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PC maker Lenovo has addressed yet another set of three shortcomings in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware affecting several Yoga, IdeaPad, and ThinkBook devices. "The vulnerabilities allow disabling UEFI Secure Boot or restoring factory default Secure Boot databases (incl. dbx): all simply from an OS," Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET  explained  in a series of tweets. UEFI refers to software that acts as an interface between the operating system and the firmware embedded in the device's hardware. Because UEFI is  responsible  for launching the operating system when a device is powered on, it has made the technology an attractive option for threat actors looking to  drop malware  that's difficult to detect and remove. Viewed in that light, the flaws, tracked as CVE-2022-3430, CVE-2022-3431, and CVE-2022-3432, could be abused by an adversary to turn off Secure Boot, a security mechanism that's designed to prevent malicious programs from lo

VMware has patched five security flaws affecting its  Workspace ONE Assist  solution, some of which could be exploited to bypass authentication and obtain elevated permissions. Topping the list are three critical vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2022-31685, CVE-2022-31686, and CVE-2022-31687. All the shortcomings are rated 9.8 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system. CVE-2022-31685 is an authentication bypass flaw that could be abused by an attacker with network access to VMware Workspace ONE Assist to obtain administrative access without the need to authenticate to the application. CVE-2022-31686 has been described by the virtualization services provider as a "broken authentication method" vulnerability, and CVE-2022-31687 as a "Broken Access Control" flaw. "A malicious actor with network access may be able to obtain administrative access without the need to authenticate to the application," VMware  said  in an advisory for CVE-2022-31686 and CVE-202

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Microsoft is warning of an uptick among nation-state and criminal actors increasingly leveraging publicly-disclosed zero-day vulnerabilities for breaching target environments. The tech giant, in its 114-page  Digital Defense Report , said it has "observed a reduction in the time between the announcement of a vulnerability and the commoditization of that vulnerability," making it imperative that organizations patch such exploits in a timely manner. This also corroborates with an April 2022 advisory from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which  found  that bad actors are "aggressively" targeting newly disclosed software bugs against broad targets globally. Microsoft noted that it only takes 14 days on average for an exploit to be available in the wild after public disclosure of a flaw, stating that while zero-day attacks are initially limited in scope, they tend to be swiftly adopted by other threat actors, leading to indiscriminat

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  published  three Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories about multiple vulnerabilities in software from ETIC Telecom, Nokia, and Delta Industrial Automation. Prominent among them is a set of three flaws affecting ETIC Telecom's Remote Access Server (RAS), which "could allow an attacker to obtain sensitive information and compromise the vulnerable device and other connected machines," CISA said. This includes CVE-2022-3703 (CVSS score: 9.0), a critical flaw that stems from the RAS web portal's inability to verify the authenticity of firmware, thereby making it possible to slip in a rogue package that grants backdoor access to the adversary. Two other flaws relate to a directory traversal bug in the RAS API (CVE-2022-41607, CVSS score: 8.6) and a file upload issue (CVE-2022-40981, CVSS score: 8.3) that can be exploited to read arbitrary files and upload malicious files that can compromise th

Multiple vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Checkmk IT Infrastructure monitoring software that could be chained together by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to fully take over affected servers.  "These vulnerabilities can be chained together by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain code execution on the server running Checkmk version 2.1.0p10 and lower," SonarSource researcher Stefan Schiller  said  in a technical analysis. Checkmk's open source edition of the monitoring tool is based on  Nagios Core  and offers integrations with  NagVis  for the visualization and generation of topological maps of infrastructures, servers, ports, and processes. According to its Munich-based developer tribe29 GmbH, its Enterprise and Raw editions are used by  over 2,000 customers , including Airbus, Adobe, NASA, Siemens, Vodafone, and others. The four vulnerabilities, which consist of two Critical and two Medium severity bugs, are as follows - A  code injection flaw  

