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Unpatched software is a computer code containing known security weaknesses. Unpatched vulnerabilities refer to weaknesses that allow attackers to leverage a known security bug that has not been patched by running malicious code. Software vendors write additions to the codes, known as "patches," when they come to know about these application vulnerabilities to secure these weaknesses. Adversaries often probe into your software, looking for unpatched systems and attacking them directly or indirectly. It is risky to run unpatched software. This is because attackers get the time to become aware of the  software's unpatched vulnerabilities  before a patch emerges. A  report  found that unpatched vulnerabilities are the most consistent and primary ransomware attack vectors. It was recorded that in 2021,  65  new vulnerabilities arose that were connected to ransomware. This was observed to be a twenty-nine percent growth compared to the number of vulnerabilities in 2020.  Gr

Linux distributions are in the process of issuing patches to address a newly disclosed security vulnerability in the kernel that could allow an attacker to overwrite arbitrary data into any read-only files and allow for a complete takeover of affected systems. Dubbed " Dirty Pipe " (CVE-2022-0847, CVSS score: 7.8) by IONOS software developer Max Kellermann, the flaw "leads to privilege escalation because unprivileged processes can inject code into root processes." Kellermann said the bug was discovered after digging into a support issue raised by one of the customers of the cloud and hosting provider that concerned a case of a "surprising kind of corruption" affecting web server access logs. The Linux kernel flaw is said to have existed since  version 5.8 , with the vulnerability sharing similarities to that of  Dirty Cow  (CVE-2016-5195), which came to light in October 2016. "A flaw was found in the way the 'flags' member of the new pip

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,

Details have emerged about a now-patched high-severity vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could potentially be abused to escape a container in order to execute arbitrary commands on the container host. The shortcoming resides in a Linux kernel feature called  control groups , also referred to as cgroups version 1 (v1), which allows processes to be organized into hierarchical groups, thereby making it possible to limit and monitor the usage of resources such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network. Tracked as  CVE-2022-0492  (CVSS score: 7.0), the  issue   concerns  a  case  of  privilege escalation  in the cgroups v1 release_agent functionality, a script that's executed following the termination of any process in the cgroup. "The issue stands out as one of the simplest Linux privilege escalations discovered in recent times: The Linux kernel mistakenly exposed a privileged operation to unprivileged users," Unit 42 researcher Yuval Avrahami  said  in a report publishe

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) this week added 95 more security flaws to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , taking the total number of actively exploited vulnerabilities to 478. "These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise," the agency  said  in an advisory published on March 3, 2022. Of the 95 newly added bugs, 38 relate to Cisco vulnerabilities, 27 for Microsoft, 16 for Adobe, seven impact Oracle, and one each corresponding to Apache Tomcat, ChakraCore, Exim, Mozilla Firefox, Linux Kernel, Siemens SIMATIC CP, and Treck TCP/IP stack. Included in the list are five issues discovered in Cisco RV routers, which CISA notes are being exploited in real-world attacks. The flaws, which  came to light  early last month, allow for the execution of arbitrary code with root privileges. Three of the vulnerabilities – CVE-2022-20699, CVE-2022-20

Researchers have disclosed details of a new security vulnerability in GitLab, an open-source DevOps software, that could potentially allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to recover user-related information. Tracked as CVE-2021-4191 (CVSS score: 5.3), the medium-severity flaw affects all versions of GitLab Community Edition and Enterprise Edition starting from 13.0 and all versions starting from 14.4 and prior to 14.8. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaw is Jake Baines, a senior security researcher at Rapid7. Following responsible disclosure on November 18, 2021, patches were  released  for self-managed servers as part of GitLab critical security releases 14.8.2, 14.7.4, and 14.6.5 shipped on February 25, 2022. "The vulnerability is the result of a missing authentication check when executing certain GitLab GraphQL API queries," Baines  said  in a report published Thursday. "A remote, unauthenticated attacker can use this vulnerability to collect regi

Critical security vulnerabilities have been uncovered in VoIPmonitor software that, if successfully exploited, could allow unauthenticated attackers to escalate privileges to the administrator level and execute arbitrary commands. Following responsible disclosure by researchers from  Kerbit , an Ethiopia-based penetration-testing and vulnerability research firm, on December 15, 2021, the issues were addressed in  version 24.97  of the WEB GUI shipped on January 11, 2022. "[F]ix critical vulnerabilities - new SQL injects for unauthenticated users allowing gaining admin privileges," the maintainers of VoIPmonitor noted in the change log. VoIPmonitor is an open-source network packet sniffer with commercial frontend for SIP RTP and RTCP VoIP protocols running on Linux, allowing users to monitor and troubleshoot quality of SIP VoIP calls as well as decode, play, and archive calls in a  CDR  database. The three flaws identified by Kerbit is below – CVE-2022-24259  (CVSS sco

