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Networking equipment maker Zyxel has released patches for a critical security flaw in its firewall devices that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution on affected systems. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2023-28771 , is rated 9.8 on the CVSS scoring system. Researchers from TRAPA Security have been credited with reporting the flaw. "Improper error message handling in some firewall versions could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute some OS commands remotely by sending crafted packets to an affected device," Zyxel  said  in an advisory on April 25, 2023. Products impacted by the flaw are - ATP (versions ZLD V4.60 to V5.35, patched in ZLD V5.36) USG FLEX (versions ZLD V4.60 to V5.35, patched in ZLD V5.36) VPN (versions ZLD V4.60 to V5.35, patched in ZLD V5.36), and ZyWALL/USG (versions ZLD V4.60 to V4.73, patched in ZLD V4.73 Patch 1) Zyxel has also  addressed  a high-severity post-authentication command injection vulnerability affecting select firewa

The maintainers of the  Apache Superset  open source data visualization software have released fixes to plug an insecure default configuration that could lead to remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as  CVE-2023-27524  (CVSS score: 8.9), impacts versions up to and including 2.0.1 and relates to the use of a default SECRET_KEY that could be abused by attackers to authenticate and access unauthorized resources on internet-exposed installations. Naveen Sunkavally, the chief architect at Horizon3.ai, described the issue as "a dangerous default configuration in Apache Superset that allows an unauth attacker to gain remote code execution, harvest credentials, and compromise data." It's worth noting that the flaw does not affect Superset instances that have changed the default value for the SECRET_KEY config to a more cryptographically secure random string. The cybersecurity firm, which found that the SECRET_KEY is defaulted to the value "\x02\x01thisismy

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

Print management software provider PaperCut said that it has "evidence to suggest that unpatched servers are being exploited in the wild," citing two vulnerability reports from cybersecurity company Trend Micro. "PaperCut has conducted analysis on all customer reports, and the earliest signature of suspicious activity on a customer server potentially linked to this vulnerability is 14th April 01:29 AEST / 13th April 15:29 UTC," it further  added . The update comes as the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a critical improper access control flaw ( CVE-2023-27350 , CVSS score: 9.8) in PaperCut MF and NG to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. Cybersecurity company Huntress, which found about 1,800 publicly exposed PaperCut servers, said it observed PowerShell commands being spawned from PaperCut software to install remote management and maintenance (RMM) software like Atera an

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added three security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The  three vulnerabilities  are as follows - CVE-2023-28432  (CVSS score - 7.5) - MinIO Information Disclosure Vulnerability  CVE-2023-27350  (CVSS score - 9.8) - PaperCut MF/NG Improper Access Control Vulnerability CVE-2023-2136  (CVSS score - TBD) - Google Chrome Skia Integer Overflow Vulnerability "In a cluster deployment, MinIO returns all environment variables, including MINIO_SECRET_KEY and MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD, resulting in information disclosure," MinIO maintainers  said  in an advisory published on March 21, 2023. Data gathered by GreyNoise shows that as many as  18 unique malicious IP addresses  from the U.S., the Netherlands, France, Japan, and Finland have  attempted to exploit  the flaw over the past 30 days. The threat intelligence company, in an  alert  p

Cisco and VMware have released security updates to address critical security flaws in their products that could be exploited by malicious actors to execute arbitrary code on affected systems. The most severe of the vulnerabilities is a command injection flaw  in Cisco Industrial Network Director  (CVE-2023-20036, CVSS score: 9.9), which resides in the web UI component and arises as a result of improper input validation when  uploading a Device Pack . "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary commands as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM on the underlying operating system of an affected device," Cisco  said  in an advisory released on April 19, 2023. The networking equipment major also resolved a medium-severity file permissions vulnerability in the same product (CVE-2023-20039, CVSS score: 5.5) that an authenticated, local attacker could abuse to view sensitive information. Patches have been made available in  version 1.11.3 , with Cisco crediting an unnamed

A chain of two critical flaws has been disclosed in Alibaba Cloud's ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL and AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL that could be exploited to breach tenant isolation protections and access sensitive data belonging to other customers. "The vulnerabilities potentially allowed unauthorized access to Alibaba Cloud customers' PostgreSQL databases and the ability to perform a supply chain attack on both Alibaba database services, leading to an RCE on Alibaba database services," cloud security firm Wiz  said  in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The  issues , dubbed  BrokenSesame , were reported to Alibaba Cloud in December 2022, following mitigations were deployed by the company on April 12, 2023. There is no evidence to suggest that the weaknesses were exploited in the wild. In a nutshell, the vulnerabilities – a privilege escalation flaw in AnalyticDB and a remote code execution bug in ApsaraDB RDS – made it possible to elevate privileges to root w