The OpenSSL project has rolled out fixes to contain two high-severity flaws in its widely used cryptography library that could result in a denial-of-service (DoS) and remote code execution. The issues, tracked as  CVE-2022-3602 and CVE-2022-3786 , have been described as buffer overrun vulnerabilities that can be triggered during X.509 certificate verification by supplying a specially-crafted email address. "In a TLS client, this can be triggered by connecting to a malicious server," OpenSSL said in an advisory for CVE-2022-3786. "In a TLS server, this can be triggered if the server requests client authentication and a malicious client connects." OpenSSL is an  open source implementation  of the SSL and TLS protocols used for secure communication and is baked into several operating systems and a wide range of software . Versions 3.0.0 through 3.0.6 of the library are affected by the new flaws, which has been remediated in version 3.0.7. It's worth noting tha

Microsoft on Tuesday said it addressed an authentication bypass vulnerability in  Jupyter Notebooks  for Azure Cosmos DB that enabled full read and write access. The tech giant said the problem was introduced on August 12, 2022, and rectified worldwide on October 6, 2022, two days after responsible disclosure from Orca Security, which dubbed the flaw  CosMiss . "In short, if an attacker had knowledge of a Notebook's 'forwardingId,' which is the UUID of the Notebook Workspace, they would have had full permissions on the Notebook without having to authenticate, including read and write access, and the ability to modify the file system of the container running the notebook," researchers Lidor Ben Shitrit and Roee Sagi said. This container modification could ultimately pave the way for obtaining remote code execution in the Notebook container by overwriting a Python file associated with the  Cosmos DB Explorer  to spawn a reverse shell. Successful exploitation

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and Git, has his own law in software development, and it goes like this: " given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow ." This phrase puts the finger on the very principle of open source: the more, the merrier - if the code is easily available for anyone and everyone to fix bugs, it's pretty safe. But is it? Or is the saying "all bugs are shallow" only true for  shallow  bugs and not ones that lie deeper? It turns out that security flaws in open source can be harder to find than we thought. Emil Wåreus, Head of R&D at  Debricked , took it upon himself to look deeper into the community's performance. As the data scientist he is, he, of course, asked the data:  how good is the open source community at finding vulnerabilities in a timely manner ? The thrill of the (vulnerability) hunt Finding open source vulnerabilities is typically done by the maintainers of the open source project, users, auditors, or external secur

Cisco has warned of active exploitation attempts targeting a pair of two-year-old security flaws in the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows. Tracked as  CVE-2020-3153  (CVSS score: 6.5) and  CVE-2020-3433  (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerabilities could enable local authenticated attackers to perform DLL hijacking and copy arbitrary files to system directories with elevated privileges.  While CVE-2020-3153 was addressed by Cisco in February 2020, a fix for CVE-2020-3433 was shipped in August 2020. "In October 2022, the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team became aware of additional attempted exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild," the networking equipment maker said in an updated advisory. "Cisco continues to strongly recommend that customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability." The alert comes as the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) moved to add the two flaws to its K

VMware on Tuesday shipped security updates to address a critical security flaw in its VMware Cloud Foundation product. Tracked as CVE-2021-39144, the issue has been rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system, and relates to a remote code execution vulnerability via XStream open source library. "Due to an unauthenticated endpoint that leverages XStream for input serialization in VMware Cloud Foundation (NSX-V), a malicious actor can get remote code execution in the context of 'root' on the appliance," the company  said  in an advisory. In light of the severity of the flaw and its relatively low bar for exploitation, the Palo Alto-based virtualization services provider has also made available a  patch  for end-of-life products. Also addressed by VMware as part of the update is CVE-2022-31678 (CVSS score: 5.3), an XML External Entity ( XXE ) vulnerability that could be exploited to result in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition or unauthorized info

