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Three unpatched high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in the  NGINX Ingress controller  for Kubernetes that could be weaponized by a threat actor to steal secret credentials from the cluster. The vulnerabilities are as follows -  CVE-2022-4886  (CVSS score: 8.8) -  Ingress-nginx  path sanitization can be bypassed to obtain the credentials of the ingress-nginx controller CVE-2023-5043  (CVSS score: 7.6) - Ingress-nginx annotation injection causes arbitrary command execution CVE-2023-5044  (CVSS score: 7.6) - Code injection via nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/permanent-redirect annotation "These vulnerabilities enable an attacker who can control the configuration of the Ingress object to steal secret credentials from the cluster," Ben Hirschberg, CTO and co-founder of Kubernetes security platform ARMO, said of CVE-2023-5043 and CVE-2023-5044. Successful exploitation of the flaws could allow an adversary to inject arbitrary code into the ingress controller proce

Google has announced that it's expanding its Vulnerability Rewards Program ( VRP ) to compensate researchers for finding attack scenarios tailored to generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems in an effort to  bolster AI safety and security . "Generative AI raises new and different concerns than traditional digital security, such as the potential for unfair bias, model manipulation or misinterpretations of data (hallucinations)," Google's Laurie Richardson and Royal Hansen  said . Some of the categories that are in scope  include  prompt injections, leakage of sensitive data from training datasets, model manipulation, adversarial perturbation attacks that trigger misclassification, and model theft. It's worth noting that Google earlier this July instituted an  AI Red Team  to help address threats to AI systems as part of its Secure AI Framework ( SAIF ). Also announced as part of its commitment to secure AI are efforts to strengthen the AI supply chain

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) is a strategic framework that helps organizations continuously assess and manage cyber risk. It breaks down the complex task of managing security threats into five distinct stages: Scoping, Discovery, Prioritization, Validation, and Mobilization. Each of these stages plays a crucial role in identifying, addressing, and mitigating vulnerabilities - before they can be exploited by attackers.  On paper, CTEM sounds great . But where the rubber meets the road – especially for CTEM neophytes - implementing CTEM can seem overwhelming. The process of putting CTEM principles into practice can look prohibitively complex at first. However, with the right tools and a clear understanding of each stage, CTEM can be an effective method for strengthening your organization's security posture.  That's why I've put together a step-by-step guide on which tools to use for which stage. Want to learn more? Read on… Stage 1: Scoping  When you're defin

F5 has alerted customers of a critical security vulnerability impacting BIG-IP that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution. The issue, rooted in the configuration utility component, has been assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2023-46747 , and carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. "This vulnerability may allow an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the BIG-IP system through the management port and/or self IP addresses to execute arbitrary system commands," F5  said  in an advisory released Thursday. "There is no data plane exposure; this is a control plane issue only." The following versions of BIG-IP have been found to be vulnerable - 17.1.0 (Fixed in 17.1.0.3 + Hotfix-BIGIP-17.1.0.3.0.75.4-ENG) 16.1.0 - 16.1.4 (Fixed in 16.1.4.1 + Hotfix-BIGIP-16.1.4.1.0.50.5-ENG) 15.1.0 - 15.1.10 (Fixed in 15.1.10.2 + Hotfix-BIGIP-15.1.10.2.0.44.2-ENG) 14.1.0 - 14.1.5 (Fixed in 14.1.5.6 + Hotfix-BIGIP-14.1.5.6.0.10.6-ENG) 13.1.0 -

