Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A new vulnerability has been disclosed in iOS Camera App that could be exploited to redirect users to a malicious website without their knowledge. The vulnerability affects Apple's latest iOS 11 mobile operating system for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices and resides in the built-in QR code reader. With iOS 11, Apple introduced a new feature that gives users ability to automatically read QR codes using their iPhone's native camera app without requiring any third-party QR code reader app. You need to open the Camera app on your iPhone or iPad and point the device at a QR code. If the code contains any URL, it will give you a notification with the link address, asking you to tap to visit it in Safari browser. However, be careful — you may not be visiting the URL displayed to you, security researcher Roman Mueller discovered . According to Mueller, the URL parser of built-in QR code reader for iOS camera app fails to detect the hostname in the URL, which allows at

AMD has finally acknowledged 13 critical vulnerabilities, and exploitable backdoors in its Ryzen and EPYC processors disclosed earlier this month by Israel-based CTS Labs and promised to roll out firmware patches for millions of affected devices 'in the coming weeks.' According to CTS-Labs researchers, critical vulnerabilities ( RyzenFall, MasterKey, Fallout, and Chimera ) that affect AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) could allow attackers to access sensitive data, install persistent malware inside the chip, and gain full access to the compromised systems. Although exploiting AMD vulnerabilities require admin access, it could help attackers defeat important security features like Windows Credential Guard, TPMs, and virtualization that are responsible for preventing access to the sensitive data from even an admin or root account. In a press release published by AMD on Tuesday, the company downplays the threat by saying that, "any attacker gaining unauthorised ad

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

You have always been warned not to share remote access to your computer with untrusted people for any reason—it's a basic cybersecurity advice, and common sense, right? But what if, I say you should not even trust anyone who invites or offer you full remote access to their computers. A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft's Windows Remote Assistanc e (Quick Assist) feature that affects all versions of Windows to date, including Windows 10, 8.1, RT 8.1, and 7, and allows remote attackers to steal sensitive files on the targeted machine. Windows Remote Assistance is a built-in tool that allows someone you trust to take over your PC (or you to take remote control of others) so they can help you fix a problem from anywhere around the world. The feature relies on the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to establish a secure connection with the person in need. However, Nabeel Ahmed of Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative discovered and reported an information di

Researchers found critical vulnerabilities in three popular VPN services that could leak users' real IP addresses and other sensitive data. VPN, or Virtual Private Network , is a great way to protect your daily online activities that work by encrypting your data and boosting security, as well as useful to obscure your actual IP address. While some choose VPN services for online anonymity and data security, one major reason many people use VPN is to hide their real IP addresses to bypass online censorship and access websites that are blocked by their ISPs. But what if when the VPN you thought is protecting your privacy is actually leaking your sensitive data and real location? A team of three ethical hackers hired by privacy advocate firm VPN Mentor revealed that three popular VPN service providers—HotSpot Shield, PureVPN, and Zenmate—with millions of customers worldwide were found vulnerable to flaws that could compromise user's privacy. The team includes applicat

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Credential Security Support Provider protocol (CredSSP) that affects all versions of Windows to date and could allow remote attackers to exploit RDP and WinRM to steal data and run malicious code. CredSSP protocol has been designed to be used by RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and Windows Remote Management (WinRM) that takes care of securely forwarding credentials encrypted from the Windows client to the target servers for remote authentication. Discovered by researchers at Cybersecurity firm Preempt Security, the issue (CVE-2018-0886) is a logical cryptographic flaw in CredSSP that can be exploited by a man-in-the-middle attacker with Wi-Fi or physical access to the network to steal session authentication data and perform a Remote Procedure Call attack. When a client and server authenticate over RDP and WinRM connection protocols, a man-in-the-middle attacker can execute remote commands to compromise enterprise networks. "A

Security researchers have discovered a "kill switch" that could help companies protect their websites under massive DDoS attack launched using vulnerable Memcached servers. Massive Memcached reflection DDoS attacks with an unprecedented amplification factor of 50,000 recently resulted in some of the largest DDoS attacks in history . To make matter even worse, someone released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for Memcached amplification attack yesterday, making it easier for even script kiddies to launch massive cyber attacks. Despite multiple warnings, more than 12,000 vulnerable Memcached servers with UDP support enabled are still accessible on the Internet, which could fuel more cyber attacks soon. However, the good news is that researchers from Corero Network Security found a technique using which DDoS victims can send back a simple command, i.e., "shutdown\r\n", or "flush_all\r\n", in a loop to the attacking Memcached servers in order

Security researchers have discovered a set of severe vulnerabilities in 4G LTE protocol that could be exploited to spy on user phone calls and text messages, send fake emergency alerts, spoof location of the device and even knock devices entirely offline. A new research paper [ PDF ] recently published by researchers at Purdue University and the University of Iowa details 10 new cyber attacks against the 4G LTE wireless data communications technology for mobile devices and data terminals. The attacks exploit design weaknesses in three key protocol procedures of the 4G LTE network known as attach, detach, and paging. Unlike many previous research, these aren't just theoretical attacks. The researchers employed a systematic model-based adversarial testing approach, which they called LTEInspector , and were able to test 8 of the 10 attacks in a real testbed using SIM cards from four large US carriers. Authentication Synchronization Failure Attack Traceability Attack Nu

