JavaScript | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A security vulnerability has been disclosed in the popular WordPress plugin  Essential Addons for Elementor  that could be potentially exploited to achieve elevated privileges on affected sites. The issue, tracked as CVE-2023-32243, has been addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 5.7.2 that was shipped on May 11, 2023. Essential Addons for Elementor has over one million active installations. "This plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability and allows any unauthenticated user to escalate their privilege to that of any user on the WordPress site," Patchstack researcher Rafie Muhammad  said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a threat actor to reset the password of any arbitrary user as long as the malicious party is aware of their username. The shortcoming is believed to have existed since version 5.4.0. This can have serious ramifications as the flaw could be weaponized to reset the password associated with an administ

Third-party apps such as Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, HotJar, and JQuery have become critical tools for businesses to optimize their website performance and services for a global audience. However, as their importance has grown, so has the threat of cyber incidents involving unmanaged third-party apps and open-source tools. Online businesses increasingly struggle to maintain complete visibility and control over the ever-changing third-party threat landscape, with sophisticated threats like evasive skimmers, Magecart attacks, and unlawful tracking practices potentially causing severe damage. This article explores the challenges of protecting modern websites from third-party scripts and the security risks associated with a lack of visibility over these scripts. Invisible to Standard Security Controls  Third-party scripts are often invisible to standard security controls like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) because they are loaded from external sources that are not under the control

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A fresh round of patches has been made available for the vm2 JavaScript library to address two critical flaws that could be exploited to break out of sandbox protections and achieve code execution. Both the flaws –  CVE-2023-29199  and  CVE-2023-30547  – are rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scoring system and have been addressed in versions 3.9.16 and 3.9.17, respectively. Successful  exploitation  of the  bugs , which allow an attacker to raise an unsanitized host exception, could be weaponized to escape the sandbox and run arbitrary code in the host context. "A threat actor can bypass the sandbox protections to gain remote code execution rights on the host running the sandbox," the maintainers of the vm2 library said in an alert. Credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerabilities is security researcher  SeungHyun Lee , who has also  released   proof-of-concept  (PoC) exploits for the two issues in question. The disclosure comes a little over a week after vm2

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

A new attack campaign has been targeting the gaming and gambling sectors since at least September 2022, just as the ICE London 2023 gaming industry trade fair event is scheduled to kick off next week. Israeli cybersecurity company Security Joes is tracking the activity cluster under the name  Ice Breaker , stating the intrusions employ clever social engineering tactics to deploy a JavaScript backdoor. The attack sequence proceeds as follows: The threat actor poses as a customer while initiating a conversation with a support agent of a gaming company under the pretext of having account registration issues. The adversary then urges the individual on the other end to open a screenshot image hosted on Dropbox. Security Joes said that the threat actor is "well-aware of the fact that the customer service is human-operated." Clicking the purported screenshot link sent in the chat leads to the retrieval of an LNK payload or, alternatively, a VBScript file as a backup option,

A recent wave of Gootkit malware loader attacks has targeted the Australian healthcare sector by leveraging legitimate tools like VLC Media Player. Gootkit , also called Gootloader, is  known  to  employ  search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning tactics (aka spamdexing) for initial access. It typically works by compromising and abusing legitimate infrastructure and seeding those sites with common keywords. Like other malware of its kind, Gootkit is capable of stealing data from the browser, performing adversary-in-the-browser (AitB) attacks, keylogging, taking screenshots, and other malicious actions. Trend Micro's  new findings  reveal that the keywords "hospital," "health," "medical," and "enterprise agreement" have been paired with various city names in Australia, marking the malware's expansion beyond accounting and law firms. The starting point of the cyber assault is to direct users searching for the same keywords to an infe

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed two security flaws in the JavaScript-based blogging platform known as  Ghost , one of which could be abused to elevate privileges via specially crafted HTTP requests. Ghost is an open source blogging platform that's used in more than 52,600 live websites, most of them located in the U.S., the U.K., German, China, France, Canada, and India. Tracked as CVE-2022-41654 (CVSS score: 9.6), the authentication bypass vulnerability allows unprivileged users (i.e., members) to make unauthorized modifications to newsletter settings. Cisco Talos, which  discovered  the shortcoming, said it could enable a member to change the system-wide default newsletter that all users are subscribed to by default. Even worse, the ability of a site administrator to inject JavaScript into the newsletter by default could be exploited to trigger the creation of arbitrary administrator accounts when attempting to edit the newsletter. "This gives unprivileged us