The threat actor known as  Winter Vivern  has been observed exploiting a zero-day flaw in Roundcube webmail software on October 11, 2023, to harvest email messages from victims' accounts. "Winter Vivern has stepped up its operations by using a zero-day vulnerability in Roundcube," ESET security researcher Matthieu Faou  said  in a new report published today. Previously, it was using known vulnerabilities in Roundcube and Zimbra, for which proofs-of-concept are available online." Winter Vivern, also known as TA473 and UAC-0114, is an  adversarial collective  whose objectives align with that of Belarus and Russia. Over the past few months, it has been attributed to attacks against Ukraine and Poland, as well as government entities across Europe and India. The group is also assessed to have exploited another flaw Roundcube as recently as August and September (CVE-2020-35730), making it the  second nation-state group after APT28  to target the open-source webmail so

VMware has released security updates to address a critical flaw in the vCenter Server that could result in remote code execution on affected systems. The issue, tracked as  CVE-2023-34048  (CVSS score: 9.8), has been described as an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the implementation of the  DCE/RPC protocol . "A malicious actor with network access to vCenter Server may trigger an out-of-bounds write potentially leading to remote code execution," VMware  said  in an advisory published today. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaw is Grigory Dorodnov of Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative. VMware said that there are no workarounds to mitigate the shortcoming and that security updates have been made available in the following versions of the software - VMware vCenter Server 8.0 (8.0U1d or 8.0U2) VMware vCenter Server 7.0 (7.0U3o) VMware Cloud Foundation 5.x and 4.x Given the criticality of the flaw and the lack of temporary mitigations, the virtualization

Virtualization services provider VMware has alerted customers to the existence of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a recently patched security flaw in Aria Operations for Logs. Tracked as CVE-2023-34051 (CVSS score: 8.1), the high-severity vulnerability relates to a case of authentication bypass that could lead to remote code execution. "An unauthenticated, malicious actor can inject files into the operating system of an impacted appliance which can result in remote code execution," VMware  noted  in an advisory on October 19, 2023. James Horseman from Horizon3.ai and the Randori Attack Team have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. Horizon3.ai has since made available a  PoC for the vulnerability , prompting VMware to revise its advisory this week. It's worth noting that CVE-2023-34051 is a patch bypass for a  set of critical flaws  that were addressed by VMware earlier this January that could expose users to remote code execution attacks. &

The backdoor implanted on Cisco devices by exploiting a pair of zero-day flaws in IOS XE software has been modified by the threat actor so as to escape visibility via previous fingerprinting methods. "Investigated network traffic to a compromised device has shown that the threat actor has upgraded the implant to do an extra header check," NCC Group's Fox-IT team  said . "Thus, for a lot of devices, the implant is still active, but now only responds if the correct Authorization HTTP header is set." The attacks entail fashioning  CVE-2023-20198  (CVSS score: 10.0) and  CVE-2023-20273  (CVSS score: 7.2) into an exploit chain that grants the threat actor the ability to gain access to the devices, create a privileged account, and ultimately deploy a Lua-based implant on the devices. The development comes as Cisco began rolling out security updates to  address the issues , with more updates to come at an as-yet-undisclosed date. The exact identity of the threat

Cisco has warned of a new zero-day flaw in IOS XE that has been actively exploited by an unknown threat actor to deploy a  malicious Lua-based implant  on susceptible devices. Tracked as  CVE-2023-20273  (CVSS score: 7.2), the issue relates to a privilege escalation flaw in the web UI feature and is said to have been used alongside CVE-2023-20198 (CVSS score: 10.0) as part of an exploit chain. "The attacker first exploited CVE-2023-20198 to gain initial access and issued a privilege 15 command to create a local user and password combination," Cisco  said  in an updated advisory published Friday. "This allowed the user to log in with normal user access." "The attacker then exploited another component of the web UI feature, leveraging the new local user to elevate privilege to root and write the implant to the file system," a shortcoming that has been assigned the identifier CVE-2023-20273. A Cisco spokesperson told The Hacker News that a fix that cove

