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An unknown threat actor created malicious game modes for the Dota 2 multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game that could have been exploited to establish backdoor access to players' systems. The modes exploited a  high-severity flaw  in the V8 JavaScript engine tracked as  CVE-2021-38003  (CVSS score: 8.8), which was  exploited as a zero-day  and addressed by Google in October 2021. "Since V8 was not sandboxed in Dota, the exploit on its own allowed for remote code execution against other Dota players," Avast researcher Jan Vojtěšek  said  in a report published last week. Following responsible disclosure to Valve, the game publisher  shipped fixes  on January 12, 2023, by upgrading the version of V8. Game modes are essentially  custom capabilities  that can either augment an existing title or offer completely new gameplay in a manner that deviates from the standard rules. While publishing a custom game mode to the Steam store includes a vetting process from

Google on Wednesday officially rolled out support for passkeys, the next-generation authentication standard, to both Android and Chrome. "Passkeys are a significantly safer replacement for passwords and other phishable authentication factors," the tech giant  said . "They cannot be reused, don't leak in server breaches, and protect users from phishing attacks." The feature was  first announced  in May 2022 as part of a broader push to support a common passwordless sign-in standard. Passkeys, established by the FIDO Alliance and also backed by  Apple and Microsoft , aim to replace standard passwords with unique digital keys that are stored locally on the device. To that end, creating a passkey requires confirmation from the end-user about the account that will be used to log in to the online service, followed by using their biometric information or the  device   passcode . Signing in to a website on a mobile device is also a simple two-step process that en

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Details have emerged about a recently patched critical remote code execution vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine used in Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. The issue relates to a case of use-after-free in the instruction optimization component, successful exploitation of which could "allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the browser." The flaw, which  was identified  in the Dev channel version of Chrome 101, was reported to Google by Weibo Wang, a security researcher at Singapore cybersecurity company  Numen Cyber Technology  and has since been quietly fixed by the company. "This vulnerability occurs in the instruction selection stage, where the wrong instruction has been selected and resulting in memory access exception," Wang said . Use-after-free flaws  occur  when previous-freed memory is accessed, inducing undefined behavior and causing a program to crash, use corrupted data, or even achieve execution

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a free-to-use browser automation framework that's being increasingly used by threat actors as part of their attack campaigns. "The framework contains numerous features which we assess may be utilized in the enablement of malicious activities," researchers from Team Cymru  said  in a new report published Wednesday. "The technical entry bar for the framework is purposefully kept low, which has served to create an active community of content developers and contributors, with actors in the underground economy advertising their time for the creation of bespoke tooling." The U.S. cybersecurity company said it observed command-and-control (C2) IP addresses associated with malware such as  Bumblebee ,  BlackGuard , and  RedLine Stealer  establishing connections to the downloads subdomain of Bablosoft ("downloads.bablosoft[.]com"), the maker of the Browser Automation Studio (BAS). Bablosoft was previously

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) on Thursday pointed fingers at a North Macedonian spyware developer named Cytrox for developing exploits against five zero-day (aka 0-day) flaws, four in Chrome and one in Android, to target Android users. "The 0-day exploits were used alongside n-day exploits as the developers took advantage of the time difference between when some critical bugs were patched but not flagged as security issues and when these patches were fully deployed across the Android ecosystem," TAG researchers Clement Lecigne and Christian Resell  said . Cytrox is alleged to have packaged the exploits and sold them to different government-backed actors located in Egypt, Armenia, Greece, Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire, Serbia, Spain, and Indonesia, who, in turn, weaponized the bugs in at least three different campaigns. The commercial surveillance company is the maker of  Predator , an implant  analogous  to that of NSO Group's  Pegasus , and is known to hav

