The Hacker News — Cyber Security and Hacking News Website: Vulnerability

If you are using LibreOffice, you need to update it once again. LibreOffice has released the latest version 6.2.6/6.3.0 of its open-source office software to address three new vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to bypass patches for two previously addressed vulnerabilities. LibreOffice is one of the most popular and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office suite and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS systems. One of the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2019-9848 , that LibreOffice attempted to patch just last month was a code execution flaw that affected LibreLogo, a programmable turtle vector graphics script that ships by default with LibreOffice. This flaw allows an attacker to craft a malicious document that can silently execute arbitrary python commands without displaying any warning to a targeted user. Apparently, the patch for this vulnerability was insufficient, as The Hacker News also reported late last month , which allowed two separate secu

Over a billion Bluetooth-enabled devices, including smartphones, laptops, smart IoT devices, and industrial devices, have been found vulnerable to a high severity vulnerability that could allow attackers to spy on data transmitted between the two devices. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-9506 , resides in the way 'encryption key negotiation protocol' lets two Bluetooth BR/EDR devices choose an entropy value for encryption keys while pairing to secure their connection. Referred to as the Key Negotiation of Bluetooth ( KNOB ) attack, the vulnerability could allow remote attackers in close proximity to targeted devices to intercept, monitor, or manipulate encrypted Bluetooth traffic between two paired devices. The Bluetooth BR/EDR (Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate, also known as "Bluetooth Classic") is a wireless technology standard that has typically been designed for relatively short-range, continuous wireless connection such as streaming audio to headsets

If you are using any supported version of the Windows operating system, stop everything and install the latest security updates from Microsoft immediately. Windows operating system contains four new critical wormable, remote code execution vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Services, similar to the recently patched ' BlueKeep ' RDP vulnerability. Discovered by Microsoft's security team itself, all four vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1181 , CVE-2019-1182 , CVE-2019-1222 , and CVE-2019-1226 , can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers to take control of an affected computer system without requiring any user interaction. Just like BlueKeep RDP flaw , all four newly discovered vulnerabilities are also wormable and could be exploited by potential malware to propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically. "An attacker can get code execution at the system level by sending a specially crafted pre-authentication RDP packet to an affected RD

Update — With this month's patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft has finally addressed this vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-1162 , by correcting how the Windows operating system handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC). A Google security researcher has just disclosed details of a 20-year-old unpatched high-severity vulnerability affecting all versions of Microsoft Windows, back from Windows XP to the latest Windows 10. The vulnerability resides in the way MSCTF clients and server communicate with each other, allowing even a low privileged or a sandboxed application to read and write data to a higher privileged application. MSCTF is a module in Text Services Framework (TSF) of the Windows operating system that manages things like input methods, keyboard layouts, text processing, and speech recognition. In a nutshell, when you log in to your Windows machine, it starts a CTF monitor service that works as a central manager to handle communications between all c

The threat of ransomware is becoming more prevalent and severe as attackers' focus has now moved beyond computers to smartphones and other Internet-connected smart devices. In its latest research, security researchers at cybersecurity firm CheckPoint demonstrated how easy it is for hackers to remotely infect a digital DSLR camera with ransomware and hold private photos and videos hostage until victims pay a ransom. Yes, you heard me right. Security researcher Eyal Itkin discovered several security vulnerabilities in the firmware of Canon cameras that can be exploited over both USB and WiFi, allowing attackers to compromise and take over the camera and its features. According to a security advisory  released  by Canon, the reported security flaws affect Canon EOS-series digital SLR and mirrorless cameras, PowerShot SX740 HS, PowerShot SX70 HS, and PowerShot G5X Mark II. "Imagine how would you respond if attackers inject ransomware into both your computer and the c

If you are running a KDE desktop environment on your Linux operating system, you need to be extra careful and avoid downloading any ".desktop" or ".directory" file for a while. A cybersecurity researcher has disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the KDE software framework that could allow maliciously crafted .desktop and .directory files to silently run arbitrary code on a user's computer—without even requiring the victim to actually open it. KDE Plasma is one of the most popular open-source widget-based desktop environment for Linux users and comes as a default desktop environment on many Linux distributions, such as Manjaro, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and PCLinuxOS. Security researcher Dominik Penner who discovered the vulnerability contacted The Hacker News, informing that there's a command injection vulnerability in KDE 4/5 Plasma desktop due to the way KDE handles .desktop and .directory files. "When a .desktop or .directory file is

