PAM | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Instead of hiding on the laptops and servers defenders watch most closely, a China-nexus group spent close to a decade hidden inside the Linux login system itself. Sygnia, which tracks the group as Velvet Ant , says it backdoored the PAM and OpenSSH components that decide who is allowed to sign in, planting its access where ordinary cleanup could not reach it. The network it targeted had no direct internet access, so the group first staged through internet-facing systems to get there. The earliest traces go back to 2016. Instead of dropping new malware that a scanner might catch, the attacker changed the trusted login programs themselves. Nothing obvious appeared, and no exploit was needed, so the activity looked like normal administration. On many machines, the attacker replaced the main PAM login module with backdoored copies. Some let them in with a secret password; others quietly recorded real usernames and passwords as people logged in. Researchers found nine separate ver...

Consider a cached access key on a single Windows machine. It got there the way most cached credentials do - a user logged in, and the key stored itself automatically. Standard AWS behavior. No one misconfigured anything or violated a policy. Yet that single key, which was easily accessible to a minor-league attacker, could have opened a path to some 98% of entities in the company's cloud environment - nearly every critical workload the business depended on.  This real-world exposure was caught before an attacker could use it. But the takeaway is clear: identity itself, and every permission it carries, has become the attack path. Your environment runs on identity. Active Directory, cloud identity providers, service accounts, machine identities, and AI agents - all of these carry permissions that span systems and trust boundaries. A single stolen credential hands the attacker a legitimate identity - along with every permission attached to it.  Despite this, most security pro...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws that could be exploited to gain root privileges on machines running major Linux distributions. The vulnerabilities , discovered by Qualys, are listed below - CVE-2025-6018 - LPE from unprivileged to allow_active in SUSE 15's Pluggable Authentication Modules ( PAM ) CVE-2025-6019 - LPE from allow_active to root in libblockdev via the udisks daemon "These modern 'local-to-root' exploits have collapsed the gap between an ordinary logged-in user and a full system takeover," Saeed Abbasi, Senior Manager at Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), said . "By chaining legitimate services such as udisks loop-mounts and PAM/environment quirks, attackers who own any active GUI or SSH session can vault across polkit's allow_active trust zone and emerge as root in seconds." The cybersecurity company said CVE-2025-6018 is present in the PAM configuration of openSUSE Leap ...