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AWS Patches Critical 'FlowFixation' Bug in Airflow Service to Prevent Session Hijacking

AWS Patches Critical 'FlowFixation' Bug in Airflow Service to Prevent Session Hijacking
Mar 22, 2024 Amazon Web Services / Vulnerability
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 misconfigura

Malware Campaign Exploits Popup Builder WordPress Plugin to Infect 3,900+ Sites

Malware Campaign Exploits Popup Builder WordPress Plugin to Infect 3,900+ Sites
Mar 12, 2024 WordPress / Website Security
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 site owners are reco

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future
Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu

WordPress LiteSpeed Plugin Vulnerability Puts 5 Million Sites at Risk

WordPress LiteSpeed Plugin Vulnerability Puts 5 Million Sites at Risk
Feb 27, 2024 Vulnerability / Website Security
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 default

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

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websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.

VMware Alert: Uninstall EAP Now - Critical Flaw Puts Active Directory at Risk

VMware Alert: Uninstall EAP Now - Critical Flaw Puts Active Directory at Risk
Feb 21, 2024 Active Directory / Vulnerability
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 EAP

Russian-Linked Hackers Target 80+ Organizations via Roundcube Flaws

Russian-Linked Hackers Target 80+ Organizations via Roundcube Flaws
Feb 19, 2024 Cyber Espionage / Vulnerability
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 Zimbra Collaboration email

Alert: CISA Warns of Active 'Roundcube' Email Attacks - Patch Now

Alert: CISA Warns of Active 'Roundcube' Email Attacks - Patch Now
Feb 13, 2024 Vulnerability / Email Security
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 been credited with dis

Hackers Exploit Job Boards, Stealing Millions of Resumes and Personal Data

Hackers Exploit Job Boards, Stealing Millions of Resumes and Personal Data
Feb 06, 2024 Dark Web / Cybercrime
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 sh

Juniper Networks Releases Urgent Junos OS Updates for High-Severity Flaws

Juniper Networks Releases Urgent Junos OS Updates for High-Severity Flaws
Jan 30, 2024 Vulnerability / Network Security
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 following versions - CVE-2024-21619  - 20.

Critical Jenkins Vulnerability Exposes Servers to RCE Attacks - Patch ASAP!

Critical Jenkins Vulnerability Exposes Servers to RCE Attacks - Patch ASAP!
Jan 25, 2024 Vulnerability / Software Security
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

Alert: New Vulnerabilities Discovered in QNAP and Kyocera Device Manager

Alert: New Vulnerabilities Discovered in QNAP and Kyocera Device Manager
Jan 09, 2024 Network Security / Data Protection
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 could be exploited to

Zero-Day Flaw in Zimbra Email Software Exploited by Four Hacker Groups

Zero-Day Flaw in Zimbra Email Software Exploited by Four Hacker Groups
Nov 16, 2023 Vulnerability / Email Security
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, said it discovered multipl

Critical Flaws Discovered in Veeam ONE IT Monitoring Software – Patch Now

Critical Flaws Discovered in Veeam ONE IT Monitoring Software – Patch Now
Nov 07, 2023 Network Security / Vulnerability
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 a user with the Veeam ONE Rea

Nation State Hackers Exploiting Zero-Day in Roundcube Webmail Software

Nation State Hackers Exploiting Zero-Day in Roundcube Webmail Software
Oct 25, 2023 Threat Intelligence / Vulnerability
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 open-source webmail so

Researchers Detail 8 Vulnerabilities in Azure HDInsight Analytics Service

Researchers Detail 8 Vulnerabilities in Azure HDInsight Analytics Service
Sep 13, 2023 Vulnerability / Data Security
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 Apache Hive Spoofing Vulnerability CV

Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Microsoft Azure Bastion and Container Registry

Severe Vulnerabilities Reported in Microsoft Azure Bastion and Container Registry
Jun 14, 2023 Cloud Security / Vulnerability
Two "dangerous" security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Microsoft Azure Bastion and Azure Container Registry that could have been exploited to carry out cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. "The vulnerabilities allowed unauthorized access to the victim's session within the compromised Azure service iframe, which can lead to severe consequences, including unauthorized data access, unauthorized modifications, and disruption of the Azure services iframes," Orca security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. XSS attacks  take place when threat actors inject arbitrary code into an otherwise trusted website, which then gets executed every time when unsuspecting users visit the site. The two flaws identified by Orca leverage a weakness in the postMessage iframe, which enables cross-origin communication between Window objects. This meant that the shortcoming could be abused to embed endpoints within remote servers usin