Fortra, the company behind Cobalt Strike, shed light on a zero-day remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in its GoAnywhere MFT tool that has come under  active   exploitation  by ransomware actors to steal sensitive data. The high-severity flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-0669  (CVSS score: 7.2), concerns a case of pre-authenticated command injection that could be abused to achieve code execution. The issue was patched by the company in version 7.1.2 of the software in February 2023, but not before it was weaponized as a zero-day since January 18. Fortra, which worked with Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, said it was made aware of suspicious activity associated with some of the file transfer instances on January 30, 2023. "The unauthorized party used CVE-2023-0669 to create unauthorized user accounts in some MFTaaS customer environments," the company  said . "For a subset of these customers, the unauthorized party leveraged these user accounts to download files from their h

Israeli spyware maker NSO Group deployed at least three novel "zero-click" exploits against iPhones in 2022 to infiltrate defenses erected by Apple and deploy Pegasus, according to the latest findings from Citizen Lab. "NSO Group customers widely deployed at least three iOS 15 and iOS 16 zero-click exploit chains against civil society targets around the world," the interdisciplinary laboratory based at the University of Toronto  said . NSO Group is the manufacturer of  Pegasus , a sophisticated cyber weapon that's capable of extracting sensitive information stored in a device – e.g., messages, locations, photos, and call logs, among others — in real-time. It's typically delivered to targeted iPhones using zero-click and/or zero-day exploits. While it has been pitched as a tool for law enforcement agencies to combat serious crimes such as child sexual abuse and terrorism, it has also been deployed illegally by authoritarian governments to spy on human rig

Google on Tuesday rolled out emergency fixes to address another actively exploited high-severity zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser. The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-2136 , is  described  as a case of  integer overflow  in  Skia , an open source 2D graphics library. Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on April 12, 2023. "Integer overflow in Skia in Google Chrome prior to 112.0.5615.137 allowed a remote attacker who had compromised the renderer process to potentially perform a sandbox escape via a crafted HTML page,"  according  to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The tech giant, which also fixed seven other security issues with the latest update, said it's aware of active exploitation of the flaw, but did not disclose additional details to prevent further abuse. The development marks the second Chrome zero-day vulnerability to be exploited by malicious actors th

Google on Friday released out-of-band updates to resolve an actively exploited zero-day flaw in its Chrome web browser, making it the first such bug to be addressed since the start of the year. Tracked as  CVE-2023-2033 , the high-severity vulnerability has been described as a  type confusion issue  in the V8 JavaScript engine. Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the issue on April 11, 2023. "Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 112.0.5615.121 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page,"  according  to the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The tech giant  acknowledged  that "an exploit for CVE-2023-2033 exists in the wild," but stopped short of sharing additional technical specifics or indicators of compromise (IoCs) to prevent further exploitation by threat actors. CVE-2023-2033 also appears to share similarities with  CVE-2022-1096

Google on Thursday outlined a set of initiatives aimed at improving the vulnerability management ecosystem and establishing greater transparency measures around exploitation. "While the notoriety of zero-day vulnerabilities typically makes headlines, risks remain even after they're known and fixed, which is the real story," the company said in an announcement. "Those risks span everything from lag time in OEM adoption, patch testing pain points, end user update issues and more." Security threats also stem from incomplete patches applied by vendors, with a chunk of the zero-days exploited in the wild turning out to be variants of previously patched vulnerabilities. Mitigating such risks requires addressing the root cause of the vulnerabilities and prioritizing modern secure software development practices to eliminate entire classes of threats and block potential attack avenues. Taking these factors into consideration, Google said it's forming a Hacking

It's the second Tuesday of the month, and Microsoft has released another set of security updates to fix  a total of 97 flaws  impacting its software, one of which has been actively exploited in ransomware attacks in the wild. Seven of the 97 bugs are rated Critical and 90 are rated Important in severity. Interestingly, 45 of the shortcomings are remote code execution flaws, followed by 20 elevation of privilege vulnerabilities. The updates also follow fixes for 26 vulnerabilities in its Edge browser that were released over the past month. The security flaw that's come under active exploitation is  CVE-2023-28252  (CVSS score: 7.8), a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Microsoft said in an advisory, crediting researchers Boris Larin, Genwei Jiang, and Quan Jin for reporting the issue. CVE-2023-28252 is the fourth privilege escalation

