Web Application Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Data loss and theft continues to rise, and hardly a day goes by without significant data breaches hit the headlines. In January 2019 alone, 1.76 billion records were leaked, and according to IBM's Data Breach study, the average cost of each lost or stolen record has reached about $148. Most of these data leaks are because of malicious attacks, where exploitation of web application vulnerabilities is one of the most common cyber attack vectors. An application security breach is a problem facing one and all, and no matter what's the size of your company, your web applications are prone to cyber attacks. Hackers breach sites for a variety of reasons—some do it for fame, some to get competitive information, whereas some do it just for financial gains. No matter what the reason is, the cost of a security breach is always higher than the cost of protection, leading to loss of data, substantial financial losses, and most importantly, loss of customers' trust. If you a

Cybersecurity researchers discover a critical flaw in the popular Evernote Chrome extension that could have allowed hackers to hijack your browser and steal sensitive information from any website you accessed. Evernote is a popular service that helps people taking notes and organize their to-do task lists, and over 4,610,000 users have been using its Evernote Web Clipper Extension for Chrome browser. Discovered by Guardio, the vulnerability ( CVE-2019-12592 ) resided in the ways Evernote Web Clipper extension interacts with websites, iframes and inject scripts, eventually breaking the browser's same-origin policy (SOP) and domain-isolation mechanisms. According to researchers, the vulnerability could allow an attacker-controlled website to execute arbitrary code on the browser in the context of other domains on behalf of users, leading to a Universal Cross-site Scripting (UXSS or Universal XSS) issue. "A full exploit that would allow loading a remote hacker contr

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

One of the most important software companies NGINX , which is also behind the very popular open-source web server of the same name, is being acquired by its rival, F5 Networks , in a deal valued at about $670 million. While NGINX is not a name that you have ever heard of, the reality is that you use NGINX every day when you post a photo, watch streaming video, purchase goods online, or log into your applications at work. NGINX powers over half of the busiest websites in the world. Majority of sites on the Internet today, including The Hacker News, and hundreds of thousands apps, like Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, and Airbnb are hosted on web servers running NGINX. NGINX web server is the third most widely used servers in the world—behind only Microsoft and Apache, and ahead of Google. In short, the internet as we know it today would not exist without NGINX. F5 Acquires NGINX to Bridge NetOps and DevOps F5 Networks is the industry leader in cloud and security application

A security researcher has discovered a severe vulnerability in the popular, open source event-driven platform StackStorm that could allow remote attackers to trick developers into unknowingly execute arbitrary commands on targeted services. StackStorm, aka "IFTTT for Ops," is a powerful event-driven automation tool for integration and automation across services and tools that allows developers to configure actions, workflows, and scheduled tasks, in order to perform some operations on large-scale servers. For example, you can set instructions (if this, then that) on Stackstorm platform to automatically upload network packet files to a cloud-based network analyze service, like CloudShark, in events when your security software detects an intrusion or malicious activity in the network. Since StackStorm executes actions—which can be anything, from the HTTP request to an arbitrary command—on remote servers or services that developers integrate for automated tasks, the pl

Tumblr today published a report admitting the presence of a security vulnerability in its website that could have allowed hackers to steal login credentials and other private information for users' accounts. The affected information included users email addresses, protected (hashed and salted) account passwords, self-reported location (a feature no longer available), previously used email addresses, last login IP addresses, and names of the blog associated with every account. According to the company, a security researcher discovered a critical vulnerability in the desktop version of its website and responsibly reported it to the Tumblr security team via its bug bounty program. Though the company has not revealed the researcher's name or any technical details about the vulnerability, Tumblr has disclosed that the flaw resided in the "Recommended Blogs" feature of its website. Recommended Blogs has been designed to display a short, rotating list of blogs o

If your website is based on the popular Joomla content management system, make sure you have updated your platform to the latest version released today. Joomla, the world's second popular open source Content Management System, has reportedly patched a critical vulnerability in its software's core component. Website administrators are strongly advised to immediately install latest Joomla version 3.7.1, released today, to patch a critical SQL Injection vulnerability (CVE-2017-8917) that affects only Joomla version 3.7.0. " Inadequate filtering of request data leads to a SQL Injection vulnerability ." release note says. The SQL Injection vulnerability in Joomla 3.7.0 was responsibly reported by Marc-Alexandre Montpas, a security researcher at Sucuri last week to the company. According to the researcher , ' The vulnerability is easy to exploit and doesn't require a privileged account on the victim's site ,' which could allow remote hackers to steal sensitive inf

