Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Following a series of security mishaps and data abuse through its social media platform, Facebook today expanding its bug bounty program in a very unique way to beef up the security of third-party apps and websites that integrate with its platform. Last year, Facebook launched " Data Abuse Bounty " program to reward anyone who reports valid events of 3rd-party apps collecting Facebook users' data and passing it off to malicious parties, violating Facebook's revamped data policies. Apparently, it turns out that most of the time, Facebook users' data that had been misused was exposed in the first place as the result of a vulnerability or security weakness in third-party apps or services. The Facebook ecosystem contains millions of third-party apps, and unfortunately, very few of them have a vulnerability disclosure program or offer bug bounty rewards to white-hat hackers for responsibly reporting bugs in their codebase. Because of this communication g

No, it's not a patch Tuesday. It's the third Tuesday of the month, and as The Hacker News shared an early heads-up late last week on Twitter, Adobe today finally released pre-announced out-of-band security updates to patch a total of 82 security vulnerabilities across its various products. The affected products that received security patches today include: Adobe Acrobat and Reader Adobe Experience Manager Adobe Experience Manager Forms Adobe Download Manager Out of 82 security vulnerabilities, 45 are rated critical, and all of them affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader and which, if exploited successfully, could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. A majority of critical-rated vulnerabilities (i.e., 26) in Adobe Acrobat and Reader reside due to use-after-free, 6 due to out-of-bounds write, 4 are type confusion bugs, 4 due to untrusted pointer dereference, 3 are heap overflow bugs, one buffer overrun and one race condition issue. Ad

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

Until now, I'm sure you all might have heard of the SimJacker vulnerability disclosed exactly a month ago that affects a wide range of SIM cards and can remotely be exploited to hack into any mobile phone just by sending a specially crafted binary SMS. If you are unaware, the name "SimJacker" has been given to a class of vulnerabilities that resides due to a lack of authentication and proprietary security mechanisms implemented by dynamic SIM toolkits that come embedded in modern SIM cards. Out of many, two such widely used SIM toolkits — S@T Browser technology and Wireless Internet Browser (WIB) — have yet been found vulnerable to SimJacker attacks, details of which we have provided in our previous articles published last month. At that time, a few experts in the telecom industry confirmed The Hacker News that the SimJacker related weaknesses were internally known to many for years, and even researchers also revealed that an unnamed surveillance company has been

Microsoft today rolling out its October 2019 Patch Tuesday security updates to fix a total of 59 vulnerabilities in Windows operating systems and related software, 9 of which are rated as critical, 49 are important, and one is moderate in severity. What's good about this month's patch update is that after a very long time, none of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month is being listed as publicly known or under active attack. Moreover, there is no roll-up patch for Adobe Flash Player bundled in Windows update for this month. Besides this, Microsoft has also put up a notice as a reminder for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 users, warning them that the extended support for these two operating systems is about to end in the next two months and that they will no longer receive updates as of January 14, 2020. Two of the critical vulnerabilities patched this month are remote code execution flaws in the VBScript engine, and both exist in the way VBS

After releasing a patch for a critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability late last month, vBulletin has recently published a new security patch update that addresses 3 more high-severity vulnerabilities in its forum software. If left unpatched, the reported security vulnerabilities, which affect vBulletin 5.5.4 and prior versions, could eventually allow remote attackers to take complete control over targeted web servers and steal sensitive user information. Written in PHP, vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package that powers over 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. Discovered by application security researcher Egidio Romano, the first vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-17132 , is a remote code execution flaw, while the other two are SQL injection issues, both assigned a single ID as CVE-2019-17271 . vBulletin RCE and SQLi Flaws The RCE flaw resides in the w

Almost every application contains security vulnerabilities, some of which you may find today, but others would remain invisible until someone else finds and exploits them—which is the harsh reality of cybersecurity and its current state. And when we say this, Signal Private Messenger —promoted as one of the most secure messengers in the world—isn't any exception. Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich discovered a logical vulnerability in the Signal messaging app for Android that could allow malicious caller to force a call to be answered at the receiver's end without requiring his/her interaction. In other words, the flaw could be exploited to turn on the microphone of a targeted Signal user's device and listen to all surrounding conversations. However, the Signal vulnerability can only be exploited if the receiver fails to answer an audio call over Signal, eventually forcing the incoming call to be automatically answered on the receiver's device

