Cross-site Scripting | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Malicious actors are exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Hunk Companion plugin for WordPress to install other vulnerable plugins that could open the door to a variety of attacks. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-11972 (CVSS score: 9.8), affects all versions of the plugin prior to 1.9.0. The plugin has over 10,000 active installations. "This flaw poses a significant security risk, as it enables attackers to install vulnerable or closed plugins, which can then be exploited for attacks such as Remote Code Execution (RCE), SQL Injection, Cross‑Site Scripting (XSS), or even the creation of administrative backdoors," WPScan said in a report. To make matters worse, attackers could leverage outdated or abandoned plugins to circumvent security measures, tamper with database records, execute malicious scripts, and seize control of the sites. WPScan said it uncovered the security defect when analyzing an infection on an unspecified WordPress site, finding that threat actors ...

Nearly two dozen security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Advantech EKI industrial-grade wireless access point devices, some of which could be weaponized to bypass authentication and execute code with elevated privileges. "These vulnerabilities pose significant risks, allowing unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges, thereby fully compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the affected devices," cybersecurity company Nozomi Networks said in a Wednesday analysis. Following responsible disclosure, the weaknesses have been addressed in the following firmware versions - 1.6.5 (for EKI-6333AC-2G and EKI-6333AC-2GD) 1.2.2 (for EKI-6333AC-1GPO) Six of the identified 20 vulnerabilities have been deemed critical, allowing an attacker to obtain persistent access to internal resources by implanting a backdoor, trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, and even repurpose infected endpoints as Linux workstations to enable latera...

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...

Unknown threat actors have been observed attempting to exploit a now-patched security flaw in the open-source Roundcube webmail software as part of a phishing attack designed to steal user credentials. Russian cybersecurity company Positive Technologies said it discovered last month an email that was sent to an unspecified governmental organization located in one of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. However, it bears noting that the message was originally sent in June 2024. "The email appeared to be a message without text, containing only an attached document," it said in an analysis published earlier this week. "However, the email client didn't show the attachment. The body of the email contained distinctive tags with the statement eval(atob(...)), which decode and execute JavaScript code." The attack chain, per Positive Technologies, is an attempt to exploit CVE-2024-37383 (CVSS score: 6.1), a stored cross-site scripting ( XSS ) v...

Two security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the Mailcow open-source mail server suite that could be exploited by malicious actors to achieve arbitrary code execution on susceptible instances. Both shortcomings impact all versions of the software prior to version 2024-04 , which was released on April 4, 2024. The issues were responsibly disclosed by SonarSource on March 22, 2024. The flaws, rated Moderate in severity, are listed below - CVE-2024-30270 (CVSS score: 6.7) - A path traversal vulnerability impacting a function named "rspamd_maps()" that could result in the execution of arbitrary commands on the server by allowing a threat actor to overwrite any file that's can be modified with the "www-data" user CVE-2024-31204 (CVSS score: 6.8) - A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability via the exception handling mechanism when not operating in the DEV_MODE The second of the two flaws is rooted in the fact that it saves details of the exception...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned that multiple high-severity security vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins are being actively exploited by threat actors to create rogue administrator accounts for follow-on exploitation. "These vulnerabilities are found in various WordPress plugins and are prone to unauthenticated stored cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks due to inadequate input sanitization and output escaping, making it possible for attackers to inject malicious scripts," Fastly researchers Simran Khalsa, Xavier Stevens, and Matthew Mathur said . The security flaws in question are listed below - CVE-2023-6961 (CVSS score: 7.2) - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting in WP Meta SEO <= 4.5.12 CVE-2023-40000 (CVSS score: 8.3) - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting in LiteSpeed Cache <= 5.7 CVE-2024-2194 (CVSS score: 7.2) - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting in WP Statistics <= 14.5 Attack chains exploiting the flaws involve inject...

A high-severity flaw impacting the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress is being actively exploited by threat actors to create rogue admin accounts on susceptible websites. The  findings  come from WPScan, which said that the vulnerability ( CVE-2023-40000 , CVSS score: 8.3) has been leveraged to set up bogus admin users with the names wpsupp‑user and wp‑configuser. CVE-2023-40000, which was  disclosed  by Patchstack in February 2024, is a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could permit an unauthenticated user to elevate privileges by means of specially crafted HTTP requests. The flaw was addressed in October 2023 in version 5.7.0.1. It's worth noting that the latest version of the plugin is 6.2.0.1, which was  released  on April 25, 2024. LiteSpeed Cache has over 5 million active installations, with statistics showing that versions other than 5.7, 6.0, 6.1, and 6....

Cybersecurity researchers have shared details of a now-patched security vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow ( MWAA ) that could be potentially exploited by a malicious actor to hijack victims' sessions and achieve remote code execution on underlying instances. The vulnerability, now addressed by AWS, has been codenamed  FlowFixation  by Tenable. "Upon taking over the victim's account, the attacker could have performed tasks such as reading connection strings, adding configurations and triggering directed acyclic graphs (DAGS)," senior security researcher Liv Matan  said  in a technical analysis. "Under certain circumstances such actions can result in RCE on the instance that underlies the MWAA, and in lateral movement to other services." The root cause of the vulnerability, per the cybersecurity firm, is a combination of  session fixation  on the web management panel of AWS MWAA and an AWS domain misconfigur...

