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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

Microsoft today released its monthly batch of software security updates for the July month to patch a total of 77 vulnerabilities, 14 are rated Critical, 62 are Important, and 1 is rated Moderate in severity. The July 2019 security updates include patches for various supported versions of Windows operating systems and other Microsoft products, including Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, Azure DevOps, Open Source Software, .NET Framework, Azure, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, and Exchange Server. Details of 6 security vulnerabilities, all rated important, were made public before a patch was released, none of which were found being exploited in the wild. However, two new privilege escalation vulnerabilities, one affects all supported versions of the Windows operating system, and the other affects Windows 7 and Server 2008, have been reported as being actively exploited in the wild. Both actively exploited vulnerabilities lead to elevation of privilege, one (CVE-2019-1132)

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

Lodash, a popular npm library used by more than 4 million projects on GitHub alone, is affected by a high severity security vulnerability that could allow attackers to compromise the security of affected services using the library and their respective user base. Lodash is a JavaScript library that contains tools to simplify programming with strings, numbers, arrays, functions, and objects, helping programmers write and maintain their JavaScript code more efficiently. Liran Tal, a developer advocate at open-source security platform Snyk, recently published details and proof-of-concept exploit of a high-severity prototype pollution security vulnerability that affects all versions of lodash, including the latest version 4.17.11. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-10744 , potentially affects a large number of frontend projects due to the popularity of lodash that is being downloaded at a rate of more than 80 million times per month. Prototype pollution is a vulnerability t

If you use Zoom video conferencing software on your Mac computer—then beware—any website you're visiting in your web browser can turn on your device camera without your permission. Ironically, even if you had ever installed the Zoom client on your device and simply uninstalled it, a remote attacker can still activate your webcam. Zoom is one of the most popular cloud-based meeting platforms that provide video, audio, and screen sharing options to users, allowing them to host webinars, teach online courses, conduct online training, or join virtual meetings online. In a Medium post published today, cybersecurity researcher Jonathan Leitschuh disclosed details of an unpatched critical security vulnerability (CVE-2019-13450) in the Zoom client app for Apple Mac computers, which if combined with a separate flaw, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on the targeted systems remotely. Jonathan responsibly reported the security vulnerability to the affected company ov

Google has started rolling out this month's security updates for its mobile operating system platform to address a total of 33 new security vulnerabilities affecting Android devices, 9 of which have been rated critical in severity. The vulnerabilities affect various Android components, including the Android operating system, framework, library, media framework, as well as Qualcomm components, including closed-source components. Three of the critical vulnerabilities patched this month reside in Android's Media framework, the most severe of which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted device, within the context of a privileged process, by convincing users into opening a specially crafted malicious file. "The severity assessment is based on the effect that exploiting the vulnerability would possibly have on an affected device, assuming the platform and service mitigations are turned off for development purposes or if successfully bypas

A popular gaming platform used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide has been found vulnerable to multiple security flaws that could have allowed remote hackers to takeover players' accounts and steal sensitive data. The vulnerabilities in question reside in the "Origin" digital distribution platform developed by Electronic Arts (EA)—the world's second-largest gaming company with over 300 million users—that allows users to purchase and play some of the most popular video games including Battlefield, Apex Legends, Madden NFL, and FIFA. The Origin platform also manages users EA Games account authentication and allows them to find friends, join games, and manage their profiles. Discovered by researchers at Check Point and CyberInt, the vulnerabilities when chained together could have allowed attackers to hijack gamer's EA account just by convincing them into opening an official webpage from the EA Games website. To perform this attack, as shown in th

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

Dell's SupportAssist utility that comes pre-installed on millions of Dell laptops and PCs contains a security vulnerability that could allow malicious software or rogue logged-in users to escalate their privileges to administrator-level and access sensitive information. Discovered by security researchers at SafeBreach Labs , the vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-12280, is a privilege-escalation issue and affects Dell's SupportAssist application for business PCs (version 2.0) and home PCs (version 3.2.1 and all prior versions). Dell SupportAssist, formerly known as Dell System Detect, checks the health of your system's hardware and software, alerting customers to take appropriate action to resolve them. To do so, it runs on your computer with SYSTEM-level permissions. With this high-level privileges, the utility interacts with the Dell Support website and automatically detects Service Tag or Express Service Code of your Dell product, scans the existing device d