Security researchers have discovered a Zero-Day vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework, which is being actively exploited in the wild. Apache Struts is a free, open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating elegant, modern Java web applications, which supports REST, AJAX, and JSON. In a blog post published Monday, Cisco's Threat intelligence firm Talos announced the team observed a number of active attacks against the zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) in Apache Struts. According to the researchers, the issue is a remote code execution vulnerability in the Jakarta Multipart parser of Apache Struts that could allow an attacker to execute malicious commands on the server when uploading files based on the parser. "It is possible to perform an RCE attack with a malicious Content-Type value," warned Apache. "If the Content-Type value isn't valid an exception is thrown which is then used to display an erro

Has Yahoo rebuilt your trust again? If yes, then you need to think once again, as the company is warning its users of another hack. Last year, Yahoo admitted two of the largest data breaches on record. One of which that took place in 2013 disclosed personal details associated with more than 1 Billion Yahoo user accounts . Well, it's happened yet again. Yahoo sent out another round of notifications to its users on Wednesday, warning that their accounts may have been compromised as recently as last year after an ongoing investigation turned up evidence that hackers used forged cookies to log accounts without passwords. The company quietly revealed the data breach in security update in December 2016, but the news was largely overlooked, as the statement from Yahoo provided information on a separate data breach that occurred in August 2013 involving more than 1 billion accounts. The warning message sent Wednesday to some Yahoo users read: "Based on the ongoing i

Update: A hacker yesterday claimed to have hacked the FBI's website running on Plone CMS, but it seems it wasn't hacked using any zero-day vulnerability in Plone. We contacted Plone security team and updated this story (see below) with official statements. A hacker, using Twitter handle CyberZeist , has claimed to have hacked the FBI's website (fbi.gov) and leaked personal account information of several FBI agents publically. CyberZeist had initially exposed the flaw on 22 December, giving the FBI time to patch the vulnerability in its website's code before making the data public. The hacker exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the Plone CMS , an Open Source Content Management software used by FBI to host its website, and leaked personal data of 155 FBI officials to Pastebin , including their names, passwords, and email accounts. CyberZeist tweeted multiple screenshots as proof of his claims, showing his unauthorized access to server and database files usi

Nearly two years back, we warned users about publicly accessible MongoDB instances – almost 600 Terabytes (TB) – over the Internet which require no authentication, potentially leaving websites and servers at risk of hacking. These MongoDB instances weren't exposed due to any flaw in its software, but due to a misconfiguration (bad security practice) that let any remote attacker access MongoDB databases without using any special hacking tool. MongoDB later resolved the issue in the next version of its software by setting unrestricted remote access by default in the configuration, thousands of site administrators have not updated their servers yet. But trust me, they'll now regret this! A Hacker is now hijacking and wiping out unsecured MongoDB databases , but keeping a copy of those databases for asking administrators a ransom of 0.2 Bitcoins (nearly US$211) to return the lost data. So, admins without backups are left in a bind. In fact, the rising price of Bitcoin

Three critical zero-day vulnerabilities have been discovered in PHP 7 that could allow an attacker to take complete control over 80 percent of websites which run on the latest version of the popular web programming language. The critical vulnerabilities reside in the unserialized mechanism in PHP 7 – the same mechanism that was found to be vulnerable in PHP 5 as well, allowing hackers to compromise Drupal, Joomla, Magento, vBulletin and PornHub websites and other web servers in the past years by sending maliciously crafted data in client cookies. Security researchers at Check Point's exploit research team spent several months examining the unserialized mechanism in PHP 7 and discovered "three fresh and previously unknown vulnerabilities" in the mechanism. While researchers discovered flaws in the same mechanism, the vulnerabilities in PHP 7 are different from what was found in PHP 5. Tracked as CVE-2016-7479, CVE-2016-7480, and CVE-2016-7478, the zero-day flaw

Hey Webmasters, are you using Memcached to boost the performance of your website? Beware! It might be vulnerable to remote hackers. Three critical Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities have been reported in Memcached by security researcher Aleksandar Nikolich at Cisco Talos Group that expose major websites, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, to hackers. Memcached is a fabulous piece of open-source distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory. It has been designed to speed up dynamic web applications by reducing stress on the database that helps administrators to increase performance and scale web applications. Memcached is widely used by thousands upon thousands of websites, including popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Github, and many more. Nikolich says that he discovered multiple integer overflow bugs in Memcached that could be exploited to remotely run arbitrary code on the targeted s

