Grammarly | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Critical security flaws have been disclosed in the Open Authorization (OAuth) implementation of popular online services such as Grammarly, Vidio, and Bukalapak, building upon previous shortcomings uncovered in  Booking[.]com and Expo . The weaknesses, now addressed by the respective companies following responsible disclosure between February and April 2023, could have allowed malicious actors to obtain access tokens and potentially hijack user accounts. OAuth is a  standard  that's commonly used as a mechanism for cross-application access, granting websites or applications access to their information on other websites, such as Facebook, but without giving them the passwords. "When OAuth is used to provide service authentication, any security breach in it can lead to identity theft, financial fraud, and access to various personal information including credit card numbers, private messages, health records, and more, depending on the specific service being attacked," Sa...

A critical vulnerability discovered in the Chrome and Firefox browser extension of the grammar-checking software Grammarly inadvertently left all 22 million users' accounts, including their personal documents and records, vulnerable to remote hackers. According to Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, who discovered the vulnerability on February 2, the Chrome and Firefox extension of Grammarly exposed authentication tokens to all websites that could be grabbed by remote attackers with just 4 lines of JavaScript code. In other words, any website a Grammarly user visits could steal his/her authentication tokens, which is enough to login into the user's account and access every "documents, history, logs, and all other data" without permission. "I'm calling this a high severity bug, because it seems like a pretty severe violation of user expectations," Ormandy said in a vulnerability report . "Users would not expect that visiting a we...

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...