Qualys | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Multiple decade-old security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the needrestart package installed by default in Ubuntu Server (since version 21.04) that could allow a local attacker to gain root privileges without requiring user interaction. The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), which identified and reported the flaws early last month, said they are trivial to exploit, necessitating that users move quickly to apply the fixes. The vulnerabilities are believed to have existed since the introduction of interpreter support in needrestart 0.8 , which was released on April 27, 2014. "These needrestart exploits allow Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) which means that a local attacker is able to gain root privileges," Ubuntu said in an advisory, noting they have been addressed in version 3.8. "The vulnerabilities affect Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions." Needrestart is a utility that scans a system to determine the services that need to be restarted a...

Malicious local attackers can obtain full root access on Linux machines by taking advantage of a newly disclosed security flaw in the GNU C library (aka glibc). Tracked as CVE-2023-6246 (CVSS score: 7.8), the heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability is rooted in glibc's __vsyslog_internal() function, which is used by  syslog() and vsyslog()  for system logging purposes. It's said to have been accidentally introduced in August 2022 with the release of glibc 2.37. "This flaw allows local privilege escalation, enabling an unprivileged user to gain full root access," Saeed Abbasi, product manager of the Threat Research Unit at Qualys,  said , adding it impacts major Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora. A threat actor could exploit the flaw to obtain elevated permissions via specially crafted inputs to applications that employ these logging functions. "Although the  vulnerability  requires specific conditions to be exploited (such as an unusual...

As SaaS providers race to integrate AI into their product offerings to stay competitive and relevant, a new challenge has emerged in the world of AI: shadow AI.  Shadow AI refers to the unauthorized use of AI tools and copilots at organizations. For example, a developer using ChatGPT to assist with writing code, a salesperson downloading an AI-powered meeting transcription tool, or a customer support person using Agentic AI to automate tasks – without going through the proper channels. When these tools are used without IT or the Security team's knowledge, they often lack sufficient security controls, putting company data at risk. Shadow AI Detection Challenges Because shadow AI tools often embed themselves in approved business applications via AI assistants, copilots, and agents they are even more tricky to discover than traditional shadow IT. While traditional shadow apps can be identified through network monitoring methodologies that scan for unauthorized connections based on...

Details have emerged about a now-patched flaw in OpenSSH that could be potentially exploited to run arbitrary commands remotely on compromised hosts under specific conditions. "This vulnerability allows a remote attacker to potentially execute arbitrary commands on vulnerable OpenSSH's forwarded ssh-agent," Saeed Abbasi, manager of vulnerability research at Qualys,  said  in an analysis last week. The vulnerability is being tracked under the CVE identifier  CVE-2023-38408  (CVSS score: N/A). It impacts all versions of OpenSSH before  9.3p2 . OpenSSH is a popular connectivity tool for remote login with the SSH protocol that's used for encrypting all traffic to eliminate eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other attacks. Successful exploitation requires the presence of certain libraries on the victim system and that the SSH authentication agent is  forwarded  to an attacker-controlled system. SSH agent is a  background program  that ...

A new malware campaign has been observed using sensitive information stolen from a bank as a lure in phishing emails to drop a remote access trojan called  BitRAT . The unknown adversary is believed to have hijacked the IT infrastructure of a Colombian cooperative bank, using the information to craft convincing decoy messages to lure victims into opening suspicious Excel attachments. The discovery comes from cybersecurity firm Qualys, which  found  evidence of a database dump comprising 418,777 records that's said to have been obtained by exploiting SQL injection faults. The leaked details include Cédula numbers (a national identity document issued to Colombian citizens), email addresses, phone numbers, customer names, payment records, salary details, and addresses, among others. There are no signs that the information has been previously shared on any forums in the darknet or clear web, suggesting that the threat actors themselves got access to customer data to mou...