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Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 11 users are at risk of a new unpatched vulnerability that was recently disclosed publicly. As we reported last week, the vulnerability — SeriousSAM — allows attackers with low-level permissions to access Windows system files to perform a Pass-the-Hash (and potentially Silver Ticket) attack.  Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to obtain hashed passwords stored in the Security Account Manager (SAM) and Registry, and ultimately run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges. SeriousSAM vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-36934 , exists in the default configuration of Windows 10 and Windows 11, specifically due to a setting that allows 'read' permissions to the built-in user's group that contains all local users. As a result, built-in local users have access to read the SAM files and the Registry, where they can also view the hashes. Once the attacker has 'User' access, they can use a tool such as Mimikatz to gain access to the Re

Microsoft's Windows 10 and the upcoming Windows 11 versions have been found vulnerable to a new local privilege escalation vulnerability that permits users with low-level permissions access Windows system files, in turn, enabling them to unmask the operating system installation password and even decrypt private keys. The vulnerability has been nicknamed "SeriousSAM." "Starting with Windows 10 build 1809, non-administrative users are granted access to SAM, SYSTEM, and SECURITY registry hive files," CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in a  vulnerability note  published Monday. "This can allow for local privilege escalation (LPE)." The operating system configuration files in question are as follows - c:\Windows\System32\config\sam c:\Windows\System32\config\system c:\Windows\System32\config\security Microsoft, which is tracking the vulnerability under the identifier  CVE-2021-36934 , acknowledged the issue, but has yet to roll out a patch, o

Follow this real-life network attack simulation, covering 6 steps from Initial Access to Data Exfiltration. See how attackers remain undetected with the simplest tools and why you need multiple choke points in your defense strategy. Surprisingly, most network attacks are not exceptionally sophisticated, technologically advanced, or reliant on zero-day tools that exploit edge-case vulnerabilities. Instead, they often use commonly available tools and exploit multiple vulnerability points. By simulating a real-world network attack, security teams can test their detection systems, ensure they have multiple choke points in place, and demonstrate the value of networking security to leadership. In this article, we demonstrate a real-life attack that could easily occur in many systems. The attack simulation was developed based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Atomic Red Team,  Cato Networks ' experience in the field, and public threat intel. In the end, we explain why a holistic secur

Details have emerged about a high severity security vulnerability affecting a software driver used in HP, Xerox, and Samsung printers that has remained undetected since 2005. Tracked as  CVE-2021-3438  (CVSS score: 8.8), the issue concerns a buffer overflow in a print driver installer package named "SSPORT.SYS" that can enable remote privilege and arbitrary code execution. Hundreds of millions of printers have been released worldwide to date with the vulnerable driver in question. However, there is no evidence that the flaw was abused in real-world attacks. "A potential buffer overflow in the software drivers for certain HP LaserJet products and Samsung product printers could lead to an escalation of privilege," according to an advisory published in May. The issue was reported to HP by threat intelligence researchers from SentinelLabs on February 18, 2021, following which  remedies  have been  published  for the affected printers as of May 19, 2021. Specific

Merely days after Microsoft sounded the alarm on an unpatched security vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler service, possibly yet another zero-day flaw in the same component has come to light, making it the fourth printer-related shortcoming to be discovered in recent weeks. "Microsoft Windows allows for non-admin users to be able to install printer drivers via Point and Print," CERT Coordination Center's Will Dormann  said  in an advisory published Sunday. "Printers installed via this technique also install queue-specific files, which can be arbitrary libraries to be loaded by the privileged Windows Print Spooler process." An exploit for the vulnerability was disclosed by security researcher and  Mimikatz creator   Benjamin Delpy . #printnightmare - Episode 4 You know what is better than a Legit Kiwi Printer ? 🥝Another Legit Kiwi Printer...👍 No prerequiste at all, you even don't need to sign drivers/package🤪 pic.twitter.com/oInb5jm3tE — 🥝 B

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has issued new stricter vulnerability disclosure regulations that mandate software and networking vendors affected with critical flaws to mandatorily disclose them first-hand to the government authorities within two days of filing a report. The " Regulations on the Management of Network Product Security Vulnerability " are expected to go into effect starting September 1, 2021, and aim to standardize the discovery, reporting, repair, and release of security vulnerabilities and prevent security risks. "No organization or individual may take advantage of network product security vulnerabilities to engage in activities that endanger network security, and shall not illegally collect, sell or publish information on network product security vulnerabilities," Article 4 of the regulation states. In addition to banning sales of previously unknown security weaknesses, the new rules also forbid vulnerabilities from being disclos

Two of the zero-day Windows flaws rectified by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday update earlier this week were weaponized by an Israel-based company called Candiru in a series of "precision attacks" to hack more than 100 journalists, academics, activists, and political dissidents globally. The spyware vendor was also formally identified as the commercial surveillance company that Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) revealed as exploiting multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome browser to target victims located in Armenia, according to a report published by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab. " Candiru 's apparent widespread presence, and the use of its surveillance technology against global civil society, is a potent reminder that the mercenary spyware industry contains many players and is prone to widespread abuse," Citizen Lab researchers  said . "This case demonstrates, yet again, that in the absence of any international safegua