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) last week published an industrial control system ( ICS ) advisory related to multiple vulnerabilities impacting Schneider Electric's  Easergy  medium voltage protection relays. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may disclose device credentials, cause a denial-of-service condition, device reboot, or allow an attacker to gain full control of the relay," the agency  said  in a bulletin on February 24, 2022. "This could result in loss of protection to your electrical network." The two high-severity weaknesses impact Easergy P3 versions prior to v30.205 and Easergy P5 versions before v01.401.101. Details of the flaws are as follows – CVE-2022-22722  (CVSS score: 7.5) – Use of hardcoded credentials that could be abused to observe and manipulate traffic associated with the device. CVE-2022-22723  and  CVE-2022-22725  (CVSS score: 8.8) – A buffer overflow vulnerability that could resu

Users of Horde Webmail are being urged to disable a feature to contain a nine-year-old unpatched security vulnerability in the software that could be abused to gain complete access to email accounts simply by previewing an attachment. "This gives the attacker access to all sensitive and perhaps secret information a victim has stored in their email account and could allow them to gain further access to the internal services of an organization," SonarSource vulnerability researcher, Simon Scannell,  said  in a report. An " all volunteer " initiative, the Horde Project is a free, browser-based communication suite that allows users to read, send, and organize email messages as well as manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks, notes, files, and bookmarks. The flaw, which was introduced as part of a  code change  pushed on November 30, 2012, relates to a case of an "unusual" stored cross-site scripting flaw (aka persistent XSS) that allows an adversary t

Patches have been issued to contain a "severe" security vulnerability in UpdraftPlus, a WordPress plugin with over three million installations, that can be weaponized to download the site's private data using an account on the vulnerable sites. "All versions of UpdraftPlus from March 2019 onwards have contained a vulnerability caused by a missing permissions-level check, allowing untrusted users access to backups," the maintainers of the plugin said in an advisory published this week. Security researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Automattic has been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability on February 14 that's been assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-0633  (CVSS score: 8.5). The issue impacts UpdraftPlus versions from 1.16.7 to 1.22.2. UpdraftPlus is a  backup and restoration solution  that's capable of performing full, manual, or scheduled backups of WordPress files, databases, plugins and themes, which can then be reinstated via th

A "potentially destructive actor" aligned with the government of Iran is actively exploiting the well-known  Log4j vulnerability  to infect unpatched VMware Horizon servers with ransomware. Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne dubbed the group " TunnelVision " owing to their heavy reliance on tunneling tools, with overlaps in tactics observed to that of a broader group tracked under the moniker  Phosphorus  as well as Charming Kitten and Nemesis Kitten. "TunnelVision activities are characterized by wide-exploitation of 1-day vulnerabilities in target regions," SentinelOne researchers Amitai Ben Shushan Ehrlich and Yair Rigevsky  said  in a report, with the intrusions detected in the Middle East and the U.S. Also observed alongside Log4Shell is the exploitation of Fortinet FortiOS path traversal flaw ( CVE-2018-13379 ) and the Microsoft Exchange  ProxyShell  vulnerability to gain initial access into the target networks for post-exploitation. "TunnelVis

Cisco has released security updates to contain three vulnerabilities affecting its products, including one high-severity flaw in its Email Security Appliance (ESA) that could result in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The weakness, assigned the identifier CVE-2022-20653 (CVSS score: 7.5), stems from a case of insufficient error handling in  DNS  name resolution that could be abused by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to send a specially crafted email message and cause a DoS. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to become unreachable from management interfaces or to process additional email messages for a period of time until the device recovers, resulting in a DoS condition," the company  said  in an advisory. "Continued attacks could cause the device to become completely unavailable, resulting in a persistent DoS condition." The flaw impacts Cisco ESA devices running Cisco AsyncOS Software running vers

VMware on Tuesday patched several  high-severity   vulnerabilities  impacting ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, Cloud Foundation, and NSX Data Center for vSphere that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code and cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. As of writing, there's no evidence that any of the weaknesses are exploited in the wild. The list of six flaws is as follows – CVE-2021-22040  (CVSS score: 8.4) - Use-after-free vulnerability in XHCI USB controller CVE-2021-22041  (CVSS score: 8.4) - Double-fetch vulnerability in UHCI USB controller CVE-2021-22042  (CVSS score: 8.2) - ESXi settingsd unauthorized access vulnerability CVE-2021-22043  (CVSS score: 8.2) - ESXi settingsd TOCTOU vulnerability CVE-2021-22050  (CVSS score: 5.3) - ESXi slow HTTP POST denial-of-service vulnerability CVE-2022-22945  (CVSS score: 8.8) - CLI shell injection vulnerability in the NSX Edge appliance component Successful exploitation of the flaws could allow a malicious actor with local ad

Researchers have revealed details of a now-patched high-severity security vulnerability in Apache Cassandra that, if left unaddressed, could be abused to gain remote code execution (RCE) on affected installations. "This Apache security vulnerability is easy to exploit and has the potential to wreak havoc on systems, but luckily only manifests in non-default configurations of Cassandra," Omer Kaspi, security researcher at DevOps firm JFrog,  said  in a technical write-up published Tuesday. Apache Cassandra is an open-source, distributed, NoSQL database management system for managing very large amounts of structured data across commodity servers. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44521  (CVSS score: 8.4), the vulnerability concerns a specific scenario where the configuration for user-defined functions ( UDFs ) are enabled, effectively allowing an attacker to leverage the  Nashorn  JavaScript engine, escape the sandbox, and achieve execution of untrusted code. Specifically, it was fou