Oracle has released an out-of-band emergency software update to patch a newly discovered critical vulnerability in the WebLogic Server. According to Oracle, the vulnerability—which can be identified as CVE-2019-2729 and has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10—is already being exploited in the wild by an unnamed group of attackers. Oracle WebLogic is a Java-based multi-tier enterprise application server that allows businesses to quickly deploy new products and services on the cloud, which is popular across both, cloud environment and conventional environments. The reported vulnerability is a deserialization issue via XMLDecoder in Oracle WebLogic Server Web Services that could allow unauthorized remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the targeted servers and take control over them. "This remote code execution vulnerability is remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password," the advisor

Important Update [21 June 2019] — Mozilla on Thursday released another update Firefox version 67.0.4 to patch a second zero-day vulnerability. If you use the Firefox web browser, you need to update it right now. Mozilla earlier today released Firefox 67.0.3 and Firefox ESR 60.7.1 versions to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability in the browsing software that hackers have been found exploiting in the wild. Discovered and reported by Samuel Groß, a cybersecurity researcher at Google Project Zero, the vulnerability could allow attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on machines running vulnerable Firefox versions and take full control of them. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-11707 , affects anyone who uses Firefox on desktop (Windows, macOS, and Linux) — whereas, Firefox for Android, iOS, and Amazon Fire TV are not affected. According to an advisory , the flaw has been labeled as a type confusion vulnerability in Firefox that can result in an exploitable cras

A team of cybersecurity researchers yesterday revealed details of a new side-channel attack on dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that could allow malicious programs installed on a modern system to read sensitive memory data from other processes running on the same hardware. Dubbed RAMBleed and identified as CVE-2019-0174 , the new attack is based on a well-known class of DRAM side channel attack called Rowhammer , various variants [ GLitch , RAMpage , Throwhammer ,  Nethammer , Drammer ] of which have been demonstrated by researchers in recent years. Known since 2012, Rowhammer bug is a hardware reliability issue that was found in the new generation of DRAM chips. It turned out that repeatedly and rapidly accessing (hammering) a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows, i.e., changing their bit values from 0 to 1 or vice-versa. In the following years, researchers also demonstrated successful exploits to achieve privilege escalation on the vulnerable computers by

It's Patch Tuesday week! Adobe has just released the latest June 2019 software updates to address a total 11 security vulnerabilities in its three widely-used products Adobe ColdFusion, Flash Player, and Adobe Campaign. Out of these, three vulnerabilities affect Adobe ColdFusion, a commercial rapid web application development platform—all critical in severity—that could lead to arbitrary code execution attacks. Here below you can find brief information about all newly patched ColdFusion flaws : CVE-2019-7838 — This vulnerability has been categorized as "File extension blacklist bypass" and can be exploited if the file uploads directory is web accessible. CVE-2019-7839 — There's a command injection vulnerability in ColdFusion 2016 and 2018 editions, but it does not impact ColdFusion version 11. CVE-2019-7840 — This flaw originates from the deserialization of untrusted data and also leads to arbitrary code execution on the system. Besides ColdFusion

Linux users, beware! If you haven't recently updated your Linux operating system, especially the command-line text editor utility, do not even try to view the content of a file using Vim or Neovim. Security researcher Armin Razmjou recently discovered a high-severity arbitrary OS command execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-12735) in Vim and Neovim —two most popular and powerful command-line text editing applications that come pre-installed with most Linux-based operating systems. On Linux systems, Vim editor allows users to create, view or edit any file, including text, programming scripts, and documents. Since Neovim is just an extended forked version of Vim, with better user experience, plugins and GUIs, the code execution vulnerability also resides in it. Code Execution Flaw in Vim and Neovim Razmjou discovered a flaw in the way Vim editor handles "modelines," a feature that's enabled-by-default to automatically find and apply a set of custom pref

