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Cybersecurity researchers have identified two malicious packages on the npm package registry that concealed backdoor code to execute malicious commands sent from a remote server. The packages in question – img-aws-s3-object-multipart-copy and legacyaws-s3-object-multipart-copy – have been downloaded 190 and 48 times each. As of writing, they have been taken down by the npm security team. "They contained sophisticated command and control functionality hidden in image files that would be executed during package installation," software supply chain security firm Phylum said in an analysis. The packages are designed to impersonate a legitimate npm library called aws-s3-object-multipart-copy , but come with an altered version of the "index.js" file to execute a JavaScript file ("loadformat.js"). For its part, the JavaScript file is designed to process three images -- that feature the corporate logos for Intel, Microsoft, and AMD -- with the image corres

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a critical security flaw impacting OSGeo GeoServer GeoTools to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. GeoServer is an open-source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. It is the reference implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-36401 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns a case of remote code execution that could be triggered through specially crafted input. "Multiple OGC request parameters allow Remote Code Execution (RCE) by unauthenticated users through specially crafted input against a default GeoServer installation due to unsafely evaluating property names as XPath expressions," according to an advisory released by the project maintainers earlier this month. The shortcom

As a vCISO, you are responsible for your client's cybersecurity strategy and risk governance. This incorporates multiple disciplines, from research to execution to reporting. Recently, we published a comprehensive playbook for vCISOs, "Your First 100 Days as a vCISO – 5 Steps to Success" , which covers all the phases entailed in launching a successful vCISO engagement, along with recommended actions to take, and step-by-step examples.  Following the success of the playbook and the requests that have come in from the MSP/MSSP community, we decided to drill down into specific parts of vCISO reporting and provide more color and examples. In this article, we focus on how to create compelling narratives within a report, which has a significant impact on the overall MSP/MSSP value proposition.  This article brings the highlights of a recent guided workshop we held, covering what makes a successful report and how it can be used to enhance engagement with your cyber security clients.

Cybersecurity researchers said they discovered an accidentally leaked GitHub token that could have granted elevated access to the GitHub repositories of the Python language, Python Package Index (PyPI), and the Python Software Foundation (PSF). JFrog, which found the GitHub Personal Access Token, said the secret was leaked in a public Docker container hosted on Docker Hub. "This case was exceptional because it is difficult to overestimate the potential consequences if it had fallen into the wrong hands – one could supposedly inject malicious code into PyPI packages (imagine replacing all Python packages with malicious ones), and even to the Python language itself," the software supply chain security company said . An attacker could have hypothetically weaponized their admin access to orchestrate a large-scale supply chain attack by poisoning the source code associated with the core of the Python programming language, or the PyPI package manager. JFrog noted that the aut

Threat actors have been observed publishing a new wave of malicious packages to the NuGet package manager as part of an ongoing campaign that began in August 2023, while also adding a new layer of stealth to evade detection. The fresh packages, about 60 in number and spanning 290 versions, demonstrate a refined approach from the previous set that came to light in October 2023, software supply chain security firm ReversingLabs said. The attackers pivoted from using NuGet's MSBuild integrations to "a strategy that uses simple, obfuscated downloaders that are inserted into legitimate PE binary files using Intermediary Language (IL) Weaving, a .NET programming technique for modifying an application's code after compilation," security researcher Karlo Zanki said . The end goal of the counterfeit packages, both old and new, is to deliver an off-the-shelf remote access trojan called SeroXen RAT . All the identified packages have since been taken down. The latest coll

Unknown threat actors have been found propagating trojanized versions of jQuery on npm, GitHub, and jsDelivr in what appears to be an instance of a "complex and persistent" supply chain attack. "This attack stands out due to the high variability across packages," Phylum said in an analysis published last week. "The attacker has cleverly hidden the malware in the seldom-used ' end ' function of jQuery, which is internally called by the more popular ' fadeTo ' function from its animation utilities." As many as 68 packages have been linked to the campaign. They were published to the npm registry starting from May 26 to June 23, 2024, using names such as cdnjquery, footersicons, jquertyi, jqueryxxx, logoo, and sytlesheets, among others.  There is evidence to suggest that each of the bogus packages were manually assembled and published due to the sheer number of packages published from various accounts, the differences in naming conventi