Google on Wednesday took to its annual developer conference to announce a host of privacy and security updates, including support for virtual credit cards on Android and Chrome. "When you use autofill to enter your payment details at checkout, virtual cards will add an additional layer of security by replacing your actual card number with a distinct, virtual number," Google's Jen Fitzpatrick  said  in a statement. The goal, the search giant, said to keep payment information safe and secure during online shopping and protect users from  skimming attacks  wherein threat actors inject malicious JavaScript code to plunder credit card numbers and sell them on the black market. The feature is expected to roll out in the U.S. for Visa, American Express, Mastercard, and Capital One cards starting this summer. Interestingly, while Apple offers an option to mask email addresses via  Hide My Email , which enables users to create unique, random email addresses to use with apps

Google on Thursday shipped emergency patches to address two security issues in its Chrome web browser, one of which it says is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-1364 , the tech giant described the high-severity bug as a case of type confusion in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group has been credited with reporting the flaw on April 13, 2022. As is typically the case with actively exploited zero-day flaws, the company acknowledged it's "aware that an exploit for CVE-2022-1364 exists in the wild." Additional details about the flaw and the identity of the threat actors have been withheld to prevent further abuse. With the latest fix, Google has patched a total of three zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome since the start of the year. It's also the second type confusion-related bug in V8 to be squashed in less than a month - CVE-2022-0609  - Use-after-free in Animation CVE-2022-1096  - Type confusio

Google on Friday shipped an out-of-band security update to address a high severity vulnerability in its Chrome browser that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-1096 , the zero-day flaw relates to a type confusion vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript engine. An anonymous researcher has been credited with reporting the bug on March 23, 2022. Type confusion errors, which arise when a resource (e.g., a variable or an object) is accessed using a type that's incompatible to what was originally initialized, could have serious consequences in languages that are not  memory safe  like C and C++, enabling a malicious actor to perform out-of-bounds memory access. "When a memory buffer is accessed using the wrong type, it could read or write memory out of the bounds of the buffer, if the allocated buffer is smaller than the type that the code is attempting to access, leading to a crash and possibly code execution," MITRE's Common Weakness Enum

A financially-motivated malware campaign has compromised over 800 WordPress websites to deliver a banking trojan dubbed Chaes targeting Brazilian customers of Banco do Brasil, Loja Integrada, Mercado Bitcoin, Mercado Livre, and Mercado Pago. First documented by  Cybereason  in November 2020, the info-stealing malware is delivered via a sophisticated infection chain that's engineered to harvest sensitive consumer information, including login credentials, credit card numbers, and other financial information. "Chaes is characterized by the multiple-stage delivery that utilizes scripting frameworks such as JScript, Python, and NodeJS, binaries written in Delphi, and malicious Google Chrome extensions," Avast researchers Anh Ho and Igor Morgenstern  said . "The ultimate goal of Chaes is to steal credentials stored in Chrome and intercept logins of popular banking websites in Brazil." The attack sequence is triggered when users visit one of the infected websites

Google Chrome has announced plans to prohibit public websites from directly accessing endpoints located within private networks as part of an upcoming major security shakeup to prevent intrusions via the browser. The proposed change is set to be rolled out in two phases consisting of releases Chrome 98 and Chrome 101 scheduled in the coming months via a newly implemented W3C specification called private network access ( PNA ). "Chrome will start sending a  CORS  preflight request ahead of any private network request for a subresource, which asks for explicit permission from the target server," Titouan Rigoudy and Eiji Kitamura  said . "This preflight request will carry a new header, Access-Control-Request-Private-Network: true, and the response to it must carry a corresponding header, Access-Control-Allow-Private-Network: true." What this means is that starting with Chrome version 101, any website accessible via the internet will be made to seek explicit permi

