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Cybersecurity researchers on Sunday disclosed multiple critical vulnerabilities in remote student monitoring software Netop Vision Pro  that a malicious attacker could abuse to execute arbitrary code and take over Windows computers. "These findings allow for elevation of privileges and ultimately remote code execution which could be used by a malicious attacker within the same network to gain full control over students' computers," the McAfee Labs Advanced Threat Research team said in an analysis. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2021-27192, CVE-2021-27193, CVE-2021-27194, and CVE-2021-27195, were reported to Netop on December 11, 2020, after which the Denmark-based company fixed the issues in an update (version 9.7.2) released on February 25. "Version 9.7.2 of Vision and Vision Pro is a maintenance release that addresses several vulnerabilities, such as escalating local privileges sending sensitive information in plain text," the company stated in its

The Apache Software Foundation on Friday addressed a high severity vulnerability in Apache OFBiz that could have allowed an unauthenticated adversary to remotely seize control of the open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Tracked as  CVE-2021-26295 , the flaw affects all versions of the software prior to  17.12.06  and employs an "unsafe deserialization" as an attack vector to permit unauthorized remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on a server directly. OFBiz  is a Java-based web framework for automating enterprise processes and offers a wide range of functionality, including accounting, customer relationship management, manufacturing operations management, order management, supply chain fulfillment, and warehouse management system, among others. Specifically, by exploiting this flaw, a malicious party can tamper with serialized data to insert arbitrary code that, when deserialized, can potentially result in remote code execution. "An unauthe

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

Researchers have disclosed vulnerabilities in multiple WordPress plugins that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code and take over a website in certain scenarios. The flaws were uncovered in  Elementor , a website builder plugin used on more than seven million sites, and  WP Super Cache , a tool used to serve cached pages of a WordPress site. According to Wordfence, which discovered the security weaknesses in Elementor, the bug concerns a set of  stored cross-site scripting  (XSS) vulnerabilities (CVSS score: 6.4), which occurs when a malicious script is injected directly into a vulnerable web application. In this case, due to a lack of validation of the HTML tags on the server-side, a bad actor can exploit the issues to add executable JavaScript to a post or page via a crafted request. "Since posts created by contributors are typically reviewed by editors or administrators before publishing, any JavaScript added to one of these posts would

Google has addressed yet another actively exploited zero-day in Chrome browser, marking the second such fix released by the company within a month. The browser maker on Friday shipped 89.0.4389.90 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which is expected to be rolling out over the coming days/weeks to all users. While the update contains a total of five security fixes, the most important flaw rectified by Google concerns a  use after free  vulnerability in its Blink rendering engine. The bug is tracked as CVE-2021-21193. Details about the flaw are scarce except that it was reported to Google by an anonymous researcher on March 9. According to IBM, the vulnerability is rated 8.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale, and could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the target system. "By persuading a victim to visit a specially crafted Web site, a remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service condition on the system," the

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Wednesday issued a joint advisory warning of active exploitation of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange on-premises products by nation-state actors and cybercriminals. "CISA and FBI assess that adversaries could exploit these vulnerabilities to compromise networks, steal information, encrypt data for ransom, or even execute a destructive attack," the agencies  said . "Adversaries may also sell access to compromised networks on the dark web." The attacks have primarily targeted local governments, academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, and business entities in various industry sectors, including agriculture, biotechnology, aerospace, defense, legal services, power utilities, and pharmaceutical, which the agencies say are in line with previous activity conducted by Chinese cyber actors. Tens of thousands of entities, including the  Eur

Application security company F5 Networks on Wednesday published an  advisory  warning of four critical vulnerabilities impacting multiple products that could result in a denial of service (DoS) attack and even unauthenticated remote code execution on target networks. The patches concern a total of seven related flaws (from CVE-2021-22986 through CVE-2021-22992),  two  of  which  were discovered and reported by Felix Wilhelm of Google Project Zero in December 2020. The four critical flaws affect BIG-IP versions 11.6 or 12.x and newer, with a critical pre-auth remote code execution (CVE-2021-22986) also affecting BIG-IQ versions 6.x and 7.x. F5 said it's not aware of any public exploitation of these issues. Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could lead to a full compromise of vulnerable systems, including the possibility of remote code execution as well as trigger a buffer overflow, leading to a DoS attack. Urging customers to update their BIG-IP and BIG-IQ deploy