Four unpatched security flaws, including three critical ones, have been disclosed in the Gogs open-source, self-hosted Git service that could enable an authenticated attacker to breach susceptible instances, steal or wipe source code, and even plant backdoors. The vulnerabilities, according to SonarSource researchers Thomas Chauchefoin and Paul Gerste, are listed below - CVE-2024-39930 (CVSS score: 9.9) - Argument injection in the built-in SSH server CVE-2024-39931 (CVSS score: 9.9) - Deletion of internal files CVE-2024-39932 (CVSS score: 9.9) - Argument injection during changes preview CVE-2024-39933 (CVSS score: 7.7) - Argument injection when tagging new releases Successful exploitation of the first three shortcomings could permit an attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the Gogs server, while the fourth flaw allows attackers to read arbitrary files such as source code, and configuration secrets. In other words, by abusing the issues, a threat actor could read sou

OpenSSH maintainers have released security updates to contain a critical security flaw that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges in glibc-based Linux systems. The vulnerability, codenamed regreSSHion, has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-6387. It resides in the OpenSSH server component , also known as sshd, which is designed to listen for connections from any of the client applications. "The vulnerability, which is a signal handler race condition in OpenSSH's server (sshd), allows unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) as root on glibc-based Linux systems," Bharat Jogi, senior director of the threat research unit at Qualys, said in a disclosure published today. "This race condition affects sshd in its default configuration." The cybersecurity firm said it identified no less than 14 million potentially vulnerable OpenSSH server instances exposed to the internet, adding it's a regression of an already pa

The heightened regulatory and legal pressure on software-producing organizations to secure their supply chains and ensure the integrity of their software should come as no surprise. In the last several years, the software supply chain has become an increasingly attractive target for attackers who see opportunities to force-multiply their attacks by orders of magnitude. For example, look no further than 2021's Log4j breach, where Log4j (an open-source logging framework maintained by Apache and used in a myriad of different applications) was the root of exploits that put thousands of systems at risk.  Log4j's communication functionality was vulnerable and thus provided an opening for an attacker to inject malicious code into the logs which could then be executed on the system. After its discovery, security researchers saw millions of attempted exploits, many of which turned into successful denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. According to some of the latest research by Gartner, close t

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a now-patched security flaw affecting the Ollama open-source artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure platform that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution. Tracked as CVE-2024-37032 , the vulnerability has been codenamed Probllama by cloud security firm Wiz. Following responsible disclosure on May 5, 2024, the issue was addressed in version 0.1.34 released on May 7, 2024. Ollama is a service for packaging, deploying, running large language models (LLMs) locally on Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. At its core, the issue relates to a case of insufficient input validation that results in a path traversal flaw an attacker could exploit to overwrite arbitrary files on the server and ultimately lead to remote code execution. The shortcoming requires the threat actor to send specially crafted HTTP requests to the Ollama API server for successful exploitation. It specifically takes advantage of the API endpoint "/api/pull&

"Test files" associated with the  XZ Utils backdoor  have made their way to a Rust crate known as  liblzma-sys , new  findings  from Phylum reveal. liblzma-sys, which has been downloaded over 21,000 times to date, provides Rust developers with bindings to the liblzma implementation, an underlying library that is part of the  XZ Utils  data compression software. The impacted version in question is 0.3.2. "The current distribution (v0.3.2) on Crates.io contains the test files for XZ that contain the backdoor," Phylum  noted  in a GitHub issue raised on April 9, 2024. "The test files themselves are not included in either the .tar.gz nor the .zip tags  here on GitHub  and are only present in liblzma-sys_0.3.2.crate that is installed from Crates.io." Following responsible disclosure, the files in question ("tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz" and "tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma") have since been removed from liblzma-sys version

New research has discovered over 800 packages in the npm registry which have discrepancies from their registry entries, out of which 18 have been found to exploit a technique called  manifest confusion . The findings come from cybersecurity firm JFrog, which said the issue could be exploited by threat actors to trick developers into running malicious code. "It's an actual threat since developers may be tricked into downloading packages that look innocent, but whose hidden dependencies are actually malicious," security researcher Andrey Polkovnichenko told The Hacker News. Manifest confusion was  first documented  in July 2023, when security researcher Darcy Clarke found that mismatches in manifest and package metadata could be weaponized to stage software supply chain attacks. The problem stems from the fact that the npm registry does not validate whether the manifest file contained in the tarball (package.json) matches the manifest data provided to the npm server d

Cybersecurity researchers have identified two authentication bypass flaws in open-source Wi-Fi software found in Android, Linux, and ChromeOS devices that could trick users into joining a malicious clone of a legitimate network or allow an attacker to join a trusted network without a password. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2023-52160 and CVE-2023-52161, have been discovered following a security evaluation of  wpa_supplicant  and Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon ( IWD ), respectively. The flaws "allow attackers to trick victims into connecting to malicious clones of trusted networks and intercept their traffic, and join otherwise secure networks without needing the password," Top10VPN  said  in a new research conducted in collaboration with Mathy Vanhoef, who has previously uncovered Wi-Fi attacks like  KRACK ,  DragonBlood , and  TunnelCrack . CVE-2023-52161, in particular, permits an adversary to gain unauthorized access to a protected Wi-Fi network, exposing exis