A high-severity vulnerability has been disclosed in the SQLite database library, which was introduced as part of a code change dating all the way back to October 2000 and could enable attackers to crash or control programs. Tracked as  CVE-2022-35737  (CVSS score: 7.5), the 22-year-old issue affects SQLite versions  1.0.12  through 3.39.1, and has been addressed in  version 3.39.2  released on July 21, 2022. "CVE-2022-35737 is  exploitable  on 64-bit systems, and exploitability depends on how the program is compiled," Trail of Bits researcher Andreas Kellas  said  in a technical write-up published today. "Arbitrary code execution is confirmed when the library is compiled without stack canaries, but unconfirmed when stack canaries are present, and denial-of-service is confirmed in all cases." Programmed in C, SQLite is the most widely used database engine , included by default in Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS, as well as popular web browsers such as Googl

Tech giant Apple on Monday rolled out updates to remediate a zero-day flaw in iOS and iPadOS that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. The weakness, given the identifier CVE-2022-42827 , has been described as an out-of-bounds write issue in the Kernel, which could be abused by a rogue application to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges. Successful exploitation of out-of-bounds write flaws, which typically occur when a program attempts to write data to a memory location that's outside of the bounds of what it is allowed to access, can result in corruption of data, a crash, or execution of unauthorized code. The iPhone maker said it addressed the bug with improved bounds checking, while crediting an anonymous researcher for reporting the vulnerability. As is usually the case with actively exploited zero-day flaws, Apple refrained from sharing more specifics about the shortcoming other than acknowledging that it's "aware of a report that this i

A now-patched vulnerability in VMware Workspace ONE Access has been observed being exploited to deliver both cryptocurrency miners and ransomware on affected machines. "The attacker intends to utilize a victim's resources as much as possible, not only to install RAR1Ransom for extortion, but also to spread GuardMiner to collect cryptocurrency," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin  said  in a Thursday report. The issue, tracked as CVE-2022-22954 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns a remote code execution vulnerability that stems from a case of server-side template injection. Although the shortcoming was addressed by the virtualization services provider in April 2022, it has since come under active exploitation in the wild. Fortinet said it observed in August 2022 attacks that sought to weaponize the flaw to deploy the  Mirai botnet  on Linux devices as well as the RAR1Ransom and  GuardMiner , a variant of the XMRig Monero miner. The Mirai sample is retrieved fr

WordPress security company Wordfence on Thursday said it started detecting exploitation attempts targeting the newly disclosed flaw in Apache Commons Text on October 18, 2022. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-42889  aka Text4Shell , has been assigned a severity ranking of 9.8 out of a possible 10.0 on the CVSS scale and affects versions 1.5 through 1.9 of the library. It's also similar to the now infamous  Log4Shell  vulnerability in that the  issue  is rooted in the manner  string substitutions  carried out during  DNS, script, and URL lookups  could lead to the execution of arbitrary code on susceptible systems when passing untrusted input. "The attacker can send a crafted payload remotely using 'script,' 'dns,' and 'url' lookups to achieve arbitrary remote code execution," the Zscaler ThreatLabZ team explained . A  successful exploitation of the flaw  can enable a threat actor to open a reverse shell connection with the vulnerable

HelpSystems, the company behind the Cobalt Strike software platform, has released an out-of-band security update to address a remote code execution vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of targeted systems. Cobalt Strike is a commercial red-team framework that's mainly used for adversary simulation, but cracked versions of the software have been  actively   abused  by ransomware operators and espionage-focused advanced persistent threat (APT) groups alike. The  post-exploitation tool  consists of a team server, which functions as a command-and-control (C2) component, and a beacon, the default malware used to create a connection to the team server and drop next-stage payloads. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2022-42948 , affects Cobalt Strike version 4.7.1, and stems from an incomplete patch released on September 20, 2022, to rectify a cross-site scripting ( XSS ) vulnerability ( CVE-2022-39197 ) that could lead to remote code execution. "The XSS vulnerabi