The maintainers of the vm2 JavaScript sandbox module have shipped a patch to address a critical flaw that could be abused to break out of security boundaries and execute arbitrary shellcode. The flaw, which affects all versions, including and prior to 3.9.14, was  reported  by researchers from South Korea-based  KAIST WSP Lab  on April 6, 2023, prompting vm2 to release a fix with  version 3.9.15  on Friday. "A threat actor can bypass the sandbox protections to gain remote code execution rights on the host running the sandbox," vm2  disclosed  in an advisory. The vulnerability has been assigned the identified  CVE-2023-29017  and is rated 9.8 on the CVSS scoring system. The issue stems from the fact that it does not properly handle errors that occur in asynchronous functions. vm2 is a  popular library  that's used to run untrusted code in an isolated environment on Node.js. It has nearly four million weekly downloads and is used in 721 packages . KAIST security res

Critical security flaws in Cacti, Realtek, and IBM Aspera Faspex are being exploited by various threat actors in hacks targeting unpatched systems. This entails the abuse of  CVE-2022-46169  (CVSS score: 9.8) and  CVE-2021-35394  (CVSS score: 9.8) to deliver  MooBot  and  ShellBot  (aka PerlBot), Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a report published this week. CVE-2022-46169  relates to a critical authentication bypass and command injection flaw in Cacti servers that allows an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code.  CVE-2021-35394  also concerns an arbitrary command injection vulnerability impacting the Realtek Jungle SDK that was patched in 2021. While the latter has been previously exploited to distribute botnets like Mirai, Gafgyt, Mozi, and RedGoBot, the development marks the first time it has been utilized to deploy MooBot, a Mirai variant known to be active since 2019. The Cacti flaw, besides being leveraged for MooBot attacks, has also been observed serving ShellB

Unknown threat actors are actively exploiting a recently patched security vulnerability in the Elementor Pro website builder plugin for WordPress. The flaw, described as a case of broken access control, impacts versions 3.11.6 and earlier. It was addressed by the plugin maintainers in version 3.11.7 released on March 22. "Improved code security enforcement in WooCommerce components," the Tel Aviv-based company  said  in its release notes. The premium plugin is  estimated  to be used on over 12 million sites. Successful exploitation of the high-severity flaw allows an authenticated attacker to complete a takeover of a WordPress site that has WooCommerce enabled. "This makes it possible for a malicious user to turn on the registration page (if disabled) and set the default user role to administrator so they can create an account that instantly has the administrator privileges," Patchstack  said  in an alert of March 30, 2023. "After this, they are likely t

Details have emerged about a now-patched vulnerability in Azure Service Fabric Explorer ( SFX ) that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. Tracked as  CVE-2023-23383  (CVSS score: 8.2), the issue has been dubbed "Super FabriXss" by Orca Security, a nod to the  FabriXss flaw  (CVE-2022-35829, CVSS score: 6.2) that was fixed by Microsoft in October 2022. "The Super FabriXss vulnerability enables remote attackers to leverage an XSS vulnerability to achieve remote code execution on a container hosted on a Service Fabric node without the need for authentication," security researcher Lidor Ben Shitrit  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. XSS refers to a kind of  client-side code injection  attack that makes it possible to upload malicious scripts into otherwise trusted websites. The scripts then get executed every time a victim visits the compromised website, thereby leading to unintended consequences. While both FabriXss and Super FabriXss

A number of zero-day vulnerabilities that were addressed last year were exploited by commercial spyware vendors to target Android and iOS devices, Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has revealed. The two distinct campaigns were both limited and highly targeted, taking advantage of the patch gap between the release of a fix and when it was actually deployed on the targeted devices. The scale of the two campaigns and the nature of the targets are currently unknown. "These vendors are enabling the proliferation of dangerous hacking tools, arming governments that would not be able to develop these capabilities in-house," TAG's Clement Lecigne  said  in a new report. "While use of surveillance technologies may be legal under national or international laws, they are often found to be used by governments to target dissidents, journalists, human rights workers, and opposition party politicians." The first of the two operations took place in November 2022 and

Microsoft on Friday shared guidance to help customers discover indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with a recently patched Outlook vulnerability. Tracked as CVE-2023-23397 (CVSS score: 9.8), the  critical flaw  relates to a case of privilege escalation that could be exploited to steal NT LAN Manager (NTLM) hashes and stage a  relay attack  without requiring any user interaction. "External attackers could send specially crafted emails that will cause a connection from the victim to an untrusted location of attackers' control," the company  noted  in an advisory released this month. "This will leak the  Net-NTLMv2 hash  of the victim to the untrusted network which an attacker can then relay to another service and authenticate as the victim." The vulnerability was resolved by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for March 2023, but not before Russia-based threat actors weaponized the flaw in attacks targeting government, transportation, en