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced that it's partnering with the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Securing Software Repositories Working Group to publish a new framework to secure package repositories. Called the  Principles for Package Repository Security , the framework  aims  to establish a set of foundational rules for package managers and further harden open-source software ecosystems. "Package repositories are at a critical point in the open-source ecosystem to help prevent or mitigate such attacks," OpenSSF  said . "Even simple actions like having a documented account recovery policy can lead to robust security improvements. At the same time, capabilities must be balanced with resource constraints of package repositories, many of which are operated by non-profit organizations." Notably, the principles lay out four security maturity levels for package repositories across four categories of authenticati

Microsoft said it's introducing Sudo for Windows 11 as part of an early preview version to help users execute commands with administrator privileges. "Sudo for Windows is a new way for users to run elevated commands directly from an unelevated console session," Microsoft Product Manager Jordi Adoumie  said . "It is an ergonomic and familiar solution for users who want to elevate a command without having to first open a new elevated console." Sudo, short for superuser do, is a  program  for  Unix-like computer operating systems  that allows users to run programs with the security privileges of another user, usually a user with elevated permissions (e.g., administrator). The feature is available for Windows 11 builds 26045 and later. It can be enabled by heading to Settings > System > For Developers, and setting "Enable sudo" to On. Sudo for Windows comes with three options: run applications in a new elevated console window, run the elevated

The title of this article probably sounds like the caption to a meme. Instead, this is an actual problem GitGuardian's engineers had to solve in implementing the mechanisms for their new  HasMySecretLeaked service . They wanted to help developers find out if their secrets (passwords, API keys, private keys, cryptographic certificates, etc.) had found their way into public GitHub repositories. How could they comb a vast library of secrets found in publicly available GitHub repositories and their histories and compare them to your secrets without you having to expose sensitive information? This article will tell you how. First, if we were to set a bit's mass as equal to that of one electron, a ton of data would be around 121.9 quadrillion petabytes of data at standard Earth gravity or $39.2 billion billion billion US dollars in MacBook Pro storage upgrades (more than all the money in the world). So when this article claims GitGuardian scanned a "ton" of GitHub public commit data, t

Two critical security flaws discovered in the open-source  CasaOS  personal cloud software could be successfully exploited by attackers to achieve arbitrary code execution and take over susceptible systems. The vulnerabilities, tracked as  CVE-2023-37265  and  CVE-2023-37266 , both carry a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. Sonar security researcher Thomas Chauchefoin, who discovered the bugs,  said  they "allow attackers to get around authentication requirements and gain full access to the CasaOS dashboard." Even more troublingly, CasaOS' support for third-party applications could be weaponized to run arbitrary commands on the system to gain persistent access to the device or pivot into internal networks. Following responsible disclosure on July 3, 2023, the flaws were addressed in  version 0.4.4  released by its maintainers IceWhale on July 14, 2023. A brief description of the two flaws is as follows - CVE-2023-37265  - Incorrect identification of the s

In today's interconnected world, evolving security solutions to meet growing demand is more critical than ever. Collaboration across multiple solutions for intelligence gathering and information sharing is indispensable. The idea of multiple-source intelligence gathering stems from the concept that threats are rarely isolated. Hence, their detection and prevention require a comprehensive understanding of the broader landscape. A comprehensive and robust security framework should be established by aggregating resources, knowledge, and expertise from various sources. This collaborative effort allows for the analysis of diverse data sets, the identification of emerging patterns, and the timely dissemination of crucial information.  In this article, we discuss a versatile security platform that can operate in two distinct roles within a security ecosystem. This platform can function as a subscriber, actively collecting and aggregating security data from various endpoints and other so

Threat actors flooded the npm open source package repository for Node.js with bogus packages that briefly even resulted in a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. "The threat actors create malicious websites and publish empty packages with links to those malicious websites, taking advantage of open-source ecosystems' good reputation on search engines," Checkmarx's Jossef Harush Kadouri  said  in a report published last week. "The attacks caused a denial-of-service (DoS) that made NPM unstable with sporadic 'Service Unavailable' errors." While  similar campaigns  were recently observed propagating phishing links, the latest wave pushed the number of package versions to 1.42 million, a dramatic uptick from the approximate 800,000 packages released on npm. The attack technique leverages the fact that open source repositories are ranked higher on search engine results to create rogue websites and upload empty npm modules with links to those sites in the