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Researchers have disclosed details of two critical security vulnerabilities in Control Web Panel that could be abused as part of an exploit chain to achieve pre-authenticated remote code execution on affected servers. Tracked as CVE-2021-45467 , the issue concerns a case of a  file inclusion vulnerability , which occurs when a web application is tricked into exposing or running arbitrary files on the web server. Control Web Panel, previously CentOS Web Panel, is an open-source Linux control panel software used for deploying web hosting environments. Specifically, the issue arises when two of the unauthenticated PHP pages used in the application — "/user/login.php" and "/user/index.php" — fail to adequately validate a path to a script file, according to Octagon Networks'  Paulos Yibelo , who discovered and reported the flaws. This means that in order to exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker has to do is to alter the  include statement , which is used...

cPanel, a provider of popular administrative tools to manage web hosting, has patched a security vulnerability that could have allowed remote attackers with access to valid credentials to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) protection on an account. The issue, tracked as "SEC-575" and discovered by researchers from  Digital Defense , has been remedied by the company in versions 11.92.0.2, 11.90.0.17, and 11.86.0.32 of the software. cPanel and WHM (Web Host Manager) offers a Linux-based control panel for users to handle website and server management, including tasks such as adding sub-domains and performing system and control panel maintenance. To date, over  70 million domains  have been launched on servers using cPanel's software suite. The issue stemmed from a lack of rate-limiting during 2FA during logins, thus making it possible for a malicious party to repeatedly submit 2FA codes using a brute-force approach and circumvent the authentication check. Digital D...

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...

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...

It's been quite a year for the open source platforms. Earlier this year, Microsoft acquired popular code repository hosting service GitHub for $7.5 billion , and now IBM has just announced the biggest open-source business deal ever. IBM today confirmed that it would be acquiring open source Linux firm Red Hat for $190 per share in cash, working out to a total value of approximately $34 billion. Red Hat, known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, is a leading software company that offers open-source software products to the enterprise community. Even Oracle uses Red Hat's source code for its Oracle Linux product. Red Hat's last year revenue was $2.4 billion, and this year the company has earned $2.9 billion. But if Red Hat products are open source and updates are free, you might be wondering how does the company earn. Red Hat was one of the first companies who found a successful way to make money from free open-source software. It offers consul...

An Indian security researcher has discovered a highly critical flaw in X.Org Server package that impacts OpenBSD and most Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, and Fedora. Xorg X server is a popular open-source implementation of the X11 system (display server) that offers a graphical environment to a wider range of hardware and OS platforms. It serves as an intermediary between client and user applications to manage graphical displays. According to a blog post published by software security engineer Narendra Shinde , Xorg X server doesn't correctly handle and validate arguments for at least two command-line parameters, allowing a low-privileged user to execute malicious code and overwrite any file—including files owned by privileged users like root. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-14665 , was introduced in X.Org server 1.19.0 package that remained undetected for almost two years and could have been exploited by a local attacker on the terminal or vi...

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Systemd , the popular init system and service manager for Linux operating systems, that could allow remote attackers to potentially trigger a buffer overflow to execute malicious code on the targeted machines via a DNS response. The vulnerability, designated as CVE-2017-9445 , actually resides in the ' dns_packet_new ' function of 'systemd-resolved,' a DNS response handler component that provides network name resolution to local applications. According to an advisory published Tuesday, a specially crafted malicious DNS response can crash 'systemd-resolved' program remotely when the system tries to lookup for a hostname on an attacker-controlled DNS service. Eventually, large DNS response overflows the buffer, allowing an attacker to overwrite the memory which leads to remote code execution. This means the attackers can remotely run any malware on the targeted system or server via their evil DNS service...

South Korean web hosting provider has agreed to pay $1 million in bitcoins to hackers after a Linux ransomware infected its 153 servers, encrypting 3,400 business websites and their data, hosted on them. According to a blog post published by NAYANA, the web hosting company, this unfortunate event happened on 10th June when ransomware malware hit its hosting servers and attacker demanded 550 bitcoins (over $1.6 million) to unlock the encrypted files. However, the company later negotiated with the cyber criminals and agreed to pay 397.6 bitcoins (around $1.01 million) in three installments to get their files decrypted. The hosting company has already paid two installments at the time of writing and would pay the last installment of ransom after recovering data from two-third of its infected servers. According to the security firm Trend Micro , the ransomware used in the attack was Erebus that was first spotted in September last year and was seen in February this year with Win...

If you are using the Internet, there are the possibilities that you are open to attack. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) implementation in all Linux systems deployed since 2012 ( version 3.6 and above of the Linux kernel ) poses a serious threat to Internet users, whether or not they use Linux directly. This issue is troubling because Linux is used widely across the Internet, from web servers to Android smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Researchers have uncovered a serious Internet flaw, which if exploited, could allow attackers to terminate or inject malware into unencrypted communication between any two vulnerable machines on the Internet. The vulnerability could also be used to forcefully terminate HTTPS encrypted connections and downgrade the privacy of secure connections, as well as also threatens anonymity of Tor users by routing them to certain malicious relays. The flaw actually resides in the design and implementation of the Request for Comments: 5961 ( RF...

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...

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...

The Developers of one of the most advanced open source operating system for penetration testing called ' KALI Linux ' have made the operating system available for Docker-addicted system administrators. But, What's Docker? Docker is a new open-source container technology, released in June 2014, that automates the deployment of applications inside self-sufficient software containers by providing an additional layer of abstraction and automation of operating-system-level visualization on Linux. Docker, built on top of Linux containers, is simply a way of managing multiple containers on a single machine. Nowadays, companies are adopting Docker at a remarkable rate. Docker is not just the favorite of Linux powers like RedHat and Canonical, but also big software firms, including Microsoft, which has embraced Docker. Why bringing Kali Linux for Docker? The same was happened to the developer of Offensive Security, who was requested for a Dockerised image of ...

Researchers on Thursday discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in the widely used command-line shell GNU Bourne Again Shell ( Bash ), dubbed " Shellshock " which affects most of the Linux distributions and servers worldwide, and may already have been exploited in the wild to take over Web servers as part of a botnet that is currently trying to infect other servers as well. BOTNET ATTACK IN THE WILD The bot was discovered by the security researcher with the Twitter handle @yinettesys , who reported it on Github and said it appeared to be remotely controlled by miscreants, which indicates that the vulnerability is already being used maliciously by the hackers. The vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271) , which came to light on Wednesday, affects versions 1.14 through 4.3 of GNU Bash and could become a dangerous threat to Linux/Unix and Apple users if the patches to BASH are not applied to the operating systems. However, the patches for the vulnerabil...

Security researchers from Russian Internet giant Yandex have discovered a new piece of malware that is being used to target Linux and FreeBSD web servers in order to make them a part of the wide botnet, even without the need of any root privileges. Researchers dubbed the malware as Mayhem, a nasty malware modular that includes a number of payloads to cause malicious things and targets to infect only those machines which are not updated with security patches or less likely to run security software. So far, researchers have found over 1,400 Linux and FreeBSD servers around the world that have compromised by the malware , with potentially thousands more to come. Most of the compromised machines are located in the USA, Russia, Germany and Canada. Three security experts, Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov , who work at Russia-based Internet portal Yandex, discovered the malware targeting *nix servers . They were able to trace transmissions from th...