Canonical | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Canonical's  Snap  software packaging and deployment system, the most critical of which can be exploited to escalate privilege to gain root privileges. Snaps are self-contained application packages that are designed to work on operating systems that use the Linux kernel and can be installed using a tool called snapd. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44731 , the issue concerns a privilege escalation flaw in the  snap-confine  function, a program used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications. The shortcoming is rated 7.8 on the CVSS scoring system. "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host," Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys,  said , adding the weakness could be abused to "obtain full root privileges on default installations of Ubuntu." Red Hat, in an independ

An unknown hacker yesterday successfully managed to hack into the official GitHub account of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux project and created 11 new empty repositories . It appears that the cyberattack was, fortunately, just a "loud" defacement attempt rather than a "silent" sophisticated supply-chain attack that could have been abused to distribute modified malicious versions of the open-source Canonical software. In a statement, David from Canonical confirmed that attacker(s) used a Canonical owned GitHub account whose credentials were compromised to unauthorizedly access Canonical's Github account. "We can confirm that on 2019-07-06 there was a Canonical owned account on GitHub whose credentials were compromised and used to create repositories and issues among other activities," David said. "Canonical has removed the compromised account from the Canonical organization in GitHub and is still investigating the extent o

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