Mastodon | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The decentralized social network Mastodon has disclosed a critical security flaw that enables malicious actors to impersonate and take over any account. "Due to insufficient origin validation in all Mastodon, attackers can impersonate and take over any remote account," the maintainers said in a terse advisory. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2024-23832 , has a severity rating of 9.4 out of a maximum of 10. Security researcher  arcanicanis  has been credited with discovering and reporting it. It has been described as an "origin validation error" ( CWE-346 ), which can typically allow an attacker to "access any functionality that is inadvertently accessible to the source." Every Mastodon version prior to 3.5.17 is vulnerable, as are 4.0.x versions before 4.0.13, 4.1.x versions before 4.1.13, and 4.2.x versions before 4.2.5. Mastodon said it's withholding additional technical specifics about the flaw until February 15, 2024, to give  admins  ampl...

Mastodon, a popular decentralized social network, has released a security update to fix critical vulnerabilities that could expose millions of users to potential attacks. Mastodon is known for its federated model, consisting of thousands of separate servers called "instances," and it has over 14 million users across more than 20,000 instances. The most critical vulnerability, CVE-2023-36460 , allows hackers to exploit a flaw in the media attachments feature, creating and overwriting files in any location the software could access on an instance. This software vulnerability could be used for DoS and arbitrary remote code execution attacks, posing a significant threat to users and the broader Internet ecosystem. If an attacker gains control over multiple instances, they could cause harm by instructing users to download malicious applications or even bring down the entire Mastodon infrastructure. Fortunately, there is no evidence of this vulnerability being exploited so fa...

The notorious information-stealer known as  Vidar  is continuing to leverage popular social media services such as TikTok, Telegram, Steam, and Mastodon as an intermediate command-and-control (C2) server. "When a user creates an account on an online platform, a unique account page that can be accessed by anyone is generated," AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC) disclosed in a technical analysis  published  late last month. "Threat actors write identifying characters and the C2 address in parts of this page." In other words, the technique relies on actor-controlled throwaway accounts created on social media to retrieve the C2 address. An advantage to this approach is that should the C2 server be taken down or blocked, the adversary can trivially get around the restrictions by setting up a new server and editing the account pages to allow the previously distributed malware to communicate with the server. Vidar, first identified in 2018, is a  co...

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