The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: Linux Software

Following the public disclosure of a critical zero-day vulnerability in Webmin last week, the project's maintainers today revealed that the flaw was not actually the result of a coding mistake made by the programmers. Instead, it was secretly planted by an unknown hacker who successfully managed to inject a backdoor at some point in its build infrastructure—that surprisingly persisted into various releases of Webmin (1.882 through 1.921) and eventually remained hidden for over a year. With over 3 million downloads per year, Webmin is one of the world's most popular open-source web-based applications for managing Unix-based systems, such as Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD servers. Webmin offers a simple user interface (UI) to manage users and groups, databases, BIND, Apache, Postfix, Sendmail, QMail, backups, firewalls, monitoring and alerts, and much more. The story started when Turkish researcher Özkan Mustafa Akkuş publicly presented a zero-day remote code execution vul

If you are using LibreOffice, you need to update it once again. LibreOffice has released the latest version 6.2.6/6.3.0 of its open-source office software to address three new vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to bypass patches for two previously addressed vulnerabilities. LibreOffice is one of the most popular and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office suite and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS systems. One of the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2019-9848 , that LibreOffice attempted to patch just last month was a code execution flaw that affected LibreLogo, a programmable turtle vector graphics script that ships by default with LibreOffice. This flaw allows an attacker to craft a malicious document that can silently execute arbitrary python commands without displaying any warning to a targeted user. Apparently, the patch for this vulnerability was insufficient, as The Hacker News also reported late last month , which allowed two separate secu

Microsoft's love for Linux continues… Microsoft has released its command-line shell and scripting language PowerShell Core for Linux operating system as a Snap package, making it easier for Linux users to install Microsoft PowerShell on their system. Yes, you heard me right. Microsoft has made PowerShell Core available to the Ubuntu Snap Store as a Snap application. PowerShell Core is a cross-platform version of Windows PowerShell that is already available for Windows, macOS, and Linux OS and has been designed for sysadmins who manage assets in hybrid clouds and heterogeneous environments. Snap is a universal Linux packaging system, built by Canonical for the Ubuntu operating system, which makes an application compatible for all major Linux distributions without requiring any modification. A Snap package is basically an application compressed together with its dependencies and also includes instructions on how to run and interact with other software on various Linu

Yet another incident which showcases that you should not explicitly trust user-controlled software repositories. One of the most popular Linux distros Arch Linux has pulled as many as three user-maintained software repository AUR packages after it was found hosting malicious code. Arch Linux is an independently developed, general-purpose GNU/Linux distribution composed predominantly of free and open-source software, and supports community involvement. Besides official repositories like Arch Build System (ABS), Arch Linux users can also download software packages from several other repositories, including AUR (Arch User Repository), a community-driven repository created and managed by Arch Linux users. Since AUR packages are user-produced content, Arch maintainers always suggest Linux users to carefully check all files, especially PKGBUILD and any .install file for malicious commands. However, this AUR repository has recently been found hosting malware code in several inst