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...

It's time once again to pay our respects to the once-famous cybersecurity solutions whose usefulness died in the past year. The cybercriminal world collectively mourns the loss of these solutions and the easy access they provide to victim organizations. These solutions, though celebrated in their prime, succumbed to the twin forces of time and advancing threats. Much like a tribute to celebrities lost in the past year, this article will look back at a few of cybersecurity's brightest stars that went dark in the past year.  1. Legacy Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Cause of Death: Compromised by sophisticated phishing, man-in-the-middle (MitM), SIM-swapping, and MFA prompt bombing attacks. The superstar of access security for more than twenty years, legacy MFA solutions enjoyed broad adoption followed by almost-universal responsibility for cybersecurity failures leading to successful ransomware attacks. These outdated solutions relied heavily on SMS or email-based codes o...

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...