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Quarkus Java framework that could be potentially exploited to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. Tracked as  CVE-2022-4116  (CVSS score: 9.8), the shortcoming could be trivially abused by a malicious actor without any privileges. "The vulnerability is found in the Dev UI Config Editor, which is vulnerable to drive-by localhost attacks that could lead to remote-code execution (RCE)," Contrast Security researcher Joseph Beeton, who reported the bug,  said  in a write-up. Quarkus, developed by Red Hat, is an  open source project  that's used for creating Java applications in  containerized  and serverless environments. It's worth pointing out that the  issue  only impacts developers who are running Quarkus and are tricked into visiting a specially crafted website, which is embedded with malicious JavaScript code designed to install or execute arbitrary payloads. This could take the form o

Spotify's Backstage has been discovered as vulnerable to a severe security flaw that could be exploited to gain remote code execution by leveraging a recently disclosed bug in a third-party module. The vulnerability (CVSS score: 9.8), at its core, takes advantage of a critical sandbox escape in vm2, a popular JavaScript sandbox library ( CVE-2022-36067  aka Sandbreak), that came to light last month. "An unauthenticated threat actor can execute arbitrary system commands on a Backstage application by exploiting a vm2 sandbox escape in the Scaffolder core plugin," application security firm Oxeye said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Backstage  is an open source  developer portal  from Spotify that allows users to create, manage, and explore software components from a unified " front door ." It's used by  many companies  like Netflix, DoorDash, Roku, and Expedia, among others. According to Oxeye, the flaw is rooted in a tool called  software templ

A now-patched security flaw in the vm2 JavaScript sandbox module could be abused by a remote adversary to break out of security barriers and perform arbitrary operations on the underlying machine. "A threat actor can bypass the sandbox protections to gain remote code execution rights on the host running the sandbox," GitHub  said  in an advisory published on September 28, 2022. The issue, tracked as CVE-2022-36067 and codenamed Sandbreak, carries a maximum severity rating of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. It has been addressed in  version 3.9.11  released on August 28, 2022. vm2 is a  popular Node library  that's used to run untrusted code with allowlisted built-in modules. It's also one of the most widely downloaded software, accounting for nearly 3.5 million downloads per week. The  shortcoming  is rooted in the error mechanism in Node.js to escape the sandbox, according to application security firm Oxeye, which  discovered the flaw . This mean

A threat actor likely with associations to China has been attributed to a new supply chain attack that involves the use of a trojanized installer for the Comm100 Live Chat application to distribute a JavaScript backdoor. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said the attack made use of a signed Comm100 desktop agent app for Windows that was downloadable from the company's website. The scale of the attack is currently unknown, but the trojanized file is said to have been identified at organizations in the industrial, healthcare, technology, manufacturing, insurance, and telecom sectors in North America and Europe. Comm100 is a Canadian provider of live audio/video chat and customer engagement software for enterprises. It  claims  to have more than 15,000 customers across 51 countries. "The installer was signed on September 26, 2022 at 14:54:00 UTC using a valid Comm100 Network Corporation certificate," the company  noted , adding it remained available until September 29. E

WordPress sites are being hacked to display fraudulent Cloudflare DDoS protection pages that lead to the delivery of malware such as NetSupport RAT and Raccoon Stealer. "A recent surge in JavaScript injections targeting WordPress sites has resulted in fake DDoS prevent prompts which lead victims to download remote access trojan malware," Sucuri's Ben Martin  said  in a write-up published last week. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection pages are essential browser verification checks designed to deter bot-driven unwanted and malicious traffic from eating up bandwidth and taking down websites. The new attack vector involves hijacking WordPress sites to display fake DDoS protection pop-ups that, when clicked, ultimately lead to the download of a malicious ISO file ("security_install.iso") to the victim's systems. This is achieved by injecting three lines of code into a JavaScript file ("jquery.min.js"), or alternatively into the active

Two client-side risks dominate the problems with data loss and data exfiltration: improperly placed trackers on websites and web applications and malicious client-side code pulled from third-party repositories like NPM.  Client-side security researchers are finding that improperly placed trackers, while not intentionally malicious, are a growing problem and have clear and significant privacy implications when it comes to both compliance/regulatory concerns, like HIPAA or PCI DSS 4.0. To highlight the risks with misplaced trackers, a  recent study  by The Markup (a non-profit news organization) examined Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in America. They found a Facebook tracker on one-third of the hospital websites which sent Facebook highly personal healthcare data whenever the user clicked the "schedule appointment" button. The data was not necessarily anonymized, because the data was connected to an IP address, and both the IP address and the appointment information get delivered to Fac