Facebook Page admins are publicly displayed only if admins have chosen to feature their profiles. However, there are some situations where you might want to contact a Facebook page admin or want to find out who is the owner of a Facebook page. Egyptian security researcher Mohamed A. Baset has discovered a severe information disclosure vulnerability in Facebook that could have allowed anyone to expose Facebook page administrator profiles, which is otherwise not supposed to be public information. Baset claimed to have discovered the vulnerability in less than 3 minutes without any kind of testing or proof of concepts, or any other type of time-consuming processes. In a blog post , Baset said he found the vulnerability, which he described as a "logical error," after receiving an invitation to like a particular Facebook page on which he had previously liked a post. Facebook has introduced a feature for page admins wherein they can send Facebook invitations to users

Bitmessage developers have warned of a critical 'remotely executable' zero-day vulnerability in the PyBitmessage application that was being exploited in the wild. Bitmessage is a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to users. Since it is decentralized and trustless communications, one need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. Those who unaware, PyBitmessage is the official client for Bitmessage messaging service. According to Bitmessage developers, a critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability, described as a message encoding flaw, affects PyBitmessage version 0.6.2 for Linux, Mac, and Windows and has been exploited against some of their users. "The exploit is triggered by a malicious message if you are the recipient (including joined chans). The attacker ran an automated script but also opened, or tried to open, a remote reverse shell," Bitmessage core developer Peter Šurda ex

A serious vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft-owned most popular free web messaging and voice calling service Skype that could potentially allow attackers to gain full control of the host machine by granting system-level privileges to a local, unprivileged user. The worst part is that this vulnerability will not be patched by Microsoft anytime soon. It's not because the flaw is unpatchable, but because fixing the vulnerability requires a significant software rewrite, which indicates that the company will need to issue an all-new version of Skype rather than just a patch. The vulnerability has been discovered and reported to Microsoft by security researcher Stefan Kanthak and resides in Skype's update installer, which is susceptible to Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) hijacking. According to the researcher, a potential attacker could exploit the "functionality of the Windows DLL loader where the process loading the DLL searches for the DLL to be loaded fi

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in the desktop version for end-to-end encrypted Telegram messaging app that was being exploited in the wild in order to spread malware that mines cryptocurrencies such as Monero and ZCash. The Telegram vulnerability was uncovered by security researcher Alexey Firsh from Kaspersky Lab last October and affects only the Windows client of Telegram messaging software. The flaw has actively been exploited in the wild since at least March 2017 by attackers who tricked victims into downloading malicious software onto their PCs that used their CPU power to mine cryptocurrencies or serve as a backdoor for attackers to remotely control the affected machine, according to a blogpost on Securelist. Here's How Telegram Vulnerability Works The vulnerability resides in the way Telegram Windows client handles the RLO (right-to-left override) Unicode character (U+202E), which is used for coding languages that are written from right to left, li

WordPress administrators are once again in trouble. WordPress version 4.9.3 was released earlier this week with patches for a total 34 vulnerabilities, but unfortunately, the new version broke the automatic update mechanism for millions of WordPress websites. WordPress team has now issued a new maintenance update, WordPress 4.9.4 , to patch this severe bug, which WordPress admins have to install manually. According to security site WordFence , when WordPress CMS tries to determine whether the site needs to install an updated version, if available, a PHP error interrupts the auto-update process. If not updated manually to the latest 4.9.4 version, the bug would leave your website on WordPress 4.9.3 forever, leaving it vulnerable to future security issues. Here's what WordPress lead developer Dion Hulse explained about the bug: "#43103-core aimed to reduce the number of API calls which get made when the auto-update cron task is run. Unfortunately, due to human e

A critical vulnerability discovered in the Chrome and Firefox browser extension of the grammar-checking software Grammarly inadvertently left all 22 million users' accounts, including their personal documents and records, vulnerable to remote hackers. According to Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, who discovered the vulnerability on February 2, the Chrome and Firefox extension of Grammarly exposed authentication tokens to all websites that could be grabbed by remote attackers with just 4 lines of JavaScript code. In other words, any website a Grammarly user visits could steal his/her authentication tokens, which is enough to login into the user's account and access every "documents, history, logs, and all other data" without permission. "I'm calling this a high severity bug, because it seems like a pretty severe violation of user expectations," Ormandy said in a vulnerability report . "Users would not expect that visiting a we