A new variant of the Spectre (Variant 1)  side-channel vulnerability has been discovered that affects all  modern Intel CPUs , and probably some AMD processors as well, which leverage speculative execution for high performance, Microsoft and Red Hat warned. Identified as CVE-2019-1125, the vulnerability could allow unprivileged local attackers to access sensitive information stored in the operating system privileged kernel memory, including passwords, tokens, and encryption keys, that would otherwise be inaccessible. Speculative execution is a core component of modern microprocessor design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded. Such speculative executions also have side effects that are not restored when the CPU state is unwound, leading to information disclosure, which can then be accessed using side-channel attacks . Microsof

The same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered several severe vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed as Dragonblood , in the newly launched WPA3 WiFi security standard few months ago has now uncovered two more flaws that could allow attackers to hack WiFi passwords . WPA, or WiFi Protected Access, is a WiFi security standard that has been designed to authenticate wireless devices using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protocol and intended to prevent hackers from eavesdropping on your wireless data. The WiFi Protected Access III (WPA3) protocol was launched a year ago in an attempt to address technical shortcomings of the WPA2 protocol from the ground, which has long been considered to be insecure and found vulnerable to more severe KRACK attacks . WPA3 relies on a more secure handshake, called SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals), which is also known as Dragonfly, that aims to protect WiFi networks against offline dictionary attacks. However, in less

Cisco Systems has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of knowingly selling video surveillance system containing severe security vulnerabilities to the U.S. federal and state government agencies. It's believed to be the first payout on a ' False Claims Act ' case over failure to meet cybersecurity standards. The lawsuit began eight years ago, in the year 2011, when Cisco subcontractor turned whistleblower, James Glenn, accused Cisco of continue selling a video surveillance technology to federal agencies even after knowing that the software was vulnerable to multiple security flaws. According to the court documents seen by The Hacker News, Glenn and one of his colleagues discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSM) suite in September 2008 and tried to report them to the company in October 2008. Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSM) suite allows customers to manage multiple video cameras at different

What could be more horrifying than knowing that a hacker can trick the plane's electronic systems into displaying false flight data to the pilot, which could eventually result in loss of control? Of course, the attacker would never wish to be on the same flight, so in this article, we are going to talk about a potential loophole that could allow an attacker to exploit a vulnerability with some level of "unsupervised" physical access to a small aircraft before the plane takes off. The United States Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) has issued an alert for the same, warning owners of small aircraft to be on guard against a vulnerability that could enable attackers to easily hack the plane's CAN bus and take control of key navigation systems. The vulnerability, discovered by a cybersecurity researcher at Rapid 7, resides in the modern aircraft's implementation of CAN (Controller Area Network) bus—a popular vehicular networking standard used in au

Security researchers have discovered almost a dozen zero-day vulnerabilities in VxWorks, one of the most widely used real-time operating systems (RTOS) for embedded devices that powers over 2 billion devices across aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, automotive, consumer electronics, networking, and other critical industries. According to a new report Armis researchers shared with The Hacker News prior to its release, the vulnerabilities are collectively dubbed as URGENT/11 as they are 11 in total, 6 of which are critical in severity leading to 'devastating' cyberattacks. Armis Labs is the same IoT security company that previously discovered the BlueBorne vulnerabilities in Bluetooth protocol that impacted more than 5.3 Billion devices—from Android, iOS, Windows and Linux to the Internet of things (IoT). These vulnerabilities could allow remote attackers to bypass traditional security solutions and take full control over affected devices or "cause disruption on