North Korean threat actors are actively exploiting a critical security flaw in JetBrains TeamCity to opportunistically breach vulnerable servers, according to Microsoft. The attacks, which entail the exploitation of  CVE-2023-42793  (CVSS score: 9.8), have been  attributed  to Diamond Sleet (aka Labyrinth Chollima) and Onyx Sleet (aka Andariel or Silent Chollima). It's worth noting that both the threat activity clusters are part of the infamous North Korean nation-state actor known as  Lazarus Group . In one of the two attack paths employed by Diamond Sleet, a successful compromise of TeamCity servers is followed by the deployment of a known implant called  ForestTiger  from legitimate infrastructure previously compromised by the threat actor. A second variant of the attacks leverages the initial foothold to retrieve a malicious DLL (DSROLE.dll aka RollSling or Version.dll or FeedLoad) that's loaded by means of a technique referred to as DLL search-order hijacking to eithe

A number of state-back threat actors from Russia and China have been observed exploiting a recent security flaw in the WinRAR archiver tool for Windows as part of their operations. The vulnerability in question is  CVE-2023-38831  (CVSS score: 7.8), which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code when a user attempts to view a benign file within a ZIP archive. The shortcoming has been actively exploited since at least April 2023. Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG), which  detected  the activities in recent weeks, attributed them to three different clusters it tracks under the geological monikers  FROZENBARENTS  (aka Sandworm),  FROZENLAKE  (aka APT28), and  ISLANDDREAMS  (aka APT40). The phishing attack linked to Sandworm impersonated a Ukrainian drone warfare training school in early September and distributed a malicious ZIP file exploiting CVE-2023-38831 to deliver Rhadamanthys, a commodity stealer malware which is offered for sale for $250 for a monthly subscription. APT28,

A medium-severity flaw has been discovered in Synology's DiskStation Manager ( DSM ) that could be exploited to decipher an administrator's password and remotely hijack the account. "Under some rare conditions, an attacker could leak enough information to restore the seed of the pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), reconstruct the admin password, and remotely take over the admin account," Claroty's Sharon Brizinov  said  in a Tuesday report. The flaw, assigned the identifier CVE-2023-2729, is rated 5.9 for severity on the CVSS scoring scale. The flaw was addressed by Synology as part of  updates  released in June 2023. The problem is rooted in the fact that the software uses a weak random number generator that relies on the JavaScript  Math.random() method  to programmatically construct the admin password for the network-attached storage (NAS) device. Referred to as insecure randomness, it  arises  when a function that can produce predictable values, or doe

Two critical security flaws discovered in the open-source  CasaOS  personal cloud software could be successfully exploited by attackers to achieve arbitrary code execution and take over susceptible systems. The vulnerabilities, tracked as  CVE-2023-37265  and  CVE-2023-37266 , both carry a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. Sonar security researcher Thomas Chauchefoin, who discovered the bugs,  said  they "allow attackers to get around authentication requirements and gain full access to the CasaOS dashboard." Even more troublingly, CasaOS' support for third-party applications could be weaponized to run arbitrary commands on the system to gain persistent access to the device or pivot into internal networks. Following responsible disclosure on July 3, 2023, the flaws were addressed in  version 0.4.4  released by its maintainers IceWhale on July 14, 2023. A brief description of the two flaws is as follows - CVE-2023-37265  - Incorrect identification of the s

Cisco has warned of a critical, unpatched security flaw impacting IOS XE software that's under active exploitation in the wild. Rooted in the web UI feature, the zero-day vulnerability is tracked as  CVE-2023-20198  and has been assigned the maximum severity rating of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. It's worth pointing out that the shortcoming only affects enterprise networking gear that have the web UI feature enabled and when it's exposed to the internet or to untrusted networks. "This vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create an account on an affected system with privilege  level 15 access ," Cisco  said  in a Monday advisory. "The attacker can then use that account to gain control of the affected system." The problem impacts both physical and virtual devices running Cisco IOS XE software that also have the HTTP or HTTPS server feature enabled. As a mitigation, it's recommended to disable the HTTP server feature on internet-facing systems. The network

