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Apple on Wednesday released security updates for  iOS, iPadOS , and  macOS  platforms to remediate two zero-day vulnerabilities previously exploited by threat actors to compromise its devices. The list of issues is below - CVE-2022-32893  - An out-of-bounds write issue in WebKit which could lead to the execution of arbitrary code by processing a specially crafted web content CVE-2022-32894  - An out-of-bounds write issue in the operating system's Kernel that could be abused by a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges Apple said it addressed both the issues with improved bounds checking, adding it's aware the vulnerabilities "may have been actively exploited." The company did not disclose any additional information regarding these attacks or the identities of the threat actors perpetrating them, although it's likely that they were abused as part of highly-targeted intrusions. The latest update brings the total number o

A group of researchers has revealed details of a new vulnerability affecting Intel CPUs that enables attackers to obtain encryption keys and other secret information from the processors. Dubbed  ÆPIC Leak , the weakness is the first-of-its-kind to architecturally disclose sensitive data in a manner that's akin to an "uninitialized memory read in the CPU itself." "In contrast to transient execution attacks like  Meltdown and Spectre ,  ÆPIC Leak  is an architectural bug: the sensitive data gets directly disclosed without relying on any (noisy) side channel," the academics said. The study was conducted by researchers from the Sapienza University of Rome, the Graz University of Technology, Amazon Web Services, and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. The vulnerability ( CVE-2022-21233 , CVSS score: 6.0), which affects CPUs with Sunny Cover microarchitecture, is rooted in a component called Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller ( APIC ), wh

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

A security feature bypass vulnerability has been uncovered in three signed third-party Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) boot loaders that allow bypass of the UEFI Secure Boot feature. "These vulnerabilities can be exploited by mounting the EFI System Partition and replacing the existing bootloader with the vulnerable one, or modifying a UEFI variable to load the vulnerable loader instead of the existing one," hardware security firm Eclypsium  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The following  vendor-specific boot loaders , which were signed and authenticated by Microsoft, have been found vulnerable to the bypass and have been patched as part of the tech giant's  Patch Tuesday update  released this week - Eurosoft Boot Loader ( CVE-2022-34301 ) New Horizon Data Systems Inc Boot Loader ( CVE-2022-34302 ), and Crypto Pro Boot Loader ( CVE-20220-34303 ) Secure Boot is a  security standard  designed to thwart malicious programs from loading w

Cisco on Wednesday released patches to contain multiple flaws in its software that could be abused to leak sensitive information on susceptible appliances. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-20866  (CVSS score: 7.4), has been described as a "logic error" when handling RSA keys on devices running Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to retrieve the RSA private key by means of a  Lenstra side-channel attack  against the targeted device. "If an attacker obtains the RSA private key, they could use the key to impersonate a device that is running Cisco ASA Software or Cisco FTD Software or to decrypt the device traffic," Cisco warned in an advisory issued on August 10. Cisco noted that the flaw impacts only Cisco ASA Software releases 9.16.1 and later and Cisco FTD Software releases 7.0.0 and later. Affected products are listed below -

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday  added  two flaws to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , citing evidence of active exploitation. The two high-severity issues relate to weaknesses in Zimbra Collaboration, both of which could be chained to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution on affected email servers - CVE-2022-27925  (CVSS score: 7.2) - Remote code execution (RCE) through mboximport from authenticated user (fixed in  versions  8.8.15 Patch 31 and 9.0.0 Patch 24 released in March) CVE-2022-37042  - Authentication bypass in MailboxImportServlet (fixed in  versions  8.8.15 Patch 33 and 9.0.0 Patch 26 released in August) "If you are running a Zimbra version that is older than Zimbra 8.8.15 patch 33 or Zimbra 9.0.0 patch 26 you should update to the latest patch as soon as possible," Zimbra  warned  earlier this week. CISA has not shared any information on the attacks exploiting the flaws but cybersecurity fi

As many as  121 new security flaws  were patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for the month of August, which also includes a fix for a Support Diagnostic Tool vulnerability that the company said is being actively exploited in the wild. Of the 121 bugs, 17 are rated Critical, 102 are rated Important, one is rated Moderate, and one is rated Low in severity. Two of the issues have been listed as publicly known at the time of the release. It's worth noting that the 121 security flaws are in addition to  25 shortcomings  the tech giant addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser late last month and the previous week. Topping the list of patches is  CVE-2022-34713  (CVSS score: 7.8), a case of remote code execution affecting the Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT), making it the second flaw in the same component after  Follina  (CVE-2022-30190) to be weaponized in  real-world attacks  within three months. The vulnerability is also said to be a var