Google has rolled out the first round of updates to its Chrome web browser for 2022 to fix 37 security issues, one of which is rated Critical in severity and could be exploited to pass arbitrary code and gain control over a victim's system. Tracked as  CVE-2022-0096 , the flaw relates to a  use-after-free bug  in the Storage component, which could have devastating effects ranging from corruption of valid data to the execution of malicious code on a compromised machine. Security researcher Yangkang ( @dnpushme ) of Qihoo 360 ATA, who has previously disclosed  zero-day vulnerabilities  in Apple's WebKit, has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on November 30, 2021. It's also worth pointing out that 24 of the 37 uncovered flaws came from external researchers, including its Google Project Zero initiative, while the others were flagged as part of its ongoing internal security work. Of the 24 bugs, 10 are rated High, another 10 are rated Medium, and three

Windows 10, iOS 15, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Ubuntu 20 were successfully broken into using original, never-before-seen exploits at the Tianfu Cup 2021, the fourth edition of the international cybersecurity contest held in the city of Chengdu, China. Targets this year  included  Google Chrome running on Windows 10 21H1, Apple Safari running on Macbook Pro, Adobe PDF Reader, Docker CE, Ubuntu 20/CentOS 8, Microsoft Exchange Server 2019, Windows 10, VMware Workstation, VMware ESXi, Parallels Desktop, iPhone 13 Pro running iOS 15, domestic mobile phones running Android, QEMU VM, Synology DS220j DiskStation, and ASUS RT-AX56U router. The Chinese version of Pwn2Own was  started  in 2018 in the wake of government regulation in the country that barred security researchers from participating in international hacking competitions because of national security concerns. With the exception of Synology DS220j NAS, Xiaomi Mi 11 smartphone, and an unnamed Chine

Google has announced plans to automatically enroll about 150 million users into its two-factor authentication scheme by the end of the year as part of its ongoing efforts to prevent unauthorized access to accounts and improve security. In addition, the internet giant said it also intends to require 2 million YouTube creators to switch on the setting, which it calls two-step verification (2SV), to protect their channels from potential takeover attacks. "2SV is strongest when it combines both 'something you know' (like a password) and 'something you have' (like your phone or a security key)," Google's AbdelKarim Mardini and Guemmy Kim  said  in a post, adding "having a second form of authentication dramatically decreases an attacker's chance of gaining access to an account." The rollout follows the  company's proposals  to beef up account sign-ins earlier this May, when it said it intends to "automatically enrolling users in 2SV i

Google on Tuesday released a new version of Chrome web-browsing software for Windows, Mac, and Linux with patches for two newly discovered security vulnerabilities for both of which it says exploits exist in the wild, allowing attackers to engage in active exploitation. One of the two flaws concerns an insufficient validation of untrusted input in its V8 JavaScript rendering engine (CVE-2021-21220), which was demonstrated by Dataflow Security's Bruno Keith and Niklas Baumstark at the  Pwn2Own 2021  hacking contest last week. While Google moved to fix the flaw quickly, security researcher Rajvardhan Agarwal published a  working exploit  over the weekend by reverse-engineering the patch that the Chromium team pushed to the open-source component, a factor that may have played a crucial role in the release. UPDATE:   Agarwal, in an email to The Hacker News, confirmed that there's one more vulnerability affecting Chromium-based browsers that has been patched in the latest vers

Exactly a month after  patching  an actively exploited zero-day flaw in Chrome, Google today rolled out fixes for yet another zero-day vulnerability in the world's most popular web browser that it says is being abused in the wild. Chrome 89.0.4389.72, released by the search giant for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Tuesday, comes with a total of 47 security fixes, the most severe of which concerns an "object lifecycle issue in audio." Tracked as CVE-2021-21166, the security flaw is one of the two bugs reported last month by Alison Huffman of Microsoft Browser Vulnerability Research on February 11. A separate object lifecycle flaw, also identified in the audio component, was reported to Google on February 4, the same day the stable version of Chrome 88 became available. With no additional details, it's not immediately clear if the two security shortcomings are related. Google acknowledged that an exploit for the vulnerability exists in the wild but stopped short of s

