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Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the Intelligent Platform Management Interface ( IPMI ) firmware for Supermicro baseboard management controllers (BMCs) that could result in privilege escalation and execution of malicious code on affected systems. The seven flaws, tracked from CVE-2023-40284 through CVE-2023-40290, vary in severity from High to Critical, according to Binarly, enabling unauthenticated actors to gain root access to the BMC system. Supermicro has  shipped  a BMC firmware update to patch the bugs. BMCs are special processors on server motherboards that support remote management, enabling administrators to monitor hardware indicators such as temperature, set fan speed, and update the UEFI system firmware. What's more, BMC chips remain operational even if the host operating system is offline, making them lucrative attack vectors to deploy  persistent malware . A brief explainer of each of the vulnerabilities is below - CVE-2023-402...

An analysis of firmware images across devices from Dell, HP, and Lenovo has revealed the presence of outdated versions of the  OpenSSL  cryptographic library, underscoring a supply chain risk. EFI Development Kit, aka  EDK , is an open source implementation of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ), which functions as an interface between the operating system and the firmware embedded in the device's hardware. The firmware development environment, which is in its second iteration (EDK II), comes with its own cryptographic package called  CryptoPkg  that, in turn, makes use of services from the OpenSSL project. Per firmware security company Binarly, the firmware image associated with Lenovo Thinkpad enterprise devices was found to use three different versions of OpenSSL: 0.9.8zb, 1.0.0a, and 1.0.2j, the last of which was released in 2018. What's more, one of the firmware modules named InfineonTpmUpdateDxe relied on OpenSSL version 0.9.8zb that w...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

A number of firmware security flaws uncovered in HP's business-oriented high-end notebooks continue to be left unpatched in some devices even months after public disclosure. Binarly, which first  revealed details  of the issues at the  Black Hat USA conference  in mid-August 2022, said the vulnerabilities "can't be detected by firmware integrity monitoring systems due to limitations of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) measurement." Firmware flaws can have serious implications as they can be abused by an adversary to achieve long-term persistence on a device in a manner that can survive reboots and evade traditional operating system-level security protections. The high-severity weaknesses identified by Binarly affect HP EliteBook devices and concern a case of memory corruption in the System Management Mode (SMM) of the firmware, thereby enabling the execution of arbitrary code with the highest privileges - CVE-2022-23930  (CVSS score: 8.2) - Stack-based b...