness could also be abused to gain remote code execution if the "mod_cgi" module was loaded and the configuration "require all denied" was absent, prompting Apache to issue another round of emergency updates. "It was found that the fix for CVE-2021-41773 in Apache HTT

Apache has issued patches to address two security vulnerabilities, including a path traversal and file disclosure flaw in its HTTP server that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. "A flaw was found in a change made to path normalization in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49. An attacker could use a path traversal attack to map URLs to files outside the expected document root," the open-source project maintainers  noted  in an advisory published Tuesday. "If files outside of the document root are not protected by 'require all denied' these requests can succeed. Additionally this flaw could leak the source of interpreted files like CGI scripts." The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2021-41773 , affects only Apache HTTP server version 2.4.49. Ash Daulton and cPanel Security Team have been credited with discovering and reporting the issue on September 29, 2021. Source: PT SWARM Also resolved by Apache is a null pointer dereference vulnerability observed during pr

A financially-motivated threat actor notorious for its cryptojacking attacks has leveraged a revised version of their malware to target cloud infrastructures using vulnerabilities in web server technologies, according to new research. Deployed by the China-based cybercrime group  Rocke , the Pro-Ocean cryptojacking malware now comes with improved rootkit and worm capabilities, as well as harbors new evasion tactics to sidestep cybersecurity companies' detection methods, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers  said  in a Thursday write-up. "Pro-Ocean uses known vulnerabilities to target cloud applications," the researchers detailed. "In our analysis, we found Pro-Ocean targeting Apache ActiveMQ ( CVE-2016-3088 ), Oracle WebLogic ( CVE-2017-10271 ) and Redis (unsecure instances)." "Once installed, the malware kills any process that uses the CPU heavily, so that it's able to use 100% of the CPU and mine Monero efficiently." First documented

If your web-server runs on Apache, you should immediately install the latest available version of the server application to prevent hackers from taking unauthorized control over it. Apache recently fixed multiple vulnerabilities in its web server software that could have potentially led to the execution of arbitrary code and, in specific scenarios, even could allow attackers to cause a crash and denial of service. The flaws, tracked as CVE-2020-9490, CVE-2020-11984, CVE-2020-11993, were uncovered by Felix Wilhelm of Google Project Zero, and have since been addressed by the Apache Foundation in the latest version of the software ( 2.4.46 ). The first of the three issues involve a possible remote code execution vulnerability due to a buffer overflow with the "mod_uwsgi" module (CVE-2020-11984), potentially allowing an adversary to view, change, or delete sensitive data depending on the privileges associated with an application running on the server. "[A] Malici

If your web server is running on Apache Tomcat, you should immediately install the latest available version of the server application to prevent hackers from taking unauthorized control over it. Yes, that's possible because all versions (9.x/8.x/7.x/6.x) of the Apache Tomcat released in the past 13 years have been found vulnerable to a new high-severity (CVSS 9.8) ' file read and inclusion bug '—which can be exploited in the default configuration. But it's more concerning because several proof-of-concept exploits ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4  and more ) for this vulnerability have also been surfaced on the Internet, making it easy for anyone to hack into publicly accessible vulnerable web servers. Dubbed ' Ghostcat ' and tracked as CVE-2020-1938 , the flaw could let unauthenticated, remote attackers read the content of any file on a vulnerable web server and obtain sensitive configuration files or source code, or execute arbitrary code if the server allows file uploa

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released new versions of its Tomcat application server to address an important security vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code and take control of an affected server. Developed by ASF, Apache Tomcat is an open source web server and servlet system, which uses several Java EE specifications such as Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Expression Language, and WebSocket to provide a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java concept to run in. The remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2019-0232 ) resides in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Servlet when running on Windows with enableCmdLineArguments enabled and occurs due to a bug in the way the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) passes command line arguments to Windows. Since the CGI Servlet is disabled by default and its option enableCmdLineArguments is disabled by default in Tomcat 9.0.x, the remote code execution vulnerability has

Mark J Cox, one of the founding members of the Apache Software Foundation and the OpenSSL project, today posted a tweet warning users about a recently discovered important flaw in Apache HTTP Server software. The Apache web server is one of the most popular, widely used open-source web servers in the world that powers almost 40 percent of the whole Internet. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-0211 , was discovered by Charles Fol , a security engineer at Ambionics Security firm, and patched by the Apache developers in the latest version 2.4.39 of its software released today. The flaw affects Apache HTTP Server versions 2.4.17 through 2.4.38 and could allow any less-privileged user to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the targeted server. "In Apache HTTP Server 2.4 releases 2.4.17 to 2.4.38, with MPM event, worker or prefork, code executing in less-privileged child processes or threads (including scripts executed by an in-process scripting interprete