Twitter on Friday revealed that a now-patched zero-day bug was used to link phone numbers and emails to user accounts on the social media platform. "As a result of the vulnerability, if someone submitted an email address or phone number to Twitter's systems, Twitter's systems would tell the person what Twitter account the submitted email addresses or phone number was associated with, if any," the company  said  in an advisory. Twitter said the bug, which it was  made aware  of in January 2022, stemmed from a code change introduced in June 2021. No passwords were exposed as a result of the incident. The six-month delay in making this public stems from new evidence last month that an unidentified actor had potentially taken advantage of the flaw before the fix to scrape user information and sell it for profit on  Breach Forums . Although Twitter didn't reveal the exact number of impacted users, the forum post made by the threat actor shows that the flaw was pr

A threat actor is said to have "highly likely" exploited a security flaw in an outdated Atlassian Confluence server to deploy a never-before-seen backdoor against an unnamed organization in the research and technical services sector. The attack, which transpired over a seven-day-period during the end of May, has been attributed to a threat activity cluster tracked by cybersecurity firm Deepwatch as  TAC-040 . "The evidence indicates that the threat actor executed malicious commands with a parent process of tomcat9.exe in Atlassian's Confluence directory," the company  said . "After the initial compromise, the threat actor ran various commands to enumerate the local system, network, and Active Directory environment." The Atlassian vulnerability suspected to have been exploited is  CVE-2022-26134 , an Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) injection flaw that paves the way for arbitrary code execution on a Confluence Server or Data Center instance.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday  added  the recently disclosed Atlassian security flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-26138 , concerns the use of hard-coded credentials when the Questions For Confluence app is enabled in Confluence Server and Data Center instances. "A remote unauthenticated attacker can use these credentials to log into Confluence and access all content accessible to users in the confluence-users group," CISA  notes  in its advisory. Depending on the page restrictions and the information a company has in Confluence, successful exploitation of the shortcoming could lead to the disclosure of sensitive information. Although the bug was addressed by the Australian software company last week in versions 2.7.38 and 3.0.5, it has since come under active exploitation , cybersecurity firm Rapid7 disclosed this week. &qu

A week after Atlassian rolled out patches to contain a critical flaw in its Questions For Confluence app for Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center, the shortcoming has now come under active exploitation in the wild. The bug in question is  CVE-2022-26138 , which concerns the use of a hard-coded password in the app that could be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to gain unrestricted access to all pages in Confluence. The real-world exploitation follows the release of the hard-coded credentials on Twitter, prompting the Australian software company to prioritize patches to mitigate potential threats targeting the flaw. "Unsurprisingly, it didn't take long [...] to observe exploitation once the hard-coded credentials were released, given the high value of Confluence for attackers who often jump on Confluence vulnerabilities to execute ransomware attacks," Rapid7 security researcher Glenn Thorpe  said . It's worth noting that the bug only exists

Network security company SonicWall on Friday rolled out fixes to mitigate a critical SQL injection (SQLi) vulnerability affecting its Analytics On-Prem and Global Management System (GMS) products. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-22280 , is rated 9.4 for severity on the CVSS scoring system and stems from what the company describes is an "improper neutralization of special elements" used in an SQL command that could lead to an unauthenticated SQL injection. "Without sufficient removal or quoting of SQL syntax in user-controllable inputs, the generated SQL query can cause those inputs to be interpreted as SQL instead of ordinary user data," MITRE  notes  in its description of SQL injection. "This can be used to alter query logic to bypass security checks, or to insert additional statements that modify the back-end database, possibly including execution of system commands." H4lo and Catalpa of DBappSecurity HAT Lab have been credited with discov