Google on Monday rolled out fixes for eight security issues in the Chrome web browser, including a high-severity vulnerability that's being actively exploited in real-world attacks, marking the first zero-day patched by the internet giant in 2022. The shortcoming, tracked  CVE-2022-0609 , is described as a  use-after-free  vulnerability in the Animation component that, if successfully exploited, could lead to corruption of valid data and the execution of arbitrary code on affected systems. "Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2022-0609 exists in the wild," the company  said  in a characteristically brief statement acknowledging active exploitation of the flaw. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaw are Adam Weidemann and Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG). Also addressed by Google four other use-after-free flaws impacting File Manager, Webstore API,  ANGLE , and GPU, a heap buffer overflow bug in Tab Groups, an inte

Technical details have been disclosed regarding a number of security vulnerabilities affecting Moxa's MXview web-based network management system, some of which could be chained by an unauthenticated adversary to achieve remote code execution on unpatched servers. The five security weaknesses "could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute code on the hosting machine with the highest privileges available: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM," Claroty security researcher Noam Moshe  said  in a report published this week. Moxa  MXview  is designed for configuring, monitoring, and diagnosing networking devices in industrial networks. The flaws, which affect versions 3.x to 3.2.2 of the network management software, were rectified in  version 3.2.4 or higher  following a coordinated disclosure process in October 2021. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to create or overwrite critical files to execute code, gain access to the program, ob

Adobe on Sunday rolled out patches to contain a critical security vulnerability impacting its Commerce and Magento Open Source products that it said is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-24086 , the shortcoming has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10 on the vulnerability scoring system and has been characterized as an " improper input validation " issue that could be weaponized to achieve arbitrary code execution.  It's also a pre-authenticated flaw, meaning it could be exploited without requiring any credentials. Additionally, the California-headquartered company pointed out that the vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker with non-administrative privileges. The flaw affects Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source 2.4.3-p1 and earlier versions as well as 2.3.7-p2 and earlier versions. Adobe Commerce 2.3.3 and lower are not vulnerable. "Adobe is aware that CVE-2022-24086 has been exploited in the wild in very limited attacks targeting Ad

Apple on Thursday released security updates for  iOS, iPadOS ,  macOS , and  Safari  to address a new WebKit flaw that it said may have been actively exploited in the wild, making it the company's third zero-day patch since the start of the year. Tracked as CVE-2022-22620, the issue concerns a use-after-free vulnerability in the WebKit component that powers the Safari web browser and could be exploited by a piece of specially crafted web content to gain arbitrary code execution.  "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited," the company said in a terse statement acknowledging in-the-wild attacks leveraging the flaw. The iPhone maker credited an anonymous researcher for discovering and reporting the flaw, adding it remediated the issue with improved memory management. The updates are available for iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is urging federal agencies to secure their systems against an actively exploited security vulnerability in Windows that could be abused to gain elevated permissions on affected hosts. To that end, the agency has added  CVE-2022-21882  (CVSS score: 7.0) to the  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , necessitating that Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies patch all systems against this vulnerability by February 18, 2022. "These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise," CISA  said  in an advisory published last week. CVE-2022-21882 , which has been tagged with an "Exploitation More Likely" exploitability index assessment, concerns a case of elevation of privilege vulnerability affecting the Win32k component. The bug was addressed by Microsoft as part of its January 2022  Patch Tu

Cisco has patched multiple critical  security vulnerabilities  impacting its RV Series routers that could be weaponized to elevate privileges and execute arbitrary code on affected systems, while also warning of the existence of proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code targeting some of these bugs. Three of the 15 flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-20699, CVE-2022-20700, and CVE-2022-20707, carry the highest CVSS rating of 10.0, and affect its Small Business RV160, RV260, RV340, and RV345 Series routers. Additionally, the flaws could be exploited to bypass authentication and authorization protections, retrieve and run unsigned software, and even cause denial-of-service (DoS) conditions. The networking equipment maker acknowledged that it's "aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for several of the vulnerabilities" but didn't share any further specifics on the nature of the exploit or the identity of the threat actors that may be exploiting them. CVE-2022-20699

Samba has issued  software updates  to address multiple security vulnerabilities that, if successfully exploited, could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges on affected installations. Chief among them is  CVE-2021-44142 , which  impacts  all versions of Samba before 4.13.17 and concerns an  out-of-bounds  heap read/write vulnerability in the VFS module " vfs_fruit " that provides compatibility with Apple SMB clients. Samba  is a popular freeware implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that allows users to access files, printers, and other commonly shared resources over a network. "All versions of Samba prior to 4.13.17 are vulnerable to an out-of-bounds heap read write vulnerability that allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code as root on affected Samba installations that use the VFS module vfs_fruit," the maintainers said in an advisory published on January 31. According to the CERT Coordinati