Sometimes I receive emails from our readers who wanted to know how to hack Facebook account , but just to delete some of their messages they have sent to their friends or colleagues mistakenly or under wrong circumstances like aggression. How to hack a Facebook account? It is probably the biggest "n00b" question you will see on the Internet. The solution for this query is hard to find — but recently researchers have shown that how you can modify or alter your messages once you have pressed the SEND button in Facebook Messenger. According to the researcher  Roman Zaikin  from cyber security firm Check Point , a simple HTML tweak can be used to exploit Facebook online chat as well as its Messenger app, potentially allowing anyone to modify or delete any of his/her sent message, photo, file, and link. Though the bug is simple, it could be exploited by malicious users to send a legitimate link in a Facebook chat or group chat, and later change it to a malicious link t

Joomla – one of the most popular open source Content Management System (CMS) software packages, has reportedly patched three critical vulnerabilities in its software. The flaws, exist in the Joomla version 3.2 to 3.4.4, include SQL injection vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to take admin privileges on most customer websites. The patch was an upgrade to Joomla version 3.4.5  and only contained security fixes. The vulnerability, discovered by Trustwave SpiderLabs researcher Asaf Orpani and Netanel Rubin of PerimeterX, could be exploited to attack a website with SQL injections. SQL injection ( SQLi ) is an injection attack wherein a bad actor can inject/insert malicious SQL commands/query (malicious payloads) through the input data from the client to the application. The vulnerability is one of the oldest, most powerful and most dangerous flaw that could affect any website or web application that uses an SQL-based database. The recent SQLi in Jooml

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in one of the most popular plugins of the the WordPress content management platform that puts more than one Million websites at risks of being completely hijacked by the attackers. The vulnerability actually resides in most versions of a WordPress plugin called Wettable Powder Slimstat (WP-Slimstat) . While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, more than 1.3 Million of them use the 'WP-Slimstat' Plugin , making it one of the popular plugins of WordPress for powerful real-time web analytic. All the WP-Slimstat versions prior to the latest release of Slimstat 3.9.6 contain an easily guessable 'secret' key which is used to sign data sent to and from the visiting end-user computers, explained in a blog post published Tuesday by Web security firm Sucuri. Once the weak 'secret' key is break, an attacker could perform an SQL injection attack against the target website

Google on Thursday unleashed its own free web application vulnerability scanner tool, which the search engine giant calls Google Cloud Security Scanner , that will potentially scan developers' applications for common security vulnerabilities on its cloud platform more effectively. SCANNER ADDRESSES TWO MAJOR WEB VULNERABILITIES Google launched the Google Cloud Security Scanner in beta. The New web application vulnerability scanner allows App Engine developers to regularly scan their applications for two common web application vulnerabilities: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Mixed Content Scripts Despite several free web application vulnerability scanner and vulnerability assessment tools are available in the market, Google says these website vulnerability scanners are typically hard to set up and " built for security professionals, " not for web application developers that run the apps on the Google App Engine. While Google Cloud Security Scanner will be ea

The popular copy and paste website ' Pastebin ' created a decade ago for software developers and even by hackers groups to share source code, dumps and stolen data, has more recently been leveraged by cyber criminals to target millions of users. Compromising a website and then hosting malware on it has become an old tactic for hackers, and now they are trying their hands in compromising vast majority of users in a single stroke. Researchers have discovered that hackers are now using Pastebin to spread malicious backdoor code. According to a blog post published yesterday by a senior malware researcher at Sucuri , Denis Sinegubko, the hackers are leveraging the weakness in older versions of the RevSlider , a popular and a premium WordPress plugin. The plugin comes packaged and bundled into the websites' themes in such a way that many website owners don't even know they have it. In order to exploit the vulnerability, first hackers look for a RevSlider plugin i

Security researchers have discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities in the Java environment of the Google App Engine (GAE) that enables attackers to bypass critical security sandbox defenses. Google App Engine is Google's PaaS (Platform as a Service) Cloud computing Platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. GAE offers to run custom-built programs using a wide variety of popular languages and frameworks, out of which many are built on the Java environment. The vulnerabilities was reported by Security Explorations, the same security research company that carried out multiple researches related to Java in past. The discovery was announced on the Full Disclosure security mailing list by Adam Gowdiak , founder and CEO of Security Explorations. According to the security firm, the flaws can be exploited by attackers to achieve a complete Java VM security sandbox escape, as well as to execute an arbitrary code. The researchers