Linux hacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A newly disclosed security flaw in the Linux kernel could be leveraged by a local adversary to gain elevated privileges on vulnerable systems to execute arbitrary code, escape containers, or induce a  kernel panic . Tracked as  CVE-2022-25636  (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerability impacts Linux kernel versions 5.4 through 5.6.10 and is a result of a heap out-of-bounds write in the netfilter subcomponent in the kernel. The issue was  discovered  by Nick Gregory, a senior threat researcher at Sophos. "This flaw allows a local attacker with a user account on the system to gain access to out-of-bounds memory, leading to a system crash or a privilege escalation threat," Red Hat  said  in an advisory published on February 22, 2022. Similar alerts have been released by  Debian ,  Oracle Linux ,  SUSE , and  Ubuntu . Netfilter is a  framework  provided by the Linux kernel that enables various networking-related operations, inc...

A group of academics from the University of California and Tsinghua University has uncovered a series of critical security flaws that could lead to a revival of DNS cache poisoning attacks. Dubbed " SAD DNS attack " (short for Side-channel AttackeD DNS), the technique makes it possible for a malicious actor to carry out an off-path attack, rerouting any traffic originally destined to a specific domain to a server under their control, thereby allowing them to eavesdrop and tamper with the communications. "This represents an important milestone — the first weaponizable network side channel attack that has serious security impacts," the researchers said. "The attack allows an off-path attacker to inject a malicious DNS record into a DNS cache." Tracked as CVE-2020-25705, the findings were presented at the ACM Conference on Computer, and Communications Security (CCS '20) held this week. The flaw affects operating systems Linux 3.18-5.10, Windows Serv...

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...

Google security researchers are warning of a new set of zero-click vulnerabilities in the Linux Bluetooth software stack that can allow a nearby unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges on vulnerable devices. According to security engineer  Andy Nguyen , the three flaws — collectively called BleedingTooth — reside in the open-source  BlueZ  protocol stack that offers support for many of the core Bluetooth layers and protocols for Linux-based systems such as laptops and IoT devices. The first and the most severe is a heap-based type confusion ( CVE-2020-12351 , CVSS score 8.3) affecting Linux kernel 4.8 and higher and is present in the Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol ( L2CAP ) of the Bluetooth standard, which provides multiplexing of data between different higher layer protocols. "A remote attacker in short distance knowing the victim's [Bluetooth device] address can send a malicious l2cap packet and cause denial ...

A United States regulator has fined the credit card provider Capital One Financial Corp with $80 million over last year's data breach that exposed the personal information of more than 100 million credit card applicants of Americans. The fine was imposed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), an independent bureau within the United States Department of the Treasury that governs the execution of laws relating to national banks. According to a press release published by the OCC on Thursday, Capital One failed to establish appropriate risk management before migrating its IT operations to a public cloud-based service, which included appropriate design and implementation of certain network security controls, adequate data loss prevention controls, and effective dispositioning of alerts. The OCC also said that the credit card provider also left numerous weaknesses in its cloud-based data storage in an internal audit in 2015 as well as failed to patch security ...

Attention Linux Users! A new vulnerability has been discovered in Sudo —one of the most important, powerful, and commonly used utilities that comes as a core command installed on almost every UNIX and Linux-based operating system. The vulnerability in question is a sudo security policy bypass issue that could allow a malicious user or a program to execute arbitrary commands as root on a targeted Linux system even when the "sudoers configuration" explicitly disallows the root access. Sudo, stands for "superuser do," is a system command that allows a user to run applications or commands with the privileges of a different user without switching environments—most often, for running commands as the root user. By default on most Linux distributions, the ALL keyword in RunAs specification in /etc/sudoers file, as shown in the screenshot, allows all users in the admin or sudo groups to run any command as any valid user on the system. However, since privilege separ...

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...