A new malware campaign is leveraging a high-severity security flaw in the Popup Builder plugin for WordPress to inject malicious JavaScript code. According to Sucuri, the campaign has  infected more than 3,900 sites  over the past three weeks. "These attacks are orchestrated from domains less than a month old, with registrations dating back to February 12th, 2024," security researcher Puja Srivastava  said  in a report dated March 7. Infection sequences involve the exploitation of CVE-2023-6000, a security vulnerability in Popup Builder that could be exploited to create rogue admin users and install arbitrary plugins. The shortcoming was exploited as part of a  Balada Injector campaign  earlier this January, compromising no less than 7,000 sites. The latest set of attacks lead to the injection of malicious code, which comes in two different variants and is designed to redirect site visitors to other sites such as phishing and scam pages. WordPress s...

A security vulnerability has been disclosed in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could enable unauthenticated users to escalate their privileges. Tracked as  CVE-2023-40000 , the vulnerability was addressed in October 2023 in version 5.7.0.1. "This plugin suffers from unauthenticated site-wide stored [cross-site scripting] vulnerability and could allow any unauthenticated user from stealing sensitive information to, in this case, privilege escalation on the WordPress site by performing a single HTTP request," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad  said . LiteSpeed Cache , which is used to improve site performance, has more than five million installations. The latest version of the plugin is 6.1, which was released on February 5, 2024. The WordPress security company said CVE-2023-40000 is the result of a lack of user input sanitization and  escaping output . The vulnerability is rooted in a function named update_cdn_status() and can be reproduced in a defa...

VMware is urging users to uninstall the deprecated Enhanced Authentication Plugin (EAP) following the discovery of a critical security flaw. Tracked as  CVE-2024-22245  (CVSS score: 9.6), the vulnerability has been described as an arbitrary authentication relay bug. "A malicious actor could trick a target domain user with EAP installed in their web browser into requesting and relaying service tickets for arbitrary Active Directory Service Principal Names (SPNs)," the company  said  in an advisory. EAP,  deprecated as of March 2021 , is a software package that's designed to allow direct login to vSphere's management interfaces and tools through a web browser. It's not included by default and is not part of vCenter Server, ESXi, or Cloud Foundation. Also discovered in the same tool is a session hijack flaw (CVE-2024-22250, CVSS score: 7.8) that could permit a malicious actor with unprivileged local access to a Windows operating system to seize a privileged EA...

Threat actors operating with interests aligned to Belarus and Russia have been linked to a new cyber espionage campaign that likely exploited cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in Roundcube webmail servers to target over 80 organizations. These entities are primarily located in Georgia, Poland, and Ukraine, according to Recorded Future, which attributed the intrusion set to a threat actor known as Winter Vivern, which is also known as TA473 and UAC0114. The cybersecurity firm is  tracking  the hacking outfit under the moniker Threat Activity Group 70 (TAG-70). Winter Vivern's exploitation of security flaws in Roundcube email servers was  previously highlighted  by ESET in October 2023, joining other Russia-linked threat actor groups such as APT28, APT29, and Sandworm that are known to target email software. The adversary, which has been active since at least December 2020, has also been  linked  to the abuse of a now-patched vulnerability in Zi...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  a medium-severity security flaw impacting Roundcube email software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2023-43770  (CVSS score: 6.1), relates to a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw that stems from the handling of linkrefs in plain text messages. "Roundcube Webmail contains a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that can lead to information disclosure via malicious link references in plain/text messages," CISA said. According to a description of the bug on NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the vulnerability impacts Roundcube versions before 1.4.14, 1.5.x before 1.5.4, and 1.6.x before 1.6.3. The flaw was  addressed  by Roundcube maintainers with  version 1.6.3 , which was released on September 15, 2023. Zscaler security researcher Niraj Shivtarkar has be...

Employment agencies and retail companies chiefly located in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region have been targeted by a previously undocumented threat actor known as  ResumeLooters  since early 2023 with the goal of stealing sensitive data. Singapore-headquartered Group-IB said the hacking crew's activities are geared towards job search platforms and the theft of resumes, with as many as 65 websites compromised between November 2023 and December 2023. The stolen files are estimated to contain 2,188,444 user data records, of which 510,259 have been taken from job search websites. Over two million unique email addresses are present within the dataset. "By using SQL injection attacks against websites, the threat actor attempts to steal user databases that may include names, phone numbers, emails, and DoBs, as well as information about job seekers' experience, employment history, and other sensitive personal data," security researcher Nikita Rostovcev  said  in a report s...