Following Microsoft's release of out-of-band patches to address multiple zero-day flaws in on-premises versions of Microsoft Exchange Server, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  issued  an emergency directive warning of " active exploitation " of the vulnerabilities. The alert comes on the heels of Microsoft's  disclosure  that China-based hackers were exploiting unknown software bugs in Exchange server to steal sensitive data from select targets, marking the second time in four months that the U.S. has scrambled to address a widespread hacking campaign believed to be the work of foreign threat actors. While the company mainly attributed the campaign to a threat group called HAFNIUM, Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET  said  it found evidence of CVE-2021-26855 being actively exploited in the wild by several cyber espionage groups, including LuckyMouse, Tick, and Calypso targeting servers located in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and the

Microsoft has  released emergency patches  to address four previously undisclosed security flaws in Exchange Server that it says are being actively exploited by a new Chinese state-sponsored threat actor with the goal of perpetrating data theft. Describing the attacks as "limited and targeted," Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said the adversary used these vulnerabilities to access on-premises Exchange servers, in turn granting access to email accounts and paving the way for the installation of additional malware to facilitate long-term access to victim environments. The tech giant primarily attributed the campaign with high confidence to a threat actor it calls HAFNIUM, a state-sponsored hacker collective operating out of China, although it suspects other groups may also be involved. Discussing the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of the group for the first time, Microsoft paints HAFNIUM as a "highly skilled and sophisticated actor" that m

Exactly a month after  patching  an actively exploited zero-day flaw in Chrome, Google today rolled out fixes for yet another zero-day vulnerability in the world's most popular web browser that it says is being abused in the wild. Chrome 89.0.4389.72, released by the search giant for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Tuesday, comes with a total of 47 security fixes, the most severe of which concerns an "object lifecycle issue in audio." Tracked as CVE-2021-21166, the security flaw is one of the two bugs reported last month by Alison Huffman of Microsoft Browser Vulnerability Research on February 11. A separate object lifecycle flaw, also identified in the audio component, was reported to Google on February 4, the same day the stable version of Chrome 88 became available. With no additional details, it's not immediately clear if the two security shortcomings are related. Google acknowledged that an exploit for the vulnerability exists in the wild but stopped short of s

A popular jailbreaking tool called "unc0ver" has been updated to support iOS 14.3 and earlier releases, thereby making it possible to unlock almost every single iPhone model using a vulnerability that Apple in January disclosed was actively exploited in the wild. The latest release, dubbed unc0ver v6.0.0, was  released  on Sunday, according to its lead developer Pwn20wnd, expanding its compatibility to jailbreak any device running iOS 11.0 through iOS 14.3 using a kernel vulnerability, including iOS 12.4.9-12.5.1, 13.5.1-13.7, and 14.0-14.3. Tracked as  CVE-2021-1782 , the flaw is a privilege escalation vulnerability in the kernel stemming from a race condition that could cause a malicious application to elevate its privileges. "We wrote our own exploit based on CVE-2021-1782 for #unc0ver to achieve optimal exploit speed and stability," Pwn20wnd  said  in a separate tweet. The vulnerability has since been addressed by Apple as part of its iOS and iPadOS 14.4 u

Cisco has addressed a maximum severity vulnerability in its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO) that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication on vulnerable devices. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the affected API," the company  said  in an advisory published yesterday. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to receive a token with administrator-level privileges that could be used to authenticate to the API on affected MSO and managed Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) devices." The bug, tracked as CVE-2021-1388, ranks 10 (out of 10) on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and stems from an improper token validation in an API endpoint of Cisco ACI MSO installed the Application Services Engine. It affects ACI MSO versions running a 3.0 release of the software. The ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator lets customers monitor and m

A malvertising group known as "ScamClub" exploited a zero-day vulnerability in WebKit-based browsers to inject malicious payloads that redirected users to fraudulent websites gift card scams. The attacks, first spotted by ad security firm Confiant in late June 2020, leveraged a bug (CVE-2021–1801) that allowed malicious parties to bypass the iframe sandboxing policy in the browser engine that powers Safari and Google Chrome for iOS and run malicious code. Specifically, the technique exploited the manner how WebKit handles JavaScript event listeners , thus making it possible to break out of the sandbox associated with an ad's inline frame element despite the presence of "allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" attribute that explicitly forbids any redirection unless the click event occurs inside the iframe. To test this hypothesis, the researchers set about creating a simple HTML file containing a cross-origin sandboxed iframe and a button outside it that

UAE and Kuwait government agencies are targets of a new cyberespionage campaign potentially carried out by Iranian threat actors, according to new research. Attributing the operation to be the work of  Static Kitten  (aka MERCURY or MuddyWater), Anomali  said  the "objective of this activity is to install a remote management tool called ScreenConnect (acquired by ConnectWise 2015) with unique launch parameters that have custom properties," with malware samples and URLs masquerading as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) of Kuwait and the UAE National Council. Since its origins in 2017, MuddyWater has been tied to a number of attacks primarily against Middle Eastern nations, actively  exploiting Zerologon vulnerability  in real-world attack campaigns to strike prominent  Israeli organizations  with malicious payloads. The state-sponsored hacking group is believed to be working at the behest of Iran's Islamic Republic Guard Corps, the country's primary intellig

