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Serious, Yet Patched Flaw Exposes 6.1 Million IoT, Mobile Devices to Remote Code Execution

Serious, Yet Patched Flaw Exposes 6.1 Million IoT, Mobile Devices to Remote Code Execution
Dec 05, 2015
As much as you protect your electronics from being hacked, hackers are clever enough at finding new ways to get into your devices. But, you would hope that once a flaw discovered it would at least be fixed in few days or weeks, but that's not always the case. A three-year-old security vulnerability within a software component used by more than 6.1 Million smart devices still remains unpatched by many vendors, thereby placing Smart TVs, Routers, Smartphones, and other Internet of Things (IoT) products at risk of exploit. Security researchers at Trend Micro have brought the flaw to light that has been known since 2012 but has not been patched yet. Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities  Researchers discovered a collection of Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in the Portable SDK for UPnP , or libupnp component – a software library used by mobile devices, routers, smart TVs, and other IoT devices to stream media files over a network. The flaws occur du

Billions of Android Devices Vulnerable to Privilege Escalation Except Android 5.0 Lollipop

Billions of Android Devices Vulnerable to Privilege Escalation Except Android 5.0 Lollipop
Nov 20, 2014
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

Pentera's 2024 Report Reveals Hundreds of Security Events per Week

Pentera's 2024 Report Reveals Hundreds of Security Events per Week
Apr 22, 2024Red Team / Pentesting
Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

Android 4.3 and Earlier versions Vulnerable to Critical Code-Execution Flaw

Android 4.3 and Earlier versions Vulnerable to Critical Code-Execution Flaw
Jun 27, 2014
A critical code-execution vulnerability almost affecting everyone those are not running the most updated version of Google Android , i.e. Android version 4.4 also known as KitKat. After nine months of vulnerability disclosure to the Android security team, researchers of the Application Security team at IBM have finally revealed all the possible details of a serious code-execution vulnerability that still affects the Android devices running versions 4.3 and earlier, which could allow attackers to exfiltrate sensitive information from the vulnerable devices. " Considering Android's fragmented nature and the fact that this was a code-execution vulnerability, we decided to wait a bit with the public disclosure ," said Roee Hay, a security research group leader at IBM. The researchers found the stack buffer overflow vulnerability that resides in the Android's KeyStore storage service, which according to the Android developers' website is the service code running in Androi

SaaS Security Buyers Guide

cyber security
websiteAppOmniSaaS Security / Threat Detection
This guide captures the definitive criteria for choosing the right SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) vendor.

Critical GnuTLS Flaw Leaves SSL Clients Vulnerable to Remote Code Execution

Critical GnuTLS Flaw Leaves SSL Clients Vulnerable to Remote Code Execution
Jun 04, 2014
GnuTLS, a widely used open source SSL/TLS cryptographic library is vulnerable to a buffer overflow vulnerability that could be exploited to crash TLS clients or potentially execute malicious code on underlying systems. The GnuTLS library implements secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) protocols on computers, servers, and softwares to provide encrypted communications over insecure channels. The bug ( CVE-2014-3466 ) was independently discovered by Joonas Kuorilehto of security firm Codenomicon, the same security firm who discovered the biggest Internet vulnerability, Heartbleed. Unlike Heartbleed, the GnuTLS library is not as widely deployed as OpenSSL. The GnuTLS Vulnerability resides in the way GnuTLS parses the session ID from the server response during a TLS handshake. It does not check the length of session ID value in the ServerHello message, which allows a malicious server to send an excessively long value in order to execute buffer overf

23-year-old Stack overflow vulnerability discovered in X11 Server

23-year-old Stack overflow vulnerability discovered in X11 Server
Jan 09, 2014
X.Org Foundation develops the X-Window System, the standard window system for open source operating systems and devices. Most of the graphical user interfaces for Unix and Linux systems rely on it. At the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Germany, Ilja van Sprundel , a security researcher gave the presentation titled  " X11 Server security with being 'worse than it looks.'". He found more than 120 bugs in a few months. In the presentation, he has presented a 23 year old Stack overflow vulnerability in X11 System that could lead to privilege escalation to root and affects all versions of the X Server back to X11R5. Later today, X.Org Foundation released a security Advisory , states " A BDF font file containing a longer than expected string could overflow the buffer on the stack. Testing in X servers built with Stack Protector resulted in an immediate crash when reading a user-provided specially crafted font. " The flaw resides in a file at " libXfo

Windows Error Crash Reports or Treasure of Zero-Day vulnerabilities for NSA?

Windows Error Crash Reports or Treasure of Zero-Day vulnerabilities for NSA?
Jan 03, 2014
I am sure that you all have been familiar with the above shown annoying Window Operating System error messages that many times pop ups on your screen while working on the system in case of process failure i.e. " The system has recovered from a serious error. A log of this error has been created. Please tell Microsoft about this problem " The message that prompts ask the user to report the problem to Microsoft followed by the options to Send an error report or Not send . Most of the time Gentle users like you and me used to submit these error reports to aware the Microsoft about the problem. But What if these crash reports can be abused to identify the vulnerabilities of your system for Spying? NSA is intercepting wide range of Internet Traffic including many Encrypted connections and naturally unencrypted also and surprisingly, by default Microsoft encrypts its reports, but the messages are transmitted unencrypted or over standard HTTP connections to watson.microsoft.com .

Buffer Overflow vulnerability in VLC media player

Buffer Overflow vulnerability in VLC media player
Feb 01, 2013
VideoLAN recently published a security advisory warning of a buffer overflow vulnerability in versions 2.0.5 and earlier of VLC Media Player, which might be exploited to execute arbitrary code. This vulnerability was reported by Debasish Mandal. The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the "DemuxPacket()" function (modules/demux/asf/asf.c) when processing ASF files and can be exploited to cause a buffer overflow via a specially crafted ASF file. To exploit the vulnerability, a user must explicitly open a specially crafted ASF movie. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code, but requires tricking a user into opening a malicious file. VideoLAN advises users to refrain from opening files from untrusted locations and to disable the VLC browser plug-ins until the issue is patched. A patch will be included in VLC 2.0.6, the next version of the media player, which is only available for testing purposes at the moment.
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