Google has pushed out a new security update to Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux with multiple fixes, including a zero-day that it says is being exploited in the wild. The latest patch resolves a total of eight issues, one of which concerns a type confusion issue in its V8 open-source and JavaScript engine ( CVE-2021-30563 ). The search giant credited an anonymous researcher for reporting the flaw on July 12. As is usually the case with actively exploited flaws, the company issued a terse statement acknowledging that "an exploit for CVE-2021-30563 exists in the wild" while refraining from sharing full details about the underlying vulnerability used in the attacks due to its serious nature and the possibility that doing so could lead to further abuse. CVE-2021-30563 also marks the ninth zero-day addressed by Google to combat real-world attacks against Chrome users since the start of the year — CVE-2021-21148  - Heap buffer overflow in V8 CVE-2021-21166  - Obje

Microsoft on Thursday shared fresh guidance on yet another vulnerability affecting the Windows Print Spooler service, stating that it's working to address it in an upcoming security update. Tracked as  CVE-2021-34481  (CVSS score: 7.8), the issue concerns a local privilege escalation flaw that could be abused to perform unauthorized actions on the system. The company credited security researcher Jacob Baines for discovering and reporting the bug. "An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when the Windows Print Spooler service improperly performs privileged file operations. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges," the Windows maker said in its advisory. "An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights." However, it's worth pointing out that successful exploitation of the vulnerability requires the attacker to have t

Threat intelligence researchers from Google on Wednesday  shed more light  on four in-the-wild zero-days in Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer browsers that were exploited by malicious actors in different campaigns since the start of the year. What's more, three of the four zero-days were engineered by commercial providers and sold to and used by government-backed actors, contributing to an uptick in real-world attacks. The list of now-patched vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2021-1879 : Use-After-Free in QuickTimePluginReplacement (Apple WebKit) CVE-2021-21166 : Chrome Object Lifecycle Issue in Audio CVE-2021-30551 : Chrome Type Confusion in V8 CVE-2021-33742 : Internet Explorer out-of-bounds write in MSHTML Both Chrome zero-days — CVE-2021-21166 and CVE-2021-30551 — are believed to have been used by the same actor, and were delivered as one-time links sent via email to targets located in Armenia, with the links redirecting unsuspecting users to attacker-controlled

Microsoft rolled out  Patch Tuesday updates  for the month of July with fixes for a total of 117 security vulnerabilities, including nine zero-day flaws, of which four are said to be under active attacks in the wild, potentially enabling an adversary to take control of affected systems.  Of the 117 issues, 13 are rated Critical, 103 are rated Important, and one is rated as Moderate in severity, with six of these bugs publicly known at the time of release.  The updates span across several of Microsoft's products, including Windows, Bing, Dynamics, Exchange Server, Office, Scripting Engine, Windows DNS, and Visual Studio Code. July also marks a dramatic jump in the volume of vulnerabilities, surpassing the number Microsoft collectively addressed as part of its updates in  May  (55) and  June  (50). Chief among the security flaws actively exploited are as follows — CVE-2021-34527  (CVSS score: 8.8) - Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (publicly disclosed

Cybersecurity agencies in Australia and the U.S. are  warning  of an actively exploited vulnerability impacting ForgeRock's OpenAM access management solution that could be leveraged to execute arbitrary code on an affected system remotely. "The [Australian Cyber Security Centre] has observed actors exploiting this vulnerability to compromise multiple hosts and deploy additional malware and tools," the organization  said  in an alert. ACSC didn't disclose the nature of the attacks, how widespread they are, or the identities of the threat actors exploiting them. Tracked as  CVE-2021-35464 , the issue concerns a pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in ForgeRock Access Manager identity and access management tool, and stems from an  unsafe Java deserialization  in the Jato framework used by the software. "An attacker exploiting the vulnerability will execute commands in the context of the current user, not as the root user (unless ForgeRo

SolarWinds, the Texas-based company that became the epicenter of a  massive supply chain attack  late last year, has issued patches to contain a remote code execution flaw in its Serv-U managed file transfer service. The fixes, which target Serv-U Managed File Transfer and Serv-U Secure FTP products, arrive after Microsoft notified the IT management and remote monitoring software maker that the flaw was being exploited in the wild. The threat actor behind the exploitation remains unknown as yet, and it isn't clear exactly how the attack was carried out. "Microsoft has provided evidence of limited, targeted customer impact, though SolarWinds does not currently have an estimate of how many customers may be directly affected by the vulnerability," SolarWinds  said  in an advisory published Friday, adding it's "unaware of the identity of the potentially affected customers." Impacting Serv-U versions 15.2.3 HF1 and before, a successful exploitation of the sh