Microsoft on Tuesday  issued fixes for 56 flaws , including a critical vulnerability that's known to be actively exploited in the wild. In all, 11 are listed as Critical, 43 are listed as Important, and two are listed as Moderate in severity — six of which are previously disclosed vulnerabilities. The updates cover .NET Framework, Azure IoT, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Edge for Android, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows Codecs Library, Skype for Business, Visual Studio, Windows Defender, and other core components such as Kernel, TCP/IP, Print Spooler, and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). A Windows Win32k Privilege Escalation Vulnerability The most critical of the flaws is a Windows Win32k privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2021-1732, CVSS score 7.8) that allows attackers with access to a target system to run malicious code with elevated permissions. Microsoft credited JinQuan, MaDongZe, TuXiaoYi, and LiHao of DBAPPSecurity for discovering and re

While Gartner does not have a dedicated Magic Quadrant for Bug Bounties or Crowd Security Testing yet, Gartner Peer Insights already lists 24 vendors in the "Application Crowdtesting Services" category. We have compiled the top 5 most promising bug bounty platforms for those of you who are looking to enhance your existing software testing arsenal with knowledge and expertise from international security researchers:  1. HackerOne Being a unicorn backed by numerous reputable venture capitalists,  HackerOne  is probably the most well-known and recognized Bug Bounty brand in the world. According to their most recent annual report, over 1,700 companies trust the HackerOne platform to augment their in-house application security testing capacities. The report likewise says that their security researchers earned approximately $40 million in bounties in 2019 alone and $82 million cumulatively. HackerOne is also famous for hosting US government Bug Bounty programs, including the

The Office of the Washington State Auditor (SAO) on Monday said it's investigating a security incident that resulted in the compromise of personal information of more than 1.6 million people who filed for unemployment claims in the state in 2020. The SAO blamed the breach on a software vulnerability in Accellion's File Transfer Appliance (FTA) service, which allows organizations to share sensitive documents with users outside their organization securely. "During the week of January 25, 2021, Accellion confirmed that an unauthorized person gained access to SAO files by exploiting a vulnerability in Accellion's file transfer service," the SAO  said  in a statement. The accessed information is said to have contained personal details of Washington state residents who filed unemployment insurance claims in 2020, as well as other data from local governments and state agencies. The exact information that may have been compromised include: Full name Social securi

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed a now-patched security flaw in TikTok that could have potentially enabled an attacker to build a database of the app's users and their associated phone numbers for future malicious activity. Although this flaw only impacts those users who have linked a phone number with their account or logged in with a phone number, a successful exploitation of the vulnerability could have resulted in data leakage and privacy violation, Check Point Research said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. TikTok has deployed a fix to address the shortcoming following responsible disclosure from Check Point researchers. The newly discovered bug resides in TikTok's " Find friends " feature that allows users to sync their contacts with the service to identify potential people to follow. The contacts are uploaded to TikTok via an HTTP request in the form of a list that consists of hashed contact names and the corresponding phone numbe

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a publicly available fully-functional exploit that could be used to target SAP enterprise software. The exploit leverages a vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2020-6207 , that stems from a missing authentication check in SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) version 7.2 SAP  SolMan  is an application management and administration solution that offers end-to-end application lifecycle management in distributed environments, acting as a centralized hub for implementing and maintaining SAP systems such as ERP, CRM, HCM, SCM, BI, and others. "A successful exploitation could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute highly privileged administrative tasks in the connected  SAP SMD Agents ," researchers from Onapsis  said , referring to the Solution Manager Diagnostics toolset used to analyze and monitor SAP systems. The vulnerability, which has the highest possible CVSS base score of 10.0, was addressed by SAP as part of its  March 2020  u

SonicWall, a popular internet security provider of firewall and VPN products, on late Friday disclosed that it fell victim to a coordinated attack on its internal systems. The San Jose-based company said the attacks leveraged zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall secure remote access products such as NetExtender VPN client version 10.x and Secure Mobile Access ( SMA ) that are used to provide users with remote access to internal resources. "Recently, SonicWall identified a coordinated attack on its internal systems by highly sophisticated threat actors exploiting probable zero-day vulnerabilities on certain SonicWall secure remote access products," the company exclusively told The Hacker News. The development comes after The Hacker News received reports that SonicWall's internal systems went down earlier this week on Tuesday and that the source code hosted on the company's GitLab repository was accessed by the attackers. SonicWall wouldn't confirm the re