Python Library | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In another finding that could expose developers to increased risk of a supply chain attack, it has emerged that nearly one-third of the packages in PyPI, the Python Package Index, trigger automatic code execution upon downloading them. "A worrying feature in pip/PyPI allows code to automatically run when developers are merely downloading a package," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb  said  in a technical report published this week. "Also, this feature is alarming due to the fact that a great deal of the malicious packages we are finding in the wild use this feature of code execution upon installation to achieve higher infection rates." One of the ways by which packages can be installed for Python is by executing the " pip install " command, which, in turn, invokes a file called "setup.py" that comes bundled along with the module. "setup.py," as the name implies, is a  setup script  that's used to specify metadata associated wit...

As many as five security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the PJSIP open-source multimedia communication library that could be abused by an attacker to trigger arbitrary code execution and denial-of-service (DoS) in applications that use the protocol stack. The weaknesses were  identified and reported  by JFrog's Security Research team, following which the project maintainers released patches ( version 2.12 ) last week on February 24, 2022. PJSIP is an open-source embedded  SIP protocol  suite written in C that supports audio, video, and instant messaging features for popular communication platforms such as  WhatsApp  and BlueJeans. It's also  used  by  Asterisk , a widely-used private branch exchange (PBX) switching system for VoIP networks. "Buffers used in PJSIP typically have limited sizes, especially the ones allocated in the stack or supplied by the application, however in several places, we do not check if our usage can exce...

Every week seems to bring news of another data breach, and it's no surprise why: securing sensitive data has become harder than ever. And it's not just because companies are dealing with orders of magnitude more data. Data flows and user roles are constantly shifting, and data is stored across multiple technologies and cloud environments. Not to mention, compliance requirements are only getting stricter and more elaborate.  The problem is that while the data landscape has evolved rapidly, the usual strategies for securing that data are stuck in the past. Gone are the days when data lived in predictable places, with access controlled by a chosen few. Today, practically every department in the business needs to use customer data, and AI adoption means huge datasets, and a constant flux of permissions, use cases, and tools. Security teams are struggling to implement effective strategies for securing sensitive data, and a new crop of tools, called data security platforms, have appear...