Jenkins Security Alert: New Security Flaws Could Allow Code Execution Attacks

Jenkins Security Alert: New Security Flaws Could Allow Code Execution Attacks
Mar 08, 2023 Open Source / Automation Tool
A pair of severe security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the Jenkins open source automation server that could lead to code execution on targeted systems. The flaws, tracked as  CVE-2023-27898  and  CVE-2023-27905 , impact the Jenkins server and Update Center, and have been collectively christened  CorePlague  by cloud security firm Aqua. All versions of Jenkins versions prior to 2.319.2 are vulnerable and exploitable. "Exploiting these vulnerabilities could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim's Jenkins server, potentially leading to a complete compromise of the Jenkins server," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The shortcomings are the result of how Jenkins processes plugins available from the  Update Center , thereby potentially enabling a threat actor to upload a plugin with a malicious payload and trigger a cross-site scripting (XSS) attack. "Once the victim opens the ' Available Plug

Important Flaw in Outlook App for Android Affects Over 100 Millions Users

Important Flaw in Outlook App for Android Affects Over 100 Millions Users
Jun 20, 2019
Update (22 June 2019)  — More technical details and proof-of-concept for the OutLook for Android vulnerability has been released that we have covered in a separate article here. Microsoft today released an updated version of its "Outlook for Android" that patches an important security vulnerability in the popular email app that is currently being used over 100 million users. According to an advisory , Outlook app with versions before 3.0.88 for Android contains a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability ( CVE-2019-1105 ) in the way the app parses incoming email messages. If exploited, remote attackers can execute malicious in-app client-side code on the targeted devices just by sending them emails with a specially crafted message. "The attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could then perform cross-site scripting attacks on the affected systems and run scripts in the security context of the current user." According to Microsoft, the fl

5 Popular Web Hosting Services Found Vulnerable to Multiple Flaws

5 Popular Web Hosting Services Found Vulnerable to Multiple Flaws
Jan 16, 2019
A security researcher has discovered multiple one-click client-side vulnerabilities in the some of the world's most popular and widely-used web hosting companies that could have put millions of their customers as well as billions of their sites' visitors at risk of hacking. Independent researcher and bug-hunter Paulos Yibelo, who shared his new research with The Hacker News, discovered roughly a dozen serious security vulnerabilities in Bluehost, Dreamhost, HostGator, OVH, and iPage, which amounts to roughly seven million domains. Some of the vulnerabilities are so simple to execute as they require attackers to trick victims into clicking on a simple link or visiting a malicious website to easily take over the accounts of anyone using the affected web hosting providers. Critical Flaws Reported in Popular Web Hosting Services Yibelo tested all the below-listed vulnerabilities on all five web hosting platforms and found several account takeover, cross-scripting, and in

Hacker reports Vulnerability in Mr. Robot Season 2 Website

Hacker reports Vulnerability in Mr. Robot Season 2 Website
May 12, 2016
Mr. Robot was the biggest 'Hacking Drama' television show of 2015 and its second season will return to American TV screens on Wednesday 13th of July 2016. However, the new promotional website for season two of Mr. Robot has recently patched a security flaw that could have easily allowed a hacker to target millions of fans of the show. A White Hat hacker going by the alias Zemnmez discovered a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Mr. Robot website on Tuesday, the same day Mr. Robot launched a promo for its second series. The second season of the television show had already received praise from both critics and viewers for its relatively accurate portrayal of cyber security and hacking, something other cyber crime movies and shows have failed at badly. The new series also features a surprising yet welcome guest: President Barack Obama , who is giving a speech about a cyber threat faced by the nation. The flaw Zemnmez discovered on the show's website coul

Hacking WordPress Website with Just a Single Comment

Hacking WordPress Website with Just a Single Comment
Apr 28, 2015
Most of the time, we have reported about WordPress vulnerabilities involving vulnerable plugins, but this time a Finnish security researcher has discovered a critical zero-day vulnerability in the core engine of the WordPress content management system. Yes, you heard it right. The WordPress CMS used by Millions of website is vulnerable to a zero-day flaw that could allow hackers to remote code execution on the Web server in order to take full control of it. The vulnerability, found by Jouko Pynnönen of Finland-based security firm Klikki Oy, is a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaw buried deep into the WordPress' comments system. The vulnerability affects the WordPress versions 3.9.3, 4.1.1, 4.1.2, and the latest WordPress version 4.2. Pynnönen disclosed the details of the zero-day flaw, along with a video and a proof-of-concept code for an exploit of the bug, on his blog post on Sunday before the WordPress team could manage to release a patch. Why the researcher m
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