Internet Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Germany's Federal Office of Information Security (BSI) has announced that it has disrupted a malware operation called BADBOX that came preloaded on at least 30,000 internet-connected devices sold across the country. In a statement published earlier this week, authorities said they severed the communications between the devices and their command-and-control (C2) servers by sinkholing the domains in question. Impacted devices include digital picture frames, media players, and streamers, and likely phones and tablets. "What all of these devices have in common is that they have outdated Android versions and were delivered with pre-installed malware," the BSI said in a press release. BADBOX was first documented by HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team in October 2023, describing it as a "complex threat actor scheme" that involves deploying the Triada Android malware on low-cost, off-brand Android devices by exploiting weak supply chain links...

German law enforcement authorities have announced the disruption of a criminal service called dstat[.]cc that made it possible for other threat actors to easily mount distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. "The platform made such DDoS attacks accessible to a wide range of users, even those without any in-depth technical skills of their own," the Federal Criminal Police Office (aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) said . "The use of stresser services to carry out DDoS attacks has recently become increasingly known in the context of police investigations." The BKA described dstat[.]cc as a platform that offered recommendations and evaluations of stresser services in order to conduct DDoS attacks against websites of interest and render them unresponsive. According to an alert published by Radware in January 2023, dstat[.]cc offered botnet owners the ability to assess the capacity and capabilities of their DDoS attack services. "Bot herders use DStat sites ...

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Google has announced that it's rolling out a new set of features to its Chrome browser that gives users more control over their data when surfing the internet and protects them against online threats. "With the newest version of Chrome, you can take advantage of our upgraded Safety Check, opt out of unwanted website notifications more easily and grant select permissions to a site for one time only," the tech giant said . The improvements to Safety Check allow it to run automatically in the background, notifying users of the actions it has taken, such as revoking permissions for websites they no longer visit, and flagging potentially unwanted notifications. It's also designed to notify users of security issues that need to be addressed, while automatically revoking notification permissions from suspicious sites identified by Google Safe Browsing . "On Desktop, Safety Check will continue to notify you if you have any Chrome extensions installed that may pose...

Google said it's adding new security warnings when downloading potentially suspicious and malicious files via its Chrome web browser. "We have replaced our previous warning messages with more detailed ones that convey more nuance about the nature of the danger and can help users make more informed decisions," Jasika Bawa, Lily Chen, and Daniel Rubery from the Chrome Security team said . To that end, the search giant is introducing a two-tier download warning taxonomy based on verdicts provided by Google Safe Browsing: Suspicious files and Dangerous files. Each category comes with its own iconography, color, and text to distinguish them from one another and help users make an informed choice. Google is also adding what's called automatic deep scans for users who have opted-in to the Enhanced Protection mode of Safe Browsing in Chrome so that they don't have to be prompted each time to send the files to Safe Browsing for deep scanning before opening them. In...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a security vulnerability in the RADIUS network authentication protocol called BlastRADIUS that could be exploited by an attacker to stage Mallory-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and bypass integrity checks under certain circumstances. "The RADIUS protocol allows certain Access-Request messages to have no integrity or authentication checks," InkBridge Networks CEO Alan DeKok, who is the creator of the FreeRADIUS Project , said in a statement. "As a result, an attacker can modify these packets without detection. The attacker would be able to force any user to authenticate, and to give any authorization (VLAN, etc.) to that user." RADIUS, short for Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service, is a client/server protocol that provides centralized authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) management for users who connect and use a network service. The security of RADIUS is reliant on a hash that's derived usi...

Now-patched authorization bypass issues impacting Cox modems could have been abused as a starting point to gain unauthorized access to the devices and run malicious commands. "This series of vulnerabilities demonstrated a way in which a fully external attacker with no prerequisites could've executed commands and modified the settings of millions of modems, accessed any business customer's PII, and gained essentially the same permissions of an ISP support team," security researcher Sam Curry said in a new report published today. Following responsible disclosure on March 4, 2024, the authorization bypass issues were addressed by the U.S. broadband provider within 24 hours. There is no evidence that these shortcomings were exploited in the wild. "I was really surprised by the seemingly unlimited access that ISPs had behind the scenes to customer devices," Curry told The Hacker News via email. "It makes sense in retrospect that an ISP should be able ...

