Software vulnerabilities | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Today's threat landscape is constantly evolving, and now more than ever, organizations and businesses in every sector have a critical need to consistently produce and maintain secure software. While some verticals - like the finance industry, for example - have been subject to regulatory and compliance requirements for some time, we are seeing a steady increase in attention on cybersecurity best practices at the highest levels of government, with the US, UK, and Australia all shining very recent light on the need for secure development at every stage of the SDLC.  Despite this, attackers are constantly finding new ways to bypass even the most advanced protections and defenses. For example, many have shifted their focus from delivering malware to instead compromising APIs, or launching targeted attacks  against a supply chain . And while those high-level incidents are happening with much greater frequency, so too are the more simplistic exploits like cross-site scripting and SQL i

Citrix today released patches for multiple new security vulnerabilities affecting its Citrix Endpoint Management (CEM) , also known as XenMobile, a product made for enterprises to help companies manage and secure their employees' mobile devices remotely. Citrix Endpoint Management offers businesses mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) capabilities. It allows companies to control which apps their employees can install while ensuring updates and security settings are applied to keep business information protected. According to Citrix, there are a total of 5 vulnerabilities that affect on-premise instances of XenMobile servers used in enterprises to manage all apps, devices, or platforms from one central location. "Remediations have already been applied to cloud versions, but hybrid rights users need to apply the upgrades to any on-premises instance," the company sai d in a post today. If left unpatched and exploited successfully,

To minimize the risk of privilege misuse, a trend in the privileged access management (PAM) solution market involves implementing just-in-time (JIT) privileged access. This approach to  privileged identity management  aims to mitigate the risks associated with prolonged high-level access by granting privileges temporarily and only when necessary, rather than providing users with continuous high-level privileges. By adopting this strategy, organizations can enhance security, minimize the window of opportunity for potential attackers and ensure that users access privileged resources only when necessary.  What is JIT and why is it important?   JIT privileged access provisioning  involves granting privileged access to users on a temporary basis, aligning with the concept of least privilege. This principle provides users with only the minimum level of access required to perform their tasks, and only for the amount of time required to do so. One of the key advantages of JIT provisioning

Popular video conferencing app Zoom has addressed several security vulnerabilities, two of which affect its Linux client that could have allowed an attacker with access to a compromised system to read and exfiltrate Zoom user data—and even run stealthy malware as a sub-process of a trusted application. According to cybersecurity researcher Mazin Ahmed , who presented his findings at DEF CON 2020 yesterday, the company also left a misconfigured development instance exposed that wasn't updated since September 2019, indicating the server could be susceptible to flaws that were left unpatched. After Ahmed privately reported the issues to Zoom in April and subsequently in July, the company issued a fix on August 3 (version 5.2.4). It's worth noting that for some of these attacks to happen, an attacker would need to have already compromised the victim's device by other means. But that doesn't take away the significance of the flaws. In one scenario, Ahmed uncov

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in Zoom video conferencing software for Windows that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a victim's computer running Microsoft Windows 7 or older. To successfully exploit the zoom vulnerability, all an attacker needs to do is tricking a Zoom user into performing some typical action like opening a received document file. No security warning is triggered or shown to the user at the time of the attack. The vulnerability has been discovered by a researcher who reported it to Acros Security, who then reported the flaw to the Zoom security team earlier today. The researcher wishes to remain anonymous. Although the flaw is present in all supported versions of the Zoom client for Windows, it is only exploitable on systems running Windows 7 and older Windows systems due to some specific system characteristics. "This vulnerability is only exploitable on Windows 7 and earlier Windows versions. It is likely also explo

Citrix yesterday issued new security patches for as many as 11 security flaws that affect its Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC), Gateway, and SD-WAN WAN Optimization edition (WANOP) networking products. Successful exploitation of these critical flaws could let unauthenticated attackers perform code injection, information disclosure, and even denial-of-service attacks against the gateway or the authentication virtual servers . Citrix confirmed that the aforementioned issues do not impact other virtual servers, such as load balancing and content switching virtual servers. Among the affected Citrix SD-WAN WANOP appliances include models 4000-WO, 4100-WO, 5000-WO, and 5100-WO. The networking vendor also reiterated that these vulnerabilities were not connected to a previously fixed zero-day NetScaler flaw (tagged as CVE-2019-19781 ) that allowed bad actors to perform arbitrary code execution even without proper authentication. It also said there's no evidence