Juniper Networks has released out-of-band updates to  address high-severity flaws  in SRX Series and EX Series that could be exploited by a threat actor to take control of susceptible systems. The vulnerabilities, tracked as  CVE-2024-21619 and CVE-2024-21620 , are rooted in the J-Web component and impact all versions of Junos OS. Two other shortcomings, CVE-2023-36846 and CVE-2023-36851, were  previously disclosed  by the company in August 2023. CVE-2024-21619  (CVSS score: 5.3) - A missing authentication vulnerability that could lead to exposure of sensitive configuration information CVE-2024-21620  (CVSS score: 8.8) - A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could lead to the execution of arbitrary commands with the target's permissions by means of a specially crafted request Cybersecurity firm watchTowr Labs has been  credited  with discovering and reporting the issues. The two vulnerabilities have been addressed in the foll...

The maintainers of the open-source continuous integration/continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) automation software Jenkins have resolved nine security flaws, including a critical bug that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution (RCE). The issue, assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2024-23897 , has been described as an arbitrary file read vulnerability through the built-in command line interface ( CLI ) "Jenkins uses the args4j library to parse command arguments and options on the Jenkins controller when processing CLI commands," the maintainers  said  in a Wednesday advisory. "This command parser has a feature that replaces an @ character followed by a file path in an argument with the file's contents (expandAtFiles). This feature is enabled by default and Jenkins 2.441 and earlier, LTS 2.426.2 and earlier does not disable it." A threat actor could exploit this quirk to read arbitrary files on the Jenkins controller file system...

A security flaw has been disclosed in Kyocera's  Device Manager  product that could be exploited by bad actors to carry out malicious activities on affected systems. "This vulnerability allows attackers to coerce authentication attempts to their own resources, such as a malicious SMB share, to capture or relay Active Directory hashed credentials if the 'Restrict NTLM: Outgoing NTLM traffic to remote servers' security policy is not enabled," Trustwave  said . Tracked as  CVE-2023-50916 , Kyocera, in an  advisory  released late last month, described it as a path traversal issue that enables an attacker to intercept and alter a local path pointing to the backup location of the database to a universal naming convention (UNC) path. This, in turn, causes the web application to attempt to authenticate the rogue UNC path, resulting in unauthorized access to clients' accounts and data theft. Furthermore, depending on the configuration of the environment, it cou...

A zero-day flaw in the Zimbra Collaboration email software was exploited by four different groups in real-world attacks to pilfer email data, user credentials, and authentication tokens. "Most of this activity occurred after the initial fix became public on GitHub," Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG)  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-37580  (CVSS score: 6.1), is a  reflected cross-site scripting  (XSS) vulnerability impacting versions before 8.8.15 Patch 41. It was  addressed  by Zimbra as part of patches released on July 25, 2023. Successful exploitation of the shortcoming could allow execution of malicious scripts on the victims' web browser simply by tricking them into clicking on a specially crafted URL, effectively initiating the XSS request to Zimbra and reflecting the attack back to the user. Google TAG, whose researcher Clément Lecigne was credited with discovering and reporting the bug, s...

Veeam has released  security updates  to address four flaws in its ONE IT monitoring and analytics platform, two of which are rated critical in severity. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-38547  (CVSS score: 9.9) - An unspecified flaw that can be leveraged by an unauthenticated user to gain information about the SQL server connection Veeam ONE uses to access its configuration database, resulting in remote code execution on the SQL server. CVE-2023-38548  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A flaw in Veeam ONE that allows an unprivileged user with access to the Veeam ONE Web Client to obtain the NTLM hash of the account used by the Veeam ONE Reporting Service. CVE-2023-38549  (CVSS score: 4.5) - A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that allows a user with the Veeam ONE Power User role to obtain the access token of a user with the Veeam ONE Administrator role. CVE-2023-41723  (CVSS score: 4.3) - A vulnerability in Veeam ONE that permits ...

The threat actor known as  Winter Vivern  has been observed exploiting a zero-day flaw in Roundcube webmail software on October 11, 2023, to harvest email messages from victims' accounts. "Winter Vivern has stepped up its operations by using a zero-day vulnerability in Roundcube," ESET security researcher Matthieu Faou  said  in a new report published today. Previously, it was using known vulnerabilities in Roundcube and Zimbra, for which proofs-of-concept are available online." Winter Vivern, also known as TA473 and UAC-0114, is an  adversarial collective  whose objectives align with that of Belarus and Russia. Over the past few months, it has been attributed to attacks against Ukraine and Poland, as well as government entities across Europe and India. The group is also assessed to have exploited another flaw Roundcube as recently as August and September (CVE-2020-35730), making it the  second nation-state group after APT28  to target the op...

More details have emerged about a set of now-patched cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in the  Microsoft Azure HDInsight  open-source analytics service that could be weaponized by a threat actor to carry out malicious activities. "The identified vulnerabilities consisted of six stored XSS and two reflected XSS vulnerabilities, each of which could be exploited to perform unauthorized actions, varying from data access to session hijacking and delivering malicious payloads," Orca security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The issues were addressed by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for August 2023. The disclosure comes three months after similar shortcomings were reported in the  Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry  that could have been exploited for unauthorized data access and modifications. The list of flaws is as follows - CVE-2023-35393  (CVSS score: 4.5) - Azure Apac...