Google has patched two more zero-day flaws in the Chrome web browser for desktop, making it the fourth and fifth actively exploited vulnerabilities addressed by the search giant in recent weeks. The company released  86.0.4240.198  for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which it said will be rolling out over the coming days/weeks to all users. Tracked as CVE-2020-16013 and CVE-2020-16017, the flaws were discovered and reported to Google by "anonymous" sources, unlike previous cases, which were uncovered by the company's Project Zero elite security team. Google acknowledged that exploits for both the vulnerabilities exist in the wild but stopped short of sharing more specifics to allow a majority of users to install the fixes. According to the release notes, the two flaws are: CVE-2020-16013:  An "inappropriate implementation" of its V8 JavaScript rendering engine was reported on November 9. CVE-2020-16017:  An  use-after-free  memory corruption issue in Chrome

Multiple software products from Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Samsung were successfully pwned with previously unseen exploits in  Tianfu Cup 2020 , the third edition of the international cybersecurity contest held in the city of Chengdu, China. "Many mature and hard targets have been pwned on this year's contest," the event organizers  said . "11 out of 16 targets cracked with 23 successful demos." The hacking competition showed off hacking attempts against a  number of platforms , including: Adobe PDF Reader Apple iPhone 11 Pro running iOS 14 and Safari browser ASUS RT-AX86U router CentOS 8 Docker Community Edition Google Chrome Microsoft Windows 10 v2004 Mozilla Firefox Samsung Galaxy S20 running Android 10 TP-Link TL-WDR7660 router VMware ESXi hypervisor The Tianfu Cup, analogous to Pwn2Own, was started in 2018 following a  government regulation  in the country that barred security researchers from participating in internati

Google has disclosed details of a new zero-day privilege escalation flaw in the Windows operating system that's being actively exploited in the wild. The elevation of privileges (EoP) vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2020-17087 , concerns a buffer overflow present since at least Windows 7 in the Windows Kernel Cryptography Driver ("cng.sys") that can be exploited for a sandbox escape. "The bug resides in the cng!CfgAdtpFormatPropertyBlock function and is caused by a 16-bit integer truncation issue," Google's Project Zero researchers Mateusz Jurczyk and Sergei Glazunov noted in their technical write-up. The security team made the details public following a seven-day disclosure deadline because of evidence that it's under active exploit. Project Zero has shared a proof-of-concept exploit (PoC) that can be used to corrupt kernel data and crash vulnerable Windows devices even under default system configurations. What's notable is that the exploit ch

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details about a new watering hole attack targeting the Korean diaspora that exploits vulnerabilities in web browsers such as Google Chrome and Internet Explorer to deploy malware for espionage purposes. Dubbed " Operation Earth Kitsune " by Trend Micro, the campaign involves the use of SLUB (for SLack and githUB) malware and two new backdoors —  dneSpy and agfSpy  — to exfiltrate system information and gain additional control of the compromised machine. The attacks were observed during the months of March, May, and September, according to the cybersecurity firm. Watering hole attacks allow a bad actor to compromise a targeted business by compromising a carefully selected website by inserting an exploit with an intention to gain access to the victim's device and infect it with malware. Operation Earth Kitsune is said to have deployed the spyware samples on websites associated with North Korea, although access to these websites

Attention readers, if you are using Google Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computers, you need to update your web browsing software immediately to the latest version Google released earlier today. Google released Chrome version 86.0.4240.111 today to patch several security high-severity issues, including a zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild by attackers to hijack targeted computers. Tracked as CVE-2020-15999 , the actively exploited vulnerability is a type of memory-corruption flaw called heap buffer overflow in Freetype, a popular open source software development library for rendering fonts that comes packaged with Chrome. The vulnerability was discovered and reported by security researcher Sergei Glazunov of Google Project Zero on October 19 and is subject to a seven-day public disclosure deadline due to the flaw being under active exploitation. Glazunov also immediately reported the zero-day vulnerability to FreeType developers, who then