Semmle security researcher Man Yue Mo has disclosed a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework that could allow remote attackers to run malicious code on the affected servers. Apache Struts is an open source framework for developing web applications in the Java programming language and is widely used by enterprises globally, including by 65 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, like Vodafone, Lockheed Martin, Virgin Atlantic, and the IRS. The vulnerability ( CVE-2018-11776 ) resides in the core of Apache Struts and originates because of insufficient validation of user-provided untrusted inputs in the core of the Struts framework under certain configurations. The newly found Apache Struts exploit can be triggered just by visiting a specially crafted URL on the affected web server, allowing attackers to execute malicious code and eventually take complete control over the targeted server running the vulnerable applicatio

The massive Equifax data breach that exposed highly sensitive data of as many as 143 million people was caused by exploiting a flaw in Apache Struts framework, which Apache patched over two months earlier of the security incident, Equifax has confirmed. Credit rating agency Equifax is yet another example of the companies that became victims of massive cyber attacks due to not patching a critical vulnerability on time, for which patches were already issued by the respected companies. Rated critical with a maximum 10.0 score, the Apache Struts2 vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) exploited in the Equifax breach was disclosed and fixed by Apache on March 6 with the release of Apache Struts version 2.3.32 or 2.5.10.1. This flaw is separate from CVE-2017-9805, another Apache Struts2 vulnerability that was patched earlier this month, which was a programming bug that manifests due to the way Struts REST plugin handles XML payloads while deserializing them, and was fixed in Struts versio

Last year Google employees took an initiative to help thousands of Open Source Projects patch a critical remote code execution vulnerability in a widely used Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library. Dubbed Operation Rosehub , the initiative was volunteered by some 50 Google employees, who utilized 20 percent of their work time to patch over 2600 open source projects on Github, those were vulnerable to "Mad Gadget vulnerability." Mad Gadget vulnerability ( CVE-2015-6420 ) is a remote code execution bug in the Java deserialization used by the Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system. The ACC Library is widely deployed by many Java applications to decode data passed between computers. To exploit this flaw, all an unauthorized attacker need to do is submit maliciously crafted input to an application on a targeted system that uses the ACC library. Once the vulnerable ACC libra

Takashi Katsuki, a researcher at Antivirus firm Symantec has discovered a new cyber attack ongoing in the wild, targeting an open-source Web server application server Apache Tomcat with a cross platform Java based backdoor that can be used to attack other machines. The malware, dubbed as " Java.Tomdep " differs from other server malware and is not written in the PHP scripting language. It is basically a Java based backdoor act as Java Servlet that gives Apache Tomcat platforms malicious capabilities. Because Java is a cross platform language, the affected platforms include Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and most supported versions of Windows. The malware was detected less than a month ago and so far the number of infected machines appears to be low. You may think that this type of attack only targets personal computers, such as desktops and laptops, but unfortunately that isn't true. Servers can also be attacked. They are quite valuable targets, since they are usu

A new sophisticated and stealthy Apache backdoor meant to drive traffic to malicious websites serving Blackhole exploit kit widely has been detected by  Sucuri recently. Researchers claimed that this backdoor affecting hundreds of web servers right now. Dubbed Linux/Cdorked.A , one of the most sophisticated Apache backdoors we have seen so far. The backdoor leaves no traces of compromised hosts on the hard drive other than its modified httpd binary, thereby complicating forensics analysis. All of the information related to the backdoor is stored in shared memory.  The configuration is pushed by the attacker through obfuscated HTTP requests that aren't logged in normal Apache logs. The HTTP server is equipped with a reverse connect backdoor that can be triggered via a special HTTP GET request. This means that no command and control information is stored anywhere on the system. ESET researchers  analyzed the binary and discovered a nasty hidden backdoor. In the Li

Some critical vulnerabilities have been reported in Apache Tomcat, which can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and cause a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. These vulnerabilities affect Apache Tomcat 6.x and Apache Tomcat 7.x . Apache Tomcat vulnerabilities CVE-2012-4534 Apache Tomcat denial of service CVE-2012-3546 Apache Tomcat Bypass of security constraints CVE-2012-4431 Apache Tomcat Bypass of CSRF prevention filter According to CVE-2012-4431 , The CSRF prevention filter could be bypassed if a request was made to a protected resource without a session identifier present in the request. CVE-2012-4534, DOS includes vulnerabilities ranging from excessive resource consumption (e.g. causing a system to use a lot of memory) to crashing an application or an entire system. Whereas, CVE-2012-3546 - where malicious users or people can bypass certain security mechanisms of the application. The actual impact varies signif