Linux users, beware! If you haven't recently updated your Linux operating system, especially the command-line text editor utility, do not even try to view the content of a file using Vim or Neovim. Security researcher Armin Razmjou recently discovered a high-severity arbitrary OS command execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-12735) in Vim and Neovim —two most popular and powerful command-line text editing applications that come pre-installed with most Linux-based operating systems. On Linux systems, Vim editor allows users to create, view or edit any file, including text, programming scripts, and documents. Since Neovim is just an extended forked version of Vim, with better user experience, plugins and GUIs, the code execution vulnerability also resides in it. Code Execution Flaw in Vim and Neovim Razmjou discovered a flaw in the way Vim editor handles "modelines," a feature that's enabled-by-default to automatically find and apply a set of custom pref...

Security researchers have discovered a new class of security vulnerabilities that impacts all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, allowing attackers to bypass protection mechanisms introduced to defend against DMA attacks. Known for years, Direct memory access (DMA)-based attacks let an attacker compromise a targeted computer in a matter of seconds by plugging-in a malicious hot plug device—such as an external network card, mouse, keyboard, printer, storage, and graphics card—into Thunderbolt 3 port or the latest USB-C port . The DMA-based attacks are possible because Thunderbolt port allows connected peripherals to bypass operating system security policies and directly read/write system memory that contains sensitive information including your passwords, banking logins, private files, and browser activity. That means, simply plugging in an infected device, created using tools like Interception , can manipulate the contents o...

A serious security vulnerability has been discovered in the core runC container code that affects several open-source container management systems, potentially allowing attackers to escape Linux container and obtain unauthorized, root-level access to the host operating system. The vulnerability, identified as  CVE-2019-5736 , was discovered by open source security researchers Adam Iwaniuk and Borys Popławski and publicly disclosed by Aleksa Sarai, a senior software engineer and runC maintainer at SUSE Linux GmbH on Monday. The flaw resides in runC—a lightweight low-level command-line tool for spawning and running containers, an operating-system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated systems on a host using a single kernel. Originally created by Docker, runC is the default container run-time for Docker, Kubernetes, ContainerD, CRI-O, and other container-dependent programs, and is widely being used by major cloud hosting and server providers. runC Cont...

Just in time… Some cybersecurity experts this week arguing over Twitter in favor of not using HTTPS and suggesting software developers to only rely on signature-based package verification, just because APT on Linux also does the same. Ironically, a security researcher just today revealed details of a new critical remote code execution flaw in the apt-get utility that can be exploited by a remote, man-in-the middle attacker to compromise Linux machines. The flaw, apparently, once again demonstrates that if the software download ecosystem uses HTTPS to communicate safely, such attacks can easily be mitigated at the first place. Discovered by Max Justicz, the vulnerability (CVE-2019-3462) resides in the APT package manager, a widely used utility that handles installation, update and removal of software on Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions. According to a blog post published by Justicz and details shared with The Hacker News, the APT utility doesn't properly...

Downloaded anything from Gentoo's GitHub account yesterday? Consider those files compromised and dump them now—as an unknown group of hackers or an individual managed to gain access to the GitHub account of the Gentoo Linux distribution on Thursday and replaced the original source code with a malicious one. Gentoo is a free open source Linux or FreeBSD-based distribution built using the Portage package management system that makes it more flexible, easier to maintain, and portable compared to other operating systems. In a security alert released on its website yesterday, developers of the Gentoo Linux distribution warned users not to use code from its GitHub account, as some "unknown individuals" had gained its control on 28 June at 20:20 UTC and "modified the content of repositories as well as pages there." According to Gentoo developer Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera, after gaining control of the Gentoo Github organization, the attackers "repla...

Security researchers have discovered a new privilege-escalation vulnerability in Linux kernel that could allow a local attacker to execute code on the affected systems with elevated privileges. Discovered by Venustech ADLab (Active-Defense Lab) researchers, the Linux kernel vulnerability (CVE-2017-15265) is due to a use-after-free memory error in the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) sequencer interface of the affected application. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) provides audio and MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system, and also bundles a userspace driven library for application developers, enabling direct (kernel) interaction with sound devices through ALSA libraries. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker—with local access on the targeted system—to execute a maliciously crafted application on a targeted system, which allows the attacker to elevate his privilege to root on the targeted system, a Cisco advisory warned ...