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...

Microsoft released its final set of Patch Tuesday updates for 2023, closing out 34 flaws in its software, making it one of the lightest releases in recent years. Of the 34 shortcomings, four are rated Critical and 30 are rated Important in severity. The fixes are in addition to  18 flaws  Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of  Patch Tuesday updates for November 2023 . According to data from the  Zero Day Initiative , the software giant has patched more than 900 flaws this year, making it one of the busiest years for Microsoft patches. For comparison, Redmond resolved 917 CVEs in 2022. While none of the vulnerabilities are listed as publicly known or under active attack at the time of release, some of the notable ones are listed below - CVE-2023-35628  (CVSS score: 8.1) - Windows MSHTML Platform Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2023-35630  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) Remote Code E...

A new research has identified four new variants of HTTP request smuggling attacks that work against various commercial off-the-shelf web servers and HTTP proxy servers. Amit Klein, VP of Security Research at SafeBreach who presented the findings today at the Black Hat security conference, said that the attacks highlight how web servers and HTTP proxy servers are still susceptible to HTTP request smuggling even after 15 years since they were first documented. What is HTTP Request Smuggling? HTTP request smuggling (or HTTP Desyncing) is a technique employed to interfere with the way a website processes sequences of HTTP requests that are received from one or more users. Vulnerabilities related to HTTP request smuggling typically arise when the front-end (a load balancer or proxy) and the back-end servers interpret the boundary of an HTTP request differently, thereby allowing a bad actor to send (or "smuggle") an ambiguous request that gets prepended to the next le...

The Department of Homeland Security and CISA ICS-CERT today issued a critical security advisory warning about over a dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting billions of Internet-connected devices manufactured by many vendors across the globe. Dubbed " Ripple20 ," the set of 19 vulnerabilities resides in a low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck, which, if weaponized, could let remote attackers gain complete control over targeted devices—without requiring any user interaction. According to Israeli cybersecurity company JSOF—who discovered these flaws—the affected devices are in use across various industries, ranging from home/consumer devices to medical, healthcare, data centers, enterprises, telecom, oil, gas, nuclear, transportation, and many others across critical infrastructure. "Just a few examples: data could be stolen off of a printer, an infusion pump behavior changed, or industrial control devices could be made to malfunction. An ...

In this digital era, the success of almost every marketing, advertising, and analytics company drives through tracking users across the Internet to identify them and learn their interests to provide targeted ads. Most of these solutions rely on 3rd-party cookies, a cookie set on a domain other than the one you are browsing, which allows companies including Google and Facebook to fingerprint you in order to track your every move across multiple sites. However, if you're using Kaspersky Antivirus, a vulnerability in the security software had exposed a unique identifier associated with you to every website you visited in the past 4 years, which might have allowed those sites and other third-party services to track you across the web even if you have blocked or erased third-party cookies timely. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-8286 and discovered by independent security researcher Ronald Eikenberg, resides in the way a URL scanning module integrated into the antivir...

After months of negotiations, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has approved a record $5 billion settlement with Facebook over its privacy investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal . The settlement will put an end to a wide-ranging probe that began more than a year ago and centers around the violation of a 2011 agreement Facebook made with the FTC that required Facebook to gain explicit consent from users to share their personal data. The FTC launched an investigation into the social media giant last year after it was revealed that the company allowed Cambridge Analytica access to the personal data of around  87 million Facebook users without their explicit consent. Now, according to a new report published by the Wall Street Journal, the FTC commissioners this week finally voted to approve a $5 billion settlement, with three Republicans voting to approve the deal and two Democrats against it. Facebook anticipated the fine to between $3 billion...