New research has disclosed what's being called a security vulnerability in Microsoft 365 that could be exploited to infer message contents due to the use of a broken cryptographic algorithm. "The [Office 365 Message Encryption] messages are encrypted in insecure Electronic Codebook ( ECB ) mode of operation," Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure  said  in a report published last week. Office 365 Message Encryption (OME) is a security mechanism used to send and receive encrypted email messages between users inside and outside an organization without revealing anything about the communications themselves. A consequence of the newly disclosed issue is that rogue third-parties gaining access to the encrypted email messages may be able to decipher the messages, effectively breaking confidentiality protections. Electronic Codebook is one of the simplest modes of encryption wherein each message block is encoded separately by a key, meaning identical plaintext blocks wi

A vulnerability in Siemens Simatic programmable logic controller (PLC) can be exploited to retrieve the hard-coded, global private cryptographic keys and seize control of the devices. "An attacker can use these keys to perform multiple advanced attacks against Siemens SIMATIC devices and the related  TIA Portal , while bypassing all four of its  access level protections ," industrial cybersecurity company Claroty  said  in a new report. "A malicious actor could use this secret information to compromise the entire SIMATIC S7-1200/1500 product line in an irreparable way." The critical vulnerability, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-38465 , is rated 9.3 on the CVSS scoring scale and has been addressed by Siemens as part of security updates issued on October 11, 2022. The list of impacted products and versions is below - SIMATIC Drive Controller family (all versions before 2.9.2) SIMATIC ET 200SP Open Controller CPU 1515SP PC2, including SIPLUS variants (all

Fortinet on Monday revealed that the newly patched critical security vulnerability impacting its firewall and proxy products is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2022-40684  (CVSS score: 9.6), the flaw relates to an authentication bypass in FortiOS, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager that could allow a remote attacker to perform unauthorized operations on the administrative interface via specially crafted HTTP(S) requests. "Fortinet is aware of an instance where this vulnerability was exploited, and recommends immediately validating your systems against the following indicator of compromise in the device's logs: user='Local_Process_Access,'" the company  noted  in an advisory. The list of impacted devices is below - FortiOS version 7.2.0 through 7.2.1 FortiOS version 7.0.0 through 7.0.6 FortiProxy version 7.2.0 FortiProxy version 7.0.0 through 7.0.6 FortiSwitchManager version 7.2.0, and FortiSwitchManager version 7.0.0 Updates hav

Fortinet has privately warned its customers of a security flaw affecting FortiGate firewalls and FortiProxy web proxies that could potentially allow an attacker to perform unauthorized actions on susceptible devices. Tracked as CVE-2022-40684 (CVSS score: 9.6), the critical flaw relates to an authentication bypass vulnerability that may permit an unauthenticated adversary to carry out arbitrary operations on the administrative interface via a specially crafted HTTP(S) request. The issue impacts the following versions, and has been addressed in FortiOS versions  7.0.7  and  7.2.2 , and FortiProxy versions 7.0.7 and 7.2.1 released this week: FortiOS - From 7.0.0 to 7.0.6 and from 7.2.0 to 7.2.1 FortiProxy - From 7.0.0 to 7.0.6 and 7.2.0 "Due to the ability to exploit this issue remotely, Fortinet is strongly recommending all customers with the vulnerable versions to perform an immediate upgrade," the company  cautioned  in an alert shared by a security researcher w

Security researchers have shared details about a now-addressed security flaw in Apple's macOS operating system that could be potentially exploited to run malicious applications in a manner that can bypass Apple's security measures. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2022-32910 , is rooted in the built-in Archive Utility and "could lead to the execution of an unsigned and unnotarized application without displaying security prompts to the user, by using a specially crafted archive," Apple device management firm Jamf said in an analysis. Following responsible disclosure on May 31, 2022, Apple addressed the issue as part of  macOS Big Sur 11.6.8  and  Monterey 12.5  released on July 20, 2022. The tech giant, for its part, also revised the earlier-issued advisories as of October 4 to add an entry for the flaw. Apple described the bug as a logic issue that could allow an archive file to get around Gatekeeper checks, which is designed so as to ascertain that only trust