Botnets, like Mirai , that are capable of infecting Linux-based internet-of-things (IoT) devices are constantly increasing and are mainly designed to conduct Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, but researchers have discovered that cybercriminals are using botnets for mass spam mailings. New research conducted by Russian security firm Doctor Web has revealed that a Linux Trojan, dubbed Linux.ProxyM that cybercriminals use to ensure their online anonymity has recently been updated to add mas spam sending capabilities to earn money. The Linux.ProxyM Linux Trojan, initially discovered by the security firm in February this year, runs a SOCKS proxy server on an infected IoT device and is capable of detecting honeypots in order to hide from malware researchers. Linux.ProxyM can operate on almost all Linux device, including routers, set-top boxes, and other equipment having the following architectures: x86, MIPS, PowerPC, MIPSEL, ARM, Motorola 68000, Superh and SPARC. ...

A Russian man accused of infecting tens of thousands of computer servers worldwide to generate millions in fraudulent payments has been imprisoned for 46 months (nearly four years) in a United States' federal prison. 41-year-old Maxim Senakh , of Velikii Novgorod, was arrested by Finnish police in August 2015 for his role in the development and maintenance of the infamous Linux botnet called Ebury that siphoned millions of dollars from victims worldwide. Senakh was extradited to the United States in February 2016 to face charges and pleaded guilty in late March this year after admitting of creating a massive Ebury botnet and personally being profited from the scheme. First spotted in 2011, Ebury is an SSH backdoor Trojan for Linux and Unix-style operating systems, such as FreeBSD or Solaris, which gives attackers full shell control of an infected machine remotely even if the password for affected user account is changed regularly. Senakh and his associates used the malw...

WikiLeaks has just published a new set of classified documents linked to another CIA project, dubbed ' Imperial ,' which reveals details of at least three CIA-developed hacking tools and implants designed to target computers running Apple Mac OS X and different flavours of Linux operating systems. If you are a regular reader of THN, you must be aware that this latest revelation by the whistleblower organisation is the part of an ongoing CIA-Vault 7 leaks, marking it as the 18th batch in the series. If you are unaware of the Vault 7 leaks, you can head on to the second of this article for having a brief look on all the leaks at once. Achilles — Tool to Backdoor Mac OS X Disk Images Dubbed Achilles , the hacking tool allows CIA operators to combine malicious Trojan applications with a legitimate Mac OS app into a disk image installer (.DMG) file. The binding tool, the shell script is written in Bash, gives the CIA operators "one or more desired operator specified e...

A security researcher has discovered a code injection vulnerability in the thumbnail handler component of GNOME Files file manager that could allow hackers to execute malicious code on targeted Linux machines. Dubbed Bad Taste , the vulnerability ( CVE-2017-11421 ) was discovered by German researcher Nils Dagsson Moskopp, who also released proof-of-concept code on his blog to demonstrate the vulnerability. The code injection vulnerability resides in "gnome-exe-thumbnailer"  — a tool to generate thumbnails from Windows executable files (.exe/.msi/.dll/.lnk) for GNOME, which requires users to have Wine application installed on their systems to open it. Those who are unaware, Wine is a free and open-source software that allows Windows applications to run on the Linux operating system. Moskopp discovered that while navigating to a directory containing the .msi file, GNOME Files takes the filename as an executable input and run it in order to create an image thumbna...

WikiLeaks has just published a new batch of the ongoing Vault 7 leak , this time detailing an alleged CIA project that allowed the agency to hack and remotely spy on computers running the Linux operating systems. Dubbed OutlawCountry , the project allows the CIA hackers to redirect all outbound network traffic on the targeted computer to CIA controlled computer systems for exfiltrate and infiltrate data. The OutlawCountry Linux hacking tool consists of a kernel module, which the CIA hackers load via shell access to the targeted system and create a hidden Netfilter table with an obscure name on a target Linux user. "The new table allows certain rules to be created using the "iptables" command. These rules take precedence over existing rules, and are only visible to an administrator if the table name is known. When the Operator removes the kernel module, the new table is also removed," CIA's leaked  user manual reads. Although the installation and persi...