The US-CERT today issued advisory warning users of a new dangerous 17-year-old remote code execution vulnerability affecting the PPP daemon (pppd) software that comes installed on almost all Linux based operating systems, as well as powers the firmware of many other networking devices. The affected pppd software is an implementation of Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) that enables communication and data transfer between nodes, primarily used to establish internet links such as those over dial-up modems, DSL broadband connections, and Virtual Private Networks. Discovered by IOActive security researcher Ilja Van Sprundel , the critical issue is a stack buffer overflow vulnerability that exists due to a logical error in the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) packet parser of the pppd software, an extension that provides support for additional authentication methods in PPP connections. The vulnerability , tracked as CVE-2020-8597  with CVSS Score 9.8, can be exploited by unau

If you use Zoom to host your remote online meetings, you need to read this piece carefully. The massively popular video conferencing software has patched a security loophole that could have allowed anyone to remotely eavesdrop on unprotected active meetings, potentially exposing private audio, video, and documents shared throughout the session. Besides hosting password-protected virtual meetings and webinars, Zoom also allows users to set up a session for non-pre-registered participants who can join an active meeting by entering a unique Meeting ID, without requiring a password or going through the Waiting Rooms. Zoom generates this random meeting ID, comprised of 9, 10, and 11-digit numbers, for each meeting you schedule or create. If leaked beyond an individual or intended group of people, merely knowing Meeting IDs could allow unwelcome guests joining meetings or webinars. This could be bad news for anyone expecting their conversations to be private. To circumvent suc

WhatsApp, the world's most popular end-to-end encrypted messaging application, patched an incredibly frustrating software bug that could have allowed a malicious group member to crash the messaging app for all members of the same group, The Hacker News learned. Just by sending a maliciously crafted message to a targeted group, an attacker can trigger a fully-destructive WhatsApp crash-loop, forcing all group members to completely uninstall the app, reinstall it, and remove the group to regain normal function. Since the group members can't selectively delete the malicious message without opening the group window and re-triggering the crash-loop, they have to lose the entire group chat history, indefinitely, to get rid of it. Discovered by researchers at Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point , the latest bug resided in the WhatsApp's implementation of XMPP communication protocol that crashes the app when a member with invalid phone number drops a message in the grou

No, it's not a patch Tuesday. It's the third Tuesday of the month, and as The Hacker News shared an early heads-up late last week on Twitter, Adobe today finally released pre-announced out-of-band security updates to patch a total of 82 security vulnerabilities across its various products. The affected products that received security patches today include: Adobe Acrobat and Reader Adobe Experience Manager Adobe Experience Manager Forms Adobe Download Manager Out of 82 security vulnerabilities, 45 are rated critical, and all of them affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader and which, if exploited successfully, could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. A majority of critical-rated vulnerabilities (i.e., 26) in Adobe Acrobat and Reader reside due to use-after-free, 6 due to out-of-bounds write, 4 are type confusion bugs, 4 due to untrusted pointer dereference, 3 are heap overflow bugs, one buffer overrun and one race condition issue. Ad

An anonymous hacker today publicly revealed details and proof-of-concept exploit code for an unpatched, critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in vBulletin—one of the widely used internet forum software, The Hacker News has learned. One of the reasons why the vulnerability should be viewed as a severe issue is not just because it is remotely exploitable, but also doesn't require authentication. Written in PHP, vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package that powers more than 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. According to details published on the Full Disclosure mailing list, the hacker claims to have found a remote code execution vulnerability that appears to affect vBulletin versions 5.0.0 till the latest 5.5.4. The Hacker News has independently verified that the flaw works, as described, and affects the latest version of vBulletin software, which even

The same security vulnerabilities that were recently reported in Zoom for macOS also affect two other popular video conferencing software that under the hood, are just a rebranded version of Zoom video conferencing software. Security researchers confirmed The Hacker News that RingCentral, used by over 350,000 businesses, and Zhumu, a Chinese version of Zoom, also runs a hidden local web server on users' computers, just like Zoom for macOS. The controversial local web server that has been designed to offer an automatic click-to-join feature was found vulnerable to remote command injection attacks through 3rd-party websites. Security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh initially provided a proof-of-concept demonstrating how the vulnerable web server  could eventually allow attackers to turn on users laptop's webcam and microphone remotely. The flaw was later escalated to remote code execution attack by another security researcher, Karan Lyons , who has now published a new v

If you use VLC media player on your computer and haven't updated it recently, don't you even dare to play any untrusted, randomly downloaded video file on it. Doing so could allow hackers to remotely take full control over your computer system. That's because VLC media player software versions prior to 3.0.7 contain two high-risk security vulnerabilities , besides many other medium- and low-severity security flaws, that could potentially lead to arbitrary code execution attacks. With more than 3 billion downloads, VLC is a hugely popular open-source media player software that is currently being used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide on all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, as well as Android and iOS mobile platforms. Discovered by Symeon Paraschoudis from Pen Test Partners and identified as CVE-2019-12874 , the first high-severity vulnerability is a double-free issue which resides in "zlib_decompress_extra" function of VideoLAN

