Web Application Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A cybersecurity researcher recently published details and proof-of-concept for an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL and MariaDB databases. phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB that's widely used to manage the database for websites created with WordPress, Joomla, and many other content management platforms. Discovered by security researcher and pentester Manuel Garcia Cardenas , the vulnerability claims to be a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw, also known as XSRF, a well-known attack wherein attackers trick authenticated users into executing an unwanted action. Identified as CVE-2019-12922 , the flaw has been given a medium rating because of its limited scope that only allows an attacker to delete any server configured in the setup page of a phpMyAdmin panel on a victim's server. To be noted, it's not something you should not be much worried abo

Estonian based web security startup WebARX, the company who is also behind open-source plugin vulnerability scanner WPBullet and soon-to-be-released bug bounty platform plugbounty.com , has a big vision for a safer web. It built a defensive core for websites which is embedded deep inside the company's DNA as even ARX in their name refers to the citadel (the core fortified area of a town or city) in Latin. WebARX—web application security platform—allows web developers and digital agencies to get advanced website security integrated with every site and makes it more effective and less time-consuming to manage security across multiple websites. You can find reviews such as "WebARX - the Swiss army knife that secures my websites!", "The security software that I use every day," "Many Promise - WebARX Delivers" from their Trustpilot page, so where is all that coming from? Serious Team With A Unique Focus WebARX is solving a very specific probl

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

Imperva, one of the leading cybersecurity startups that helps businesses protect critical data and applications from cyberattacks, has suffered a data breach that has exposed sensitive information for some of its customers, the company revealed today. The security breach particularly affects customers of Imperva's Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) product, formerly known as Incapsula , a security-focused CDN service known for its DDoS mitigation and web application security features that protect websites from malicious activities. In a blog post published today, Imperva CEO Chris Hylen revealed that the company learned about the incident on August 20, 2019, only after someone informed it about the data exposure that "impacts a subset of customers of its Cloud WAF product who had accounts through September 15, 2017." The exposed data includes email addresses and hashed and salted passwords for all Cloud WAF customers who registered before 15th September 2017

WAF (Web Application Firewall) has been the first line of defence when it comes to application security for a while now. Many organizations have adopted WAF in one form or the other and most cases, compliance has been the driver for adoption. But unfortunately, when it comes to the efficacy of WAF in thwarting attacks, it has not lived up to the expectations. In most organizations, WAF has always remained in log mode with a little process to monitor and react, rendering the solution ineffective. The major challenge with effective deployment of WAF is: Applications are unique, and there is no silver bullet set of rules that will protect them all, Most WAF's do not try to understand the risk profile of the application; they end up providing common out of box vanilla rules that seldom works. Each application has its own intricacies and the out of the box rules that many WAF vendors provide create a lot of FPs (False Positives) or FNs (False Negatives), For proper implement

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

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