Wiz | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google is making the biggest ever acquisition in its history by purchasing cloud security company Wiz in an all-cash deal worth $32 billion. "This acquisition represents an investment by Google Cloud to accelerate two large and growing trends in the AI era: improved cloud security and the ability to use multiple clouds (multicloud)," the tech giant said today. It added the acquisition, which is subject to regulatory approvals, is meant to provide customers with a "comprehensive security platform" that secures modern IT environments.  Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said by bringing its cloud offerings and Wiz together, the move will "spur the adoption of multicloud cybersecurity, the use of multicloud, and competition and growth in cloud computing." Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport said it will remain an independent multicloud platform even after the deal is closed, and that it will work with other cloud companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft A...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two high-severity security flaws in the Ubuntu kernel that could pave the way for local privilege escalation attacks. Cloud security firm Wiz, in a  report  shared with The Hacker News, said the easy-to-exploit shortcomings have the potential to impact 40% of Ubuntu users. "The impacted Ubuntu versions are prevalent in the cloud as they serve as the default operating systems for multiple [cloud service providers]," security researchers Sagi Tzadik and Shir Tamari said. The  vulnerabilities  – tracked as CVE-2023-2640 and CVE-2023-32629 (CVSS scores: 7.8) and dubbed  GameOver(lay)  – are present in a module called  OverlayFS  and arise as a result of inadequate permissions checks in certain scenarios, enabling a local attacker to gain elevated privileges. Overlay Filesystem refers to a union mount file system that makes it possible to combine multiple directory trees or file systems into a single, unif...