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Philips Clinical Collaboration Platform Portal (aka Vue PACS), some of which could be exploited by an adversary to take control of an affected system. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an unauthorized person or process to eavesdrop, view or modify data, gain system access, perform code execution, install unauthorized software, or affect system data integrity in such a way as to negatively impact the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the system," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  noted  in an advisory. The 15 flaws impact: VUE Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (versions 12.2.x.x and prior), Vue MyVue (versions 12.2.x.x and prior), Vue Speech (versions 12.2.x.x and prior), and Vue Motion (versions 12.2.1.5 and prior) Four of the issues (CVE-2020-1938, CVE-2018-12326, CVE-2018-11218, CVE-2020-4670, and CVE-2018-8014) have been given a C

Four security vulnerabilities have been uncovered in the  Sage X3  enterprise resource planning (ERP) product, two of which could be chained together as part of an attack sequence to enable adversaries to execute malicious commands and take control of vulnerable systems. These issues were discovered by researchers from Rapid7, who notified Sage Group of their findings on Feb. 3, 2021. The vendor has since rolled out  fixes  in recent releases for Sage X3 Version 9 (Syracuse 9.22.7.2), Sage X3 HR & Payroll Version 9 (Syracuse 9.24.1.3), Sage X3 Version 11 (Syracuse 11.25.2.6), and Sage X3 Version 12 (Syracuse 12.10.2.8) that were shipped in March. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2020-7388  (CVSS score: 10.0) - Sage X3 Unauthenticated Remote Command Execution (RCE) as SYSTEM in AdxDSrv.exe component CVE-2020-7389  (CVSS score" 5.5) - System "CHAINE" Variable Script Command Injection (No fix planned) CVE-2020-7387  (CVSS score: 5.3) - Sage X3 Ins

This week, PrintNightmare - Microsoft's Print Spooler vulnerability (CVE-2021-34527) was upgraded from a 'Low' criticality to a 'Critical' criticality. This is due to a Proof of Concept published on GitHub, which attackers could potentially leverage for gaining access to Domain Controllers. As we reported earlier , Microsoft already released a patch in June 2021, but it wasn't enough to stop exploits. Attackers can still use Print Spooler when connecting remotely. You can find all you need to know about this vulnerability in this article and how you can mitigate it (and you can).  Print Spooler in a nutshell:  Print Spooler is Microsoft's service for managing and monitoring files printing. This service is among Microsoft's oldest and has had minimal maintenance updates since it was released.  Every Microsoft machine (servers and endpoints) has this feature enabled by default. PrintNightmare vulnerability:  As soon as an attacker gains limited user

Even as Microsoft  expanded patches  for the so-called PrintNightmare vulnerability for Windows 10 version 1607, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2016, it has come to light that the fix for the remote code execution exploit in the Windows Print Spooler service can be bypassed in certain scenarios, effectively defeating the security protections and permitting attackers to run arbitrary code on infected systems. On Tuesday, the Windows maker issued an  emergency out-of-band update  to address  CVE-2021-34527  (CVSS score: 8.8) after the flaw was accidentally disclosed by researchers from Hong Kong-based cybersecurity firm Sangfor late last month, at which point it emerged that the issue was different from another bug — tracked as  CVE-2021-1675  — that was patched by Microsoft on June 8. "Several days ago, two security vulnerabilities were found in Microsoft Windows' existing printing mechanism," Yaniv Balmas, head of cyber research at Check Point, told The Hack

Microsoft has shipped an  emergency out-of-band security update  to address a critical zero-day vulnerability — known as "PrintNightmare" — that affects the Windows Print Spooler service and can permit remote threat actors to run arbitrary code and take over vulnerable systems. Tracked as  CVE-2021-34527  (CVSS score: 8.8), the remote code execution flaw impacts all supported editions of Windows. Last week, the company warned it had detected active exploitation attempts targeting the vulnerability. "The Microsoft Windows Print Spooler service fails to restrict access to functionality that allows users to add printers and related drivers, which can allow a remote authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges on a vulnerable system," the CERT Coordination Center said of the issue. It's worth noting that PrintNightmare includes both remote code execution and a local privilege escalation vector that can be abused in attacks to run com

Microsoft on Thursday officially confirmed that the " PrintNightmare " remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting Windows Print Spooler is different from the issue the company addressed as part of its Patch Tuesday update released earlier this month, while warning that it has detected exploitation attempts targeting the flaw. The company is tracking the security weakness under the identifier  CVE-2021-34527 , and has assigned it a severity rating of 8.8 on the CVSS scoring system. All versions of Windows contain the vulnerable code and are susceptible to exploitation. "A remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Windows Print Spooler service improperly performs privileged file operations," Microsoft said in its advisory. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user righ

A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit related to a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Windows Print Spooler and patched by Microsoft earlier this month was briefly published online before being taken down. Identified as  CVE-2021-1675 , the security issue could grant remote attackers full control of vulnerable systems.  Print Spooler  manages the printing process in Windows, including loading the appropriate printer drivers and scheduling the print job for printing, among others. Print Spooler flaws are concerning, not least because of the wide attack surface, but also owing to the fact that it runs at the highest privilege level and is capable of dynamically loading third-party binaries. The Windows maker addressed the vulnerability as part of its Patch Tuesday update on June 8, 2021. But almost two weeks later, Microsoft revised the flaw's impact from an elevation of privilege to remote code execution (RCE) as well as upgraded the severity level from Important to Crit