Nearly 1 million Windows systems are still unpatched and have been found vulnerable to a recently disclosed critical, wormable, remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)—two weeks after Microsoft releases the security patch. If exploited, the vulnerability could allow an attacker to easily cause havoc around the world, potentially much worse than what WannaCry and NotPetya like wormable attacks did in 2017. Dubbed BlueKeep and tracked as CVE-2019-0708, the vulnerability affects Windows 2003, XP, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 editions and could spread automatically on unprotected systems. The vulnerability could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code and take control of a targeted computer just by sending specially crafted requests to the device's Remote Desktop Service (RDS) via the RDP—without requiring any interaction from a user. Describing the BlueKeep vulnerability as being Wormable

An anonymous hacker with an online alias "SandboxEscaper" today released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for a new zero-day vulnerability affecting Windows 10 operating system—that's his/her 5th publicly disclosed Windows zero-day exploit [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] in less than a year. Published on GitHub , the new Windows 10 zero-day vulnerability is a privilege escalation issue that could allow a local attacker or malware to gain and run code with administrative system privileges on the targeted machines, eventually allowing the attacker to gain full control of the machine. The vulnerability resides in Task Scheduler, a utility that enables Windows users to schedule the launch of programs or scripts at a predefined time or after specified time intervals. SandboxEscaper's exploit code makes use of SchRpcRegisterTask, a method in Task Scheduler to register tasks with the server, which doesn't properly check for permissions and can, therefore, be used to set an arb

Academic researchers today disclosed details of the newest class of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel processors that impacts all modern chips, including the chips used in Apple devices. After the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown processor vulnerabilities earlier last year that put practically every computer in the world at risk, different classes of Spectre and Meltdown variations surfaced again and again. Now, a team of security researchers from multiple universities and security firms has discovered different but more dangerous speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs. The newly discovered flaws could allow attackers to directly steal user-level, as well as system-level secrets from CPU buffers, including user keys, passwords, and disk encryption keys. Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true.

It's Patch Tuesday—the day when Microsoft releases monthly security updates for its software. Microsoft has software updates to address a total of 79 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other products, including a critical wormable flaw that can propagate malware from computer to computer without requiring users' interaction. Out of 79 vulnerabilities, 18 issues have been rated as critical and rest Important in severity. Two of the vulnerabilities addressed this month by the tech giant are listed as publicly known, of which one is listed as under active attack at the time of release. May 2019 security updates address flaws in Windows OS, Internet Explorer, Edge, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office Services and Web Apps, ChakraCore, .NET Framework, and ASP.NET, Skype for Android, Azure DevOps Server, and the NuGet Package Manager. Critical Wormable RDP Vulnerability The wormable vulnerability ( CVE-2019-0708 ) resides in Remote Desktop

Adobe today released its monthly software updates to patch a total of 87 security vulnerabilities in its Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Flash Player and Media Encoder, most of which could lead to arbitrary code execution attacks or worse. None of the flaws patched this month in Adobe products has been found exploited in the wild. Out of 87 total flaws, a whopping number of vulnerabilities (i.e., 84 in total) affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader applications alone, where 42 of them are critical and rest 42 are important in severity. Upon successful exploitation, all critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat and Reader software lead to arbitrary code execution, allowing attackers to take complete control over targeted systems. Adobe has released updated versions of Acrobat and Reader software for Windows and macOS operating systems to address these security vulnerabilities. The update for Adobe Flash Player , which will receive security patch updates until the end of 2020, comes this

A bug hunter has discovered and publicly disclosed details of an unpatched browser address bar spoofing vulnerability that affects popular Chinese UC Browser and UC Browser Mini apps for Android. Developed by Alibaba-owned UCWeb, UC Browser is one of the most popular mobile browsers, specifically in China and India, with a massive user base of more than half a billion users worldwide. According to the details security researcher Arif Khan shared with The Hacker News, the vulnerability resides in the way User Interface on both browsers handles a special built-in feature that was otherwise designed to improve users Google search experience. The vulnerability, which has yet not assigned any CVE identifier, could allow an attacker to control URL string displayed in the address bar, eventually letting a malicious website to pose as some legitimate site. The vulnerability affects the latest UC Browser version 12.11.2.1184 and UC Browser Mini version 12.10.1.1192—that is current