Ubuntu Linux | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

An unknown hacker yesterday successfully managed to hack into the official GitHub account of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux project and created 11 new empty repositories . It appears that the cyberattack was, fortunately, just a "loud" defacement attempt rather than a "silent" sophisticated supply-chain attack that could have been abused to distribute modified malicious versions of the open-source Canonical software. In a statement, David from Canonical confirmed that attacker(s) used a Canonical owned GitHub account whose credentials were compromised to unauthorizedly access Canonical's Github account. "We can confirm that on 2019-07-06 there was a Canonical owned account on GitHub whose credentials were compromised and used to create repositories and issues among other activities," David said. "Canonical has removed the compromised account from the Canonical organization in GitHub and is still investigating the extent o...

Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions suffer from a severe privilege escalation vulnerability that could allow a local attacker or a malicious program to obtain root privileges and total control over the targeted system. Dubbed " Dirty_Sock " and identified as CVE-2019-7304 , the vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Chris Moberly, who privately disclosed it to Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, late last month. The vulnerability resides in the REST API for snapd service , a universal Linux packaging system that makes an application compatible for various Linux distributions without requiring any modification. Built by Canonical, snapd comes by default installed on all versions of Ubuntu and also used by other Linux distributions, including Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Solus, and Fedora. Snap packages are basically applications compressed together with their dependencies that also includes instructions on how to run and interact with other software o...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Windows and Linux in the same line? Yes, you heard that right... and that too, on the same computer and within the same operating system. Two months ago, Microsoft announced its plans to let its users install three different flavours of the Linux operating system – Ubuntu , Fedora , and SUSE – directly through their Windows Store, allowing them to run Windows and Linux apps side-by-side. Now, downloading an entire operating system has just become as easy as downloading an application with the availability of popular Linux distro 'Ubuntu' in the Windows App Store . However, unlike a conventional Ubuntu installation, this Ubuntu version runs in a sandboxed alongside Windows 10 with limited interaction with the operating system and is focused on running regular command-line utilities like bash or SSH as a standalone installation through an Ubuntu Terminal. For now, Ubuntu is currently only available to Windows 10 Insiders users and would be made available to the pub...