Security researchers have discovered multiple critical vulnerabilities in a popular IPTV middleware platform that is currently being used by more than a thousand regional and international online media streaming services to manage their millions of subscribers. Discovered by security researchers at CheckPoint , the vulnerabilities reside in the administrative panel of Ministra TV platform, which if exploited, could allow attackers to bypass authentication and extract subscribers' database, including their financial details. Besides this, the flaws could also allow attackers to replace broadcast and steam any content of their choice on the TV screens of all affected customer networks. Ministra TV platform, previously known as Stalker Portal, is a software written in PHP that works as a middleware platform for media streaming services for managing Internet Protocol television (IPTV), video-on-demand (VOD) and over-the-top (OTT) content, licenses and their subscribers. Deve

A new security vulnerability has been discovered in the latest version of Apple's macOS Mojave that could allow a malicious application to access data stored in restricted folders which are otherwise not accessible to every app. Discovered by application developer Jeff Johnson on February 8, the vulnerability is unpatched at the time of writing and impacts all version of macOS Mojave, including macOS Mojave 10.14.3 Supplemental update released on February 7. Certain folders in macOS Mojave have restricted access that is forbidden by default, like ~/Library/Safari, which can be accessed by only a few applications, such as Finder. However, Johnson discovered a way to bypass these restrictions in Mojave, allowing applications to access ~/Library/Safari without needing any permission from the user or the system, and read users' web browsing history. "My bypass works with the 'hardened runtime' enabled," Johnson said in a blog post published last week.

As part of June's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released security patches for a total of 96 security vulnerabilities across its products, including fixes for two vulnerabilities being actively exploited in the wild. This month's patch release also includes emergency patches for unsupported versions of Windows platform the company no longer officially supports to fix three Windows hacking exploits leaked by the Shadow Brokers in the April's data dump of NSA hacking arsenal . The June 2017 Patch Tuesday brings patches for several remote code execution flaws in Windows, Office, and Edge, which could be exploited remotely by hackers to take complete control over vulnerable machines with little or no interaction from the user. While two of the vulnerabilities have been exploited in live attacks, another three flaws have publicly available proof-of-concept (POC) exploits that anyone could use to target Windows users. Vulnerabilities Under Active Attack The two vul

Police have arrested and charged six people with crimes linked to hacking Connecticut state lottery terminals in order to produce more winning tickets than usual. Prosecutors say all the six suspects are either owners or employees of retail stores that produced a much higher number of winning tickets than the state average, according to the Hartford Courant . Suspects Hacked Lottery Terminal The alleged group set up machines to process a flood of tickets at once that caused a temporary display freeze, allowing operators to see which of the tickets about to be dispensed would be winning tickets, cancel the duff ones, and print the good ones. The hack appears to have exploited some  software weaknesses in lottery terminals  that not only caused ticket requests to be delayed but also allowed operators to know ahead of time whether a given request would produce a winning ticket. The actual culprit, in this case, was a game dubbed " 5 Card Cash ." The a

A critical zero-day vulnerability discovered in Mozilla's popular Bugzilla bug-tracking software used by hundreds of prominent software organizations, both private and open-source, could expose sensitive information and vulnerabilities of the software projects to the hackers. The critical flaw allows an attacker to bypass email verification part when registering a new Bugzilla account, which clearly means that an attacker can register accounts using any email addresses of their choice without the need to access the actual inbox for validation purposes. VALIDATION BYPASS AND PRIVILEGE ESCALATION BUG Security firm Check Point Software Technologies disclosed the flaw ( CVE-2014-1572 ) on Monday and said that it's the first time when a privilege-escalation vulnerability has been found in the Bugzilla project since 2002. The Mozilla foundation has also confirmed that this particular bug exists in all versions of Bugzilla going back to version 2.23.3 from 2006. An analysis

It's more than a month since we all were warned of the critical OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability , but that doesn't mean it disappeared. The critical bug compromised many popular websites and after been discovered the problem was solved. But is that so? No, not at all! A recent finding from the security researcher Robert David Graham claims that there are still more than 300,000 servers apparently remain vulnerable to the most critical OpenSSL bug, Heartbleed, which is admittedly down in numbers from the previous which resulted in over 600,000 systems a month ago. Graham announced on the Errata Security blog that he arrived at the number through a recently done global internet scan (or at least the important bits: port 443 of IPv4 addresses), which reveals that exactly 318,239 systems are still vulnerable to the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug and over 1.5 million servers still support the vulnerable "heartbeat" feature of OpenSSL that allowed the critical bug. "