With global cybercrime costs expected to reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, according to Cybersecurity Ventures, it comes as little surprise that the risk of attack is companies' biggest concern globally. To help businesses uncover and fix the vulnerabilities and misconfigurations affecting their systems, there is an (over)abundance of solutions available.  But beware, they may not give you a full and continuous view of your weaknesses if used in isolation. With huge financial gains to be had from each successful breach, hackers do not rest in their hunt for flaws and use a wide range of tools and scanners to help them in their search. Beating these criminals means staying one step ahead and using the most comprehensive and responsive vulnerability detection support you can.  We'll go through each solution and explain how you can maintain your vigilance. Of course, vulnerability management is just one step businesses must take to prevent a breach; there's also proper

Microsoft on Wednesday shed light on a now patched security vulnerability affecting Apple's operating systems that, if successfully exploited, could allow attackers to escalate device privileges and deploy malware. "An attacker could take advantage of this sandbox escape vulnerability to gain elevated privileges on the affected device or execute malicious commands like installing additional payloads," Jonathan Bar Or of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in a write-up. Tracked as  CVE-2022-26706  (CVSS score: 5.5), the security vulnerability impacts iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS and was fixed by Apple in May 2022. Calling it an access issue affecting the LaunchServices (launchd) component, the iPhone maker noted that "A sandboxed process may be able to circumvent sandbox restrictions," adding it mitigated the issue with additional restrictions. While Apple's  App Sandbox  is designed to tightly regulate a third-party app's acce

Microsoft released its monthly round of Patch Tuesday updates to address  84 new security flaws  spanning multiple product categories, counting a zero-day vulnerability that's under active attack in the wild. Of the 84 shortcomings, four are rated Critical, and 80 are rated Important in severity. Also separately resolved by the tech giant are  two other bugs  in the Chromium-based Edge browser, one of which plugs another  zero-day flaw  that Google disclosed as being actively exploited in real-world attacks. Top of the list of this month's updates is  CVE-2022-22047  (CVSS score: 7.8), a case of privilege escalation in the Windows Client Server Runtime Subsystem ( CSRSS ) that could be abused by an attacker to gain SYSTEM permissions. "With this level of access, the attackers are able to disable local services such as Endpoint Detection and Security tools," Kev Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs, told The Hacker News. "With SYSTEM acce

A newly observed phishing campaign is leveraging the recently disclosed Follina security vulnerability to distribute a previously undocumented backdoor on Windows systems. "Rozena is a backdoor malware that is capable of injecting a remote shell connection back to the attacker's machine," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said  in a report this week. Tracked as  CVE-2022-30190 , the now-patched Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) remote code execution vulnerability has come under heavy exploitation in recent weeks ever since it came to light in late May 2022. The starting point for the latest attack chain observed by Fortinet is a weaponized  Office document  that, when opened, connects to a  Discord CDN URL  to retrieve an HTML file (" index.htm ") that, in turn, invokes the diagnostic utility using a PowerShell command to download next-stage payloads from the same CDN attachment space. This includes the Rozena implant ("Word

Google on Monday shipped security updates to address a high-severity zero-day vulnerability in its Chrome web browser that it said is being exploited in the wild. The shortcoming, tracked as  CVE-2022-2294 , relates to a heap overflow flaw in the  WebRTC  component that provides real-time audio and video communication capabilities in browsers without the need to install plugins or download native apps. Heap buffer overflows, also referred to as heap overrun or heap smashing, occur when data is overwritten in the  heap area of the memory , leading to arbitrary code execution or a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. "Heap-based overflows can be used to overwrite function pointers that may be living in memory, pointing it to the attacker's code," MITRE  explains . "When the consequence is arbitrary code execution, this can often be used to subvert any other security service." Credited with reporting the flaw on July 1, 2022, is Jan Vojtesek from the Avast Thre

Fixing indirect vulnerabilities is one of those complex, tedious and, quite frankly, boring tasks that no one really wants to touch. No one except for  Debricked , it seems. Sure, there are lots of ways to do it manually, but can it be done automatically with minimal risk of breaking changes? The Debricked team decided to find out.  A forest full of fragile trees So, where do you even start? Firstly, there needs to be a way to fix the vulnerability, which, for indirect dependencies, is no walk in the park. Secondly, it needs to be done in a safe way, or, without anything breaking.  You see, indirect dependencies are introduced deep down the dependency tree and it's very tricky to get to the exact version you want. As Debricked's Head of R&D once put it, " You are turning the knobs by playing around with your direct dependencies and praying to Torvalds that the correct indirect packages are resolved. When Torvalds is in your favour, you have to sacrifice some cloud