Are you using LibreOffice? You should be extra careful about what document files you open using the LibreOffice software over the next few days. That's because LibreOffice contains a severe unpatched code execution vulnerability that could sneak malware into your system as soon as you open a maliciously-crafted document file. LibreOffice is one of the most popular and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office suite and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS systems. Earlier this month, LibreOffice released the latest version 6.2.5 of its software that addresses two severe vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-9848 and CVE-2019-9849), but the patch for the former has now been bypassed, security researcher Alex Inführ claims . Though Inführ has not yet disclosed details of the technique that allowed him to bypass the patch, the impact of this vulnerability remains the same, as explained below. 1.) CVE-2019-9848 : This vulnerability, which still exists in the latest version,

A German security researcher has publicly disclosed details of a serious vulnerability in one of the most popular FTP server applications, which is currently being used by more than one million servers worldwide. The vulnerable software in question is ProFTPD , an open source FTP server used by a large number of popular businesses and websites including SourceForge, Samba and Slackware, and comes pre-installed with many Linux and Unix distributions, like Debian. Discovered by Tobias Mädel , the vulnerability resides in the mod_copy module of the ProFTPD application, a component that allows users to copy files/directories from one place to another on a server without having to transfer the data to the client and back. According to Mädel, an incorrect access control issue in the mod_copy module could be exploited by an authenticated user to unauthorizedly copy any file on a specific location of the vulnerable FTP server where the user is otherwise not allowed to write a file.

Security researchers have illustrated a new app-in-the-middle attack that could allow a malicious app installed on your iOS device to steal sensitive information from other apps by exploiting certain implementations of Custom URL Scheme . By default on Apple's iOS operating system, every app runs inside a sandbox of its own, which prevent all apps installed on the same device from accessing each other's data. However, Apple offers some methods that facilitate sending and receiving very limited data between applications. One such mechanism is called URL Scheme, also known as Deep Linking, that allows developers to let users launch their apps through URLs, like facetime:// , whatsapp:// , fb-messenger:// . For example, when you click "Sign in with Facebook" within an e-commerce app, it directly launches the Facebook app installed on your device and automatically process the authentication. In the background, that e-commerce app actually triggers the URL Sch

Watch out! Facebook-owned photo-sharing service has recently patched a critical vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to compromise any Instagram account without requiring any interaction from the targeted users. Instagram is growing quickly—and with the most popular social media network in the world after Facebook, the photo-sharing network absolutely dominates when it comes to user engagement and interactions. Despite having advanced security mechanisms in place, bigger platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Instagram are not completely immune to hackers and contain severe vulnerabilities. Some vulnerabilities have recently been patched , some are still under the process of being fixed, and many others most likely do exist, but haven't been found just yet. Details of one such critical vulnerability in Instagram surfaced today on the Internet that could have allowed a remote attacker to reset the password for any Instagram account and take complete contr

The chaos and panic that the disclosure of privacy vulnerability in the highly popular and widely-used Zoom video conferencing software created earlier this week is not over yet. As suspected, it turns out that the core issue—a locally installed web server by the software—was not just allowing any website to turn on your device webcam, but also could allow hackers to take complete control over your Apple's Mac computer remotely. Reportedly, the cloud-based Zoom meeting platform for macOS has also been found vulnerable to another severe flaw (CVE-2019-13567) that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system just by convincing users into visiting an innocent looking web-page. As explained in our previous report by Swati Khandelwal, the Zoom conferencing app contained a critical vulnerability ( CVE-2019-13450 ) that resides in the way its click-to-join feature is implemented, which automatically turns on users' webcam when they visit an in

Are you sure the WhatsApp app you are using on your Android device is legitimate, even if it's working perfectly as intended? ...Or the JioTV, AppLock, HotStar, Flipkart, Opera Mini or Truecaller app—if you have installed any of these? I'm asking this because cybersecurity researchers just yesterday revealed eye-opening details about a widespread Android malware campaign wherein attackers silently replaced installed legitimate apps with their malicious versions on nearly 25 million mobile phones. Now the important question here is how they're doing it and why? According to researchers at Check Point, attackers are distributing a new kind of Android malware that disguises itself as innocent-looking photo editing, adult entertainment, or gaming apps and available through widely used third-party app stores. Dubbed Agent Smith , the malware takes advantage of multiple Android vulnerabilities, such as the  Janus flaw and the Man-in-the-Disk flaw , and injects malic