Another day, another revelation of a critical unpatched zero-day vulnerability, this time in the world's most widely used mobile operating system, Android. What's more? The Android zero-day vulnerability has also been found to be exploited in the wild by the Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group—infamous for selling zero-day exploits to governments—or one of its customers, to gain control of their targets' Android devices. Discovered by Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone, the details and a proof-of-concept exploit for the high-severity security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2215, has been made public today—just seven days after reporting it to the Android security team. The zero-day is a use-after-free vulnerability in the Android kernel's binder driver that can allow a local privileged attacker or an app to escalate their privileges to gain root access to a vulnerable device and potentially take full remote control of the device. Vulnerable Android D

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a GIF is worth a thousand pictures. Today, the short looping clips, GIFs are everywhere—on your social media, on your message boards, on your chats, helping users perfectly express their emotions, making people laugh, and reliving a highlight. But what if an innocent-looking GIF greeting with Good morning, Happy Birthday, or Merry Christmas message hacks your smartphone? Well, not a theoretical idea anymore. WhatsApp has recently patched a critical security vulnerability in its app for Android, which remained unpatched for at least 3 months after being discovered, and if exploited, could have allowed remote hackers to compromise Android devices and potentially steal files and chat messages. WhatsApp Remote Code Execution Vulnerability The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11932 , is a double-free memory corruption bug that doesn't actually reside in the WhatsApp code itself, but in an open-source GIF image parsing library th

A critical security vulnerability has been discovered and fixed in the popular open-source Exim email server software, which could allow a remote attacker to simply crash or potentially execute malicious code on targeted servers. Exim maintainers today released an urgent security update— Exim version 4.92.3 —after publishing an early warning two days ago, giving system administrators an early head-up on its upcoming security patches that affect all versions of the email server software from 4.92 up to and including then-latest version 4.92.2. Exim is a widely used, open source mail transfer agent (MTA) developed for Unix-like operating systems like Linux, Mac OSX or Solaris, which runs almost 60 percent of the Internet's email servers today for routing, delivering and receiving email messages. This is the second time in this month when the Exim maintainers have released an urgent security update. Earlier this month, the team patched a critical remote code execution flaw (

An iOS hacker and cybersecurity researcher today publicly released what he claimed to be a "permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit," in other words, an epic jailbreak that works on all iOS devices ranging from iPhone 4s (A5 chip) to iPhone 8 and iPhone X (A11 chip). Dubbed Checkm8, the exploit leverages unpatchable security weaknesses in Apple's Bootrom (SecureROM), the first significant code that runs on an iPhone while booting, which, if exploited, provides greater system-level access. "EPIC JAILBREAK: Introducing checkm8 (read "checkmate"), a permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit for hundreds of millions of iOS devices," said axi0mX while announcing the publicly release of the exploit on Twitter. The new exploit came exactly a month after Apple released an emergency patch for another critical jailbreak vulnerability that works on Apple devices including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR and the 2019 iPad Mini and iPad Air, running iOS 12.4 and i

Following the release of iOS 13 and iPadOS earlier this week, Apple has issued an advisory warning iPhone and iPad users of an unpatched security bug impacting third-party keyboard apps. On iOS, third-party keyboard extensions can run entirely standalone without access to external services and thus, are forbidden from storing what you type unless you grant "full access" permissions to enable some additional features through network access. However, in the brief security advisory , Apple says that an unpatched issue in iOS 13 and iPadOS could allow third-party keyboard apps to grant themselves "full access" permission to access what you are typing—even if you deny this permission request in the first place. It should be noted that the iOS 13 bug doesn't affect Apple's built-in keyboards or third-party keyboards that don't make use of full access. Instead, the bug only impacts users who have third-party keyboard apps—such as popular Gboard, Grammarl

Google has released an urgent software update for its Chrome web browser and is urging Windows, Mac, and Linux users to upgrade the application to the latest available version immediately. Started rolling out to users worldwide this Wednesday, the Chrome 77.0.3865.90 version contains security patches for 1 critical and 3 high-risk security vulnerabilities, the most severe of which could allow remote hackers to take control of an affected system. Google has decided to keep details of all four vulnerabilities secret for a few more days in order to prevent hackers from exploiting them and give users enough time to install the Chrome update. For now, Chrome security team has only revealed that all four vulnerabilities are use-after-free issues in different components of the web browser, as mentioned below, the critical of which could lead to remote code execution attacks. The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory corruption issue that allows corruption or modificat

A cybersecurity researcher recently published details and proof-of-concept for an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL and MariaDB databases. phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB that's widely used to manage the database for websites created with WordPress, Joomla, and many other content management platforms. Discovered by security researcher and pentester Manuel Garcia Cardenas , the vulnerability claims to be a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw, also known as XSRF, a well-known attack wherein attackers trick authenticated users into executing an unwanted action. Identified as CVE-2019-12922 , the flaw has been given a medium rating because of its limited scope that only allows an attacker to delete any server configured in the setup page of a phpMyAdmin panel on a victim's server. To be noted, it's not something you should not be much worried abo