A simple yet serious application-level denial of service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress CMS platform that could allow anyone to take down most WordPress websites even with a single machine—without hitting with a massive amount of bandwidth, as required in network-level DDoS attacks to achieve the same. Since the company has denied patching the issue, the vulnerability ( CVE-2018-6389 ) remains unpatched and affects almost all versions of WordPress released in last nine years, including the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.9.2). Discovered by Israeli security researcher Barak Tawily , the vulnerability resides in the way " load-scripts.php ," a built-in script in WordPress CMS, processes user-defined requests. For those unaware, load-scripts.php file has only been designed for admin users to help a website improve performance and load page faster by combining (on the server end) multiple JavaScript files into a single request. Howe

Another reason to uninstall Adobe Flash Player—a new zero-day Flash Player exploit has reportedly been spotted in the wild by North Korean hackers. South Korea's Computer Emergency Response Team (KR-CERT) issued an alert Wednesday for a new Flash Player zero-day vulnerability that's being actively exploited in the wild by North Korean hackers to target Windows users in South Korea. Simon Choi of South Korea-based cybersecurity firm Hauri first reported the campaign on Twitter, saying the North Korean hackers have been using the Flash zero-day against South Koreans since mid-November 2017. Although Choi did not share any malware sample or details about the vulnerability, the researcher said the attacks using the new Flash zero-day is aimed at South Korean individuals who focus on researching North Korea. Adobe also released an advisory on Wednesday, which said the zero-day is exploiting a critical 'use-after-free' vulnerability (CVE-2018-4878) in its Flash

Mozilla has released an important update for its Firefox web browser to patch a critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute malicious code on computers running an affected version of the browser. The update comes just a week after the company rolled out its new Firefox Quantum browser, a.k.a Firefox 58, with some new features like improved graphics engine and performance optimizations and patches for more than 30 vulnerabilities. According to a security advisory published by Cisco, Firefox 58.0.1 addresses an 'arbitrary code execution' flaw that originates due to 'insufficient sanitization' of HTML fragments in chrome-privileged documents (browser UI). Hackers could exploit this vulnerability (CVE-2018-5124) to run arbitrary code on the victim's computer just by tricking them into accessing a link or ' opening a file that submits malicious input to the affected software .' "A successful exploit could allow the attacker t

A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been reported in Electron —a popular web application framework that powers thousands of widely-used desktop applications including Skype, Signal, Wordpress and Slack—that allows for remote code execution. Electron is an open-source framework that is based on Node.js and Chromium Engine and allows app developers to build cross-platform native desktop applications for Windows, macOS and Linux, without knowledge of programming languages used for each platform. The vulnerability, assigned as the number CVE-2018-1000006, affects only those apps that run on Microsoft Windows and register themselves as the default handler for a protocol like myapp://. "Such apps can be affected regardless of how the protocol is registered, e.g. using native code, the Windows registry, or Electron's app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient API," Electron says in an advisory published Monday. The Electron team has also confirmed that applications

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the widely used Transmission BitTorrent app that could allow hackers to remotely execute malicious code on BitTorrent users' computers and take control of them. The vulnerability has been uncovered by Google's Project Zero vulnerability reporting team, and one of its researchers Tavis Ormandy has also posted a proof-of-concept attack—just 40 days after the initial report. Usually, Project Zero team discloses vulnerabilities either after 90 days of reporting them to the affected vendors or until the vendor has released a patch. However, in this case, the Project Zero researchers disclosed the vulnerability 50 days prior to the actual time limit because Transmission developers failed to apply a ready-made patch provided by the researchers over a month ago. "I'm finding it frustrating that the transmission developers are not responding on their private security list, I suggested moving this into the open so that

It's been a terrible new-year-starting for Intel. Researchers warn of a new attack which can be carried out in less than 30 seconds and potentially affects millions of laptops globally. As Intel was rushing to roll out patches for Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities , security researchers have discovered a new critical security flaw in Intel hardware that could allow hackers to access corporate laptops remotely. Finnish cyber security firm F-Secure reported unsafe and misleading default behaviour within Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) that could allow an attacker to bypass login processes and take complete control over a user's device in less than 30 seconds. AMT is a feature that comes with Intel-based chipsets to enhance the ability of IT administrators and managed service providers for better controlling their device fleets, allowing them to remotely manage and repair PCs, workstations, and servers in their organisation. The bug allows anyone with phy

Security researchers have discovered several severe vulnerabilities and a secret hard-coded backdoor in Western Digital's My Cloud NAS devices that could allow remote attackers to gain unrestricted root access to the device. Western Digital's My Cloud (WDMyCloud) is one of the most popular network-attached storage devices which is being used by individuals and businesses to host their files, and automatically backup and sync them with various cloud and web-based services. The device lets users not only share files in a home network, but the private cloud feature also allows them to access their data from anywhere at any time. Since these devices have been designed to be connected over the Internet, the hardcoded backdoor would leave user data open to hackers. GulfTech research and development team has recently published an advisory detailing a hardcoded backdoor and several vulnerabilities it found in WD My Cloud storage devices that could allow remote attackers to