Linux security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Are millions of enterprise users, who rely on the next-generation firewalls for protection, actually protected from hackers? Probably Not. Just less than a month after an unauthorized backdoor found in Juniper Networks firewalls, an anonymous security researcher has discovered highly suspicious code in FortiOS firewalls from enterprise security vendor Fortinet. According to the leaked information, FortiOS operating system, deployed on Fortinet's FortiGate firewall networking equipment, includes an SSH backdoor that can be used to access its firewall equipment. Anyone can Access FortiOS SSH Backdoor Anyone with " Fortimanager_Access " username and a hashed version of the " FGTAbc11*xy+Qqz27 " password string, which is hard coded into the firewall, can login into Fortinet's FortiGate firewall networking equipment. However, according to the company's product details, this SSH user is created for challenge-and-response authenti

So what would anyone need to bypass password protection on your computer? It just needs to hit the backspace key 28 times , for at least the computer running Linux operating system. Wait, what? A pair of security researchers from the University of Valencia have uncovered a bizarre bug in several distributions of Linux that could allow anyone to bypass any kind of authentication during boot-up just by pressing backspace key 28 times. This time, the issue is neither in a kernel nor in an operating system itself, but rather the vulnerability actually resides in Grub2 , the popular Grand Unified Bootloader , which is used by most Linux systems to boot the operating system when the PC starts. Also Read: GPU-based Linux Rootkit and Keylogger . The source of the vulnerability is nothing but an integer underflow fault that was introduced with single commit in Grub version 1.98 (December 2009) – b391bdb2f2c5ccf29da66cecdbfb7566656a704d – affecting the grub_password

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Since past few years, Ransomware has emerged as one of the catastrophic malware programs that lets hacker encrypts all the contents of a victim's hard drive or/and server and demands ransom (typically to be paid in Bitcoin ) in exchange for a key to decrypt it. Until now cyber criminals were targeting computers, smartphones and tablets, but now it appears they are creating ransomware that makes the same impact but for Web Sites – specifically holding files, pages and images of the target website for Ransom. Dubbed Linux.Encoder.1 by Russian antivirus firm Dr.Web , the new strain of ransomware targets Linux-powered websites and servers by encrypting MySQL, Apache, and home/root folders associated with the target site and asking for 1 Bitcoin ( ~ $300 ) to decrypt the files. The ransomware threat is delivered to the target website through known vulnerabilities in website plugins or third-party software. Must Read: FBI Suggests Ransomware Victims — 'Just Pay th

Can you name which Operating System is most Secure ? ...Windows, Mac, Linux or any particular Linux Distribution? Yes, we get that! It's not an easy thing to pick. Besides Windows, Even the so-called ultra-secure Linux Distros were found to be vulnerable to various critical flaws in past years. Because, almost all Linux Distros use the same Kernel, and the most number of cyber attacks target the Kernel of an operating system. So, It doesn't matter which Linux distribution you use. The kernel is the core part an operating system, which handles all the main activities and enforces the security mechanisms to the entire operating system. Making an Operating System secure requires that vulnerabilities shall not exist in the Kernel, which is the communicating interface between the hardware and the user.  To overcome the above situation, Security Researchers, Mathematicians and Aviation gurus from Boeing and Rockwell Collins joined a team of dedicated NIC

A simple but highly critical vulnerability recently disclosed in the most widely used OpenSSH software allows attackers to try thousands of password login attempts per connection in a short period. OpenSSH is the most popular software widely used for secure remote access to Linux-based systems. Generally, the software allows 3 to 6 Password login attempts before closing a connection, but a new vulnerability lets attackers perform thousands of authentication requests remotely . OpenSSH servers with keyboard-interactive authentication enabled , including FreeBSD Linux, can be exploited to carry out the brute force attack on OpenSSH protocol, a security researcher with online alias KingCope explained in a blog post . Exploit for the Vulnerability RELEASED  Hackers could widely exploit the vulnerability because the keyboard-interactive authentication is by default enabled on most of the systems. Researcher has also released a proof-of-concept exploit code, which i

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has released a network security tool for Government and the private sectors to help secure their networks against cyber attacks. Dubbed Systems Integrity Management Platform (SIMP) , the tool is now publicly available on the popular source code sharing website GitHub . According to an official release from NSA, SIMP makes it easier for government organizations and the private sector to "fortify their networks against cyber threats." SIMP aims at providing a reasonable combination of security compliance and operational flexibility , keeping networked systems compliant with security standards and requirements. It is considered to be a critical part of a layered, "defence-in-depth" approach to information security. " By releasing SIMP, the agency seeks to reduce duplication of effort and promote greater collaboration within the community: The wheel would not have to be reinvented for every organiza

The open-source Wget application which is most widely used on Linux and Unix systems for retrieving files from the web has found vulnerable to a critical flaw. GNU Wget is a command-line utility designed to retrieve files from the Web using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP, the most widely used Internet protocols. Wget can be easily installed on any Unix-like system and has been ported to many environments, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, OpenVMS, MorphOS and AmigaOS. When a recursive directory fetch over FTP server as the target, it would let an attacker " create arbitrary files, directories or symbolic links " due to a symlink flaw. IMPACT OF SYMLINK ATTACK " It was found that wget was susceptible to a symlink attack which could create arbitrary files, directories or symbolic links and set their permissions when retrieving a directory recursively through FTP ," developer Vasyl Kaigorodov wrote in a Red Hat Bugzilla comment . A remote unauthentica