Pro-Russian hacking groups have exploited a recently disclosed security vulnerability in the WinRAR archiving utility as part of a phishing campaign designed to harvest credentials from compromised systems. "The attack involves the use of malicious archive files that exploit the recently discovered vulnerability affecting the WinRAR compression software versions prior to 6.23 and traced as CVE-2023-38831," Cluster25  said  in a report published last week. The archive contains a booby-trapped PDF file that, when clicked, causes a Windows Batch script to be executed, which launches PowerShell commands to open a reverse shell that gives the attacker remote access to the targeted host. Also deployed is a PowerShell script that steals data, including login credentials, from the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers. The captured information is exfiltrated via a legitimate web service webhook[.]site. CVE-2023-38831 refers to a  high-severity flaw  in WinRAR that allows at

Encrypted messaging app Signal has pushed back against "viral reports" of an alleged zero-day flaw in its software, stating it found no evidence to support the claim. "After responsible investigation *we have no evidence that suggests this vulnerability is real* nor has any additional info been shared via our official reporting channels," it  said  in a series of messages posted in X (formerly Twitter). Signal said it also checked with the U.S. government and that it found no information to suggest "this is a valid claim." It's also urging those with legitimate information to send reports to security@signal[.]org. The development comes as  reports   circulated  over the  weekend  about a zero-day vulnerability in Signal that could be exploited to gain complete access to a targeted mobile device. As a security precaution, it's been advised to turn off  link previews  in the app. The feature can be disabled by going to Signal Settings > Chats

Image Source: JFrog Security Research Patches have been released for  two security flaws  impacting the Curl data transfer library, the most severe of which could potentially result in code execution. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-38545  (CVSS score: 7.5) - SOCKS5 heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability CVE-2023-38546  (CVSS score: 5.0) - Cookie injection with none file CVE-2023-38545 is the more severe of the two, and has been  described  by the project's lead developer, Daniel Stenberg, as "probably the worst Curl security flaw in a long time." It affects libcurl versions 7.69.0 to and including 8.3.0. "This flaw makes Curl overflow a heap-based buffer in the  SOCKS5  proxy handshake," the maintainers said in an advisory. "When Curl is asked to pass along the hostname to the SOCKS5 proxy to allow that to resolve the address instead of it getting done by Curl itself, the maximum length that hostname can be is 255 bytes.&quo

Microsoft has released its Patch Tuesday updates for October 2023, addressing a total of  103 flaws  in its software, two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 103 flaws, 13 are rated Critical and 90 are rated Important in severity. This is apart from  18 security vulnerabilities  addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the second Tuesday of September. The two vulnerabilities that have been weaponized as zero-days are as follows - CVE-2023-36563  (CVSS score: 6.5) - An information disclosure vulnerability in Microsoft WordPad that could result in the leak of NTLM hashes CVE-2023-41763  (CVSS score: 5.3) - A privilege escalation vulnerability in Skype for Business that could lead to exposure of sensitive information such as IP addresses or port numbers (or both), enabling threat actors to gain access to internal networks "To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would first have to log on to the system. An attacker could then run a sp

Microsoft has linked the exploitation of a recently disclosed critical flaw in Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server to a nation-state actor it tracks as  Storm-0062  (aka DarkShadow or Oro0lxy). The tech giant's threat intelligence team said it observed in-the-wild abuse of the vulnerability since September 14, 2023. "CVE-2023-22515 is a critical privilege escalation vulnerability in Atlassian Confluence Data Center and Server," the company  noted  in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter). "Any device with a network connection to a vulnerable application can exploit CVE-2023-22515 to create a Confluence administrator account within the application." CVE-2023-22515 , rated 10.0 on the CVSS severity rating system, allows  remote attackers  to create unauthorized Confluence administrator accounts and access Confluence servers. The flaw has been addressed in the following versions - 8.3.3 or later 8.4.3 or later, and 8.5.2 (Long Term Support rel