Threat actors behind web skimming campaigns are leveraging malicious JavaScript code that mimics Google Analytics and Meta Pixel scripts in an attempt to sidestep detection. "It's a shift from earlier tactics where attackers conspicuously injected malicious scripts into e-commerce platforms and content management systems (CMSs) via vulnerability exploitation, making this threat highly evasive to traditional security solutions," Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in a new report. Skimming attacks, such as those by Magecart, are carried out with the goal of harvesting and exporting users' payment information, such as credit card details, that are entered into online payment forms in e-commerce platforms, typically during the checkout process. This is achieved by taking advantage of security vulnerabilities in third-party plugins and other tools to inject rogue JavaScript code into the online portals without the owners' knowledge. As skimming attacks h

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a massive campaign that's responsible for injecting malicious JavaScript code into compromised WordPress websites that redirects visitors to scam pages and other malicious websites to generate illegitimate traffic. "The websites all shared a common issue — malicious JavaScript had been injected within their website's files and the database, including legitimate core WordPress files," Krasimir Konov, a malware analyst at Sucuri,  said  in a report published Wednesday. This involved infecting files such as jquery.min.js and jquery-migrate.min.js with obfuscated JavaScript that's activated on every page load, allowing the attacker to redirect the website visitors to a destination of their choice. The GoDaddy-owned website security company said that the domains at the end of the redirect chain could be used to load advertisements, phishing pages, malware, or even trigger another set of redirects. In some instances, unsus

The maintainers of the RubyGems package manager have addressed a critical security flaw that could have been abused to remove gems and replace them with rogue versions under specific circumstances. "Due to a bug in the yank action, it was possible for any RubyGems.org user to remove and replace certain gems even if that user was not authorized to do so," RubyGems  said  in a security advisory published on May 6, 2022. RubyGems, like npm for JavaScript and pip for Python, is a  package manager  and a gem hosting service for the Ruby programming language, offering a repository of more than 171,500 libraries. In a nutshell, the flaw in question, tracked as CVE-2022-29176, enabled anyone to pull certain gems and upload different files with the same name, same version number, and different platforms. For this to happen, however, a gem needed to have one or more dashes in its name, where the word before the dash was the name of an attacker-controlled gem, and which was create

A threat actor dubbed " RED-LILI " has been linked to an ongoing large-scale supply chain attack campaign targeting the NPM package repository by publishing nearly 800 malicious modules. "Customarily, attackers use an anonymous disposable NPM account from which they launch their attacks," Israeli security company Checkmarx  said . "As it seems this time, the attacker has fully-automated the process of NPM account creation and has opened dedicated accounts, one per package, making his new malicious packages batch harder to spot." The findings build on recent reports from  JFrog  and  Sonatype , both of which detailed hundreds of NPM packages that leverage techniques like  dependency confusion  and typosquatting to target Azure, Uber, and Airbnb developers. According to a detailed analysis of RED-LILI's modus operandi, earliest evidence of anomalous activity is said to have occurred on February 23, 2022, with the cluster of malicious packages publis

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

Another batch of 25 malicious JavaScript libraries have made their way to the official NPM package registry with the goal of stealing Discord tokens and environment variables from compromised systems, more than two months after  17 similar packages  were taken down. The libraries in question leveraged typosquatting techniques and masqueraded as other legitimate packages such as colors.js, crypto-js, discord.js, marked, and  noblox.js , DevOps security firm JFrog said, attributing the packages as the work of "novice malware authors." The complete list of packages is below – node-colors-sync (Discord token stealer) color-self (Discord token stealer) color-self-2 (Discord token stealer) wafer-text (Environment variable stealer) wafer-countdown (Environment variable stealer) wafer-template (Environment variable stealer) wafer-darla (Environment variable stealer) lemaaa (Discord token stealer) adv-discord-utility (Discord token stealer) tools-for-discord (Discord t

Researchers have demonstrated a new type of fingerprinting technique that exploits a machine's graphics processing unit (GPU) as a means to persistently track users across the web. Dubbed  DrawnApart , the method "identifies a device from the unique properties of its GPU stack," researchers from Australia, France, and Israel said in a new paper, adding "variations in speed among the multiple execution units that comprise a GPU can serve as a reliable and robust device signature, which can be collected using unprivileged JavaScript." A device fingerprint or machine fingerprint is information that is collected about the hardware, installed software, as well as the web browser and its associated add-ons from a remote computing device for the purpose of unique identification. Fingerprints can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, a fingerprint algorithm may allow a service provider (e.g., bank) to detect and prevent identity theft and credit card fraud. But