The world of connected consumer electronics, IoT, and smart devices is growing faster than ever with tens of billions of connected devices streaming and sharing data wirelessly over the Internet, but how secure is it? As we connect everything from coffee maker to front-door locks and cars to the Internet, we're creating more potential—and possibly more dangerous—ways for hackers to wreak havoc. Believe me, there are over 100 ways a hacker can ruin your life just by compromising your wireless router —a device that controls the traffic between your local network and the Internet, threatening the security and privacy of a wide range of wireless devices, from computers and phones to IP Cameras, smart TVs and connected appliances. In its latest study titled " SOHOpelessly Broken 2.0 ," Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) discovered a total of 125 different security vulnerabilities across 13 small office/home office (SOHO) routers and Network Attached Storage (NAS) de

Unlike previous side-channel vulnerabilities disclosed in Intel CPUs, researchers have discovered a new flaw that can be exploited remotely over the network without requiring an attacker to have physical access or any malware installed on a targeted computer. Dubbed NetCAT , short for Network Cache ATtack, the new network-based side-channel vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to sniff out sensitive data, such as someone's SSH password, from Intel's CPU cache. Discovered by a team of security researchers from the Vrije University in Amsterdam, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11184, resides in a performance optimization feature called Intel's DDIO—short for Data-Direct I/O—which by design grants network devices and other peripherals access to the CPU cache. The DDIO comes enabled by default on all Intel server-grade processors since 2012, including Intel Xeon E5, E7 and SP families. According to the researchers [ paper ], NetCAT attack works simila

Get your update caps on. Microsoft today released its monthly Patch Tuesday update for September 2019, patching a total of 79 security vulnerabilities in its software, of which 17 are rated critical, 61 as important, and one moderate in severity. Two of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month are listed as "publicly known" at the time of release, one of which is an elevation of privilege vulnerability (CVE-2019-1235) in Windows Text Service Framework (TSF), more likely related to a 20-year-old flaw Google security researcher disclosed last month . Two other vulnerabilities patched this month are reported as being actively exploited in the wild by hackers, both are privilege elevation flaws—one resides in the Windows operating system and the other in Windows Common Log File System Driver. Besides these, Microsoft has released patches for four critical RCE vulnerabilities in Windows built-in Remote Desktop Client application that could enabl

Facebook has patched two high-severity vulnerabilities in its server application that could have allowed remote attackers to unauthorisedly obtain sensitive information or cause a denial of service just by uploading a maliciously constructed JPEG image file. The vulnerabilities reside in HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)—a high-performance, open source virtual machine developed by Facebook for executing programs written in PHP and Hack programming languages. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance of your Hack and PHP code while maintaining the development flexibility that the PHP language provides. Since the affected HHVM server application is open-source and free, both issues may also impact other websites that use HHVM, including Wikipedia, Box and especially those which allow their users to upload images on the server. Both the vulnerabilities, as listed below, reside due to a possible memory overflow in the GD extension of HHVM wh

A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the popular open-source Exim email server software, leaving at least over half a million email servers vulnerable to remote hackers. Exim maintainers today released Exim version 4.92.2 after publishing an early warning two days ago, giving system administrators a heads-up on its upcoming security patches that affect all versions of the email server software up to and including then-latest 4.92.1. Exim is a widely used, open source mail transfer agent (MTA) software developed for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, Mac OSX or Solaris, which runs almost 60% of the internet's email servers today for routing, delivering and receiving email messages. Tracked as CVE-2019-15846 , the security vulnerability only affects Exim servers that accept TLS connections, potentially allowing attackers to gain root-level access to the system "by sending an SNI ending in a backslash-null sequence during the ini

What if the tech intended to ensure that your kids, senior citizens, and pets are safe even when they're out of sight inadvertently expose them to stalkers? An estimated 600,000 GPS tracking devices for sale on Amazon and other large online merchants for $25–$50 have been found vulnerable to a handful of dangerous vulnerabilities that may have exposed user's real-time locations, security researchers have claimed. Cybersecurity researchers from Avast discovered that 29 models of GPS trackers made by Chinese technology company Shenzhen i365 for keeping tabs on young children, elderly relatives, and pets contain a number of security vulnerabilities. Moreover, all over half a million tracking devices were shipped with the same default password of "123456," leaving an opportunity for attackers to easily access tracking information for those who never changed the default password. Vulnerabilities in GPS Tracking Devices The reported GPS tracking device vulnerabili