Almost every activity on the Internet starts with a DNS query, a key function of the Internet that works as an Internet's directory where your device looks up for the server IP addresses after you enter a human-readable web address (e.g., thehackernews.com). Since DNS queries are sent in clear text over UDP or TCP without encryption, the information can reveal not only what websites an individual visits but is also vulnerable to spoofing attacks. To address these problems, Google announced Wednesday that its Public DNS (Domain Name System) service finally supports DNS-over-TLS security protocol, which means that the DNS queries and responses will be communicated over TLS-encrypted TCP connections. The DNS-over-TLS has been designed to make it harder for man-in-the-middle attackers to manipulate the DNS query or eavesdrop on your Internet connection. Launched over eight years ago, Google Public DNS, at IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, is world's largest public Domai...

Image by New York Times The Internet just lost one of its most prominent innovators. Robert W Taylor, a computer scientist who was instrumental in creating the Internet as well as the modern personal computer, has died at the age of 85. Mr. Taylor, who is best known as the mastermind of ARPAnet (precursor of the Internet), had Parkinson's disease and died on Thursday at his home in Woodside, California, his son Kurt Kurt Taylor told US media . While the creation of the Internet was work of many hands, Mr. Taylor made many contributions. As a researcher for the US military's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in 1966, Taylor helped pioneer the concept of shared networks, as he was frustrated with constantly switching between 3 terminals to communicate with researchers across the country. His frustration led the creation of ARPAnet — a single computer network to link each project with the others — and this network then evolved into what we now know as the In...

The non-profit organization behind TOR – the largest online anonymity network that allows people to hide their real identity online – has launched an early alpha version of Sandboxed Tor Browser 0.0.2 . Yes, the Tor Project is working on a sandboxed version of the Tor Browser that would isolate the Tor Browser from other processes of the operating system and limit its ability to interact or query low-level APIs that can lead to the exposure of real IP addresses, MAC addresses, computer name, and more. Sandboxing is a security mechanism for separating running programs. When an application is sandboxed, its process runs in a separate environment from the underlying operating system, so that errors or security issues in that application can not be leveraged to affect other parts of the OS. Sandbox applications are enabled in their own sequestered area and memory, where they can be worked on without posing any threat to other applications or the operating system. Major moder...

Browser extensions have become a standard part of the most popular browsers and essential part of our lives for surfing the Internet. But not all extensions can be trusted. One such innocent looking browser add-on has been caught collecting browsing history of millions of users and selling them to third-parties for making money. An investigation by German television channel NDR ( Norddeutscher Rundfunk ) has discovered a series of privacy breaches by Web Of Trust (WOT) – one of the top privacy and security browser extensions used by more than 140 Million online users to help keep them safe online. Web of Trust has been offering a " Safe Web Search & Browsing " service since 2007. The WOT browser extension, which is available for both Firefox and Chrome, uses crowdsourcing to rate websites based on trustworthiness and child safety. However, it turns out that the Web of Trust service collects extensive data about netizens' web browsing habits via its brows...

Good News for privacy concerned people! Now, your online data will not be marketed for business; at least by your Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Yes, it's time for your ISPs to ask your permission in order to share your sensitive data for marketing or advertisement purposes, the FCC rules. On Thursday, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has imposed new privacy rules on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that restrict them from sharing your online history with third parties without your consent. In a 3-2 vote, the FCC approved the new rules by which many privacy advocates seem pleased, while some of them wanted the Commission to even apply the same rules to web-based services like Google and Facebook as well. Initially proposed earlier this year, the new rule says : "ISPs are required to obtain affirmative 'opt-in' consent from consumers to use and share sensitive information." What does 'sensitive' information mean h...

A massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against Dyn , a major domain name system (DNS) provider, broke large portions of the Internet on Friday, causing a significant outage to a ton of websites and services, including Twitter, GitHub, PayPal, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, and Spotify. But how the attack happened? What's the cause behind the attack? Exact details of the attack remain vague, but Dyn reported a huge army of hijacked internet-connected devices could be responsible for the massive attack. Yes, the same method recently employed by hackers to carry out record-breaking DDoS attack of over 1 Tbps against France-based hosting provider OVH. According to security intelligence firm Flashpoint , Mirai bots were detected driving much, but not necessarily all, of the traffic in the DDoS attacks against DynDNS. Mirai is a piece of malware that targets Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as routers, and security cameras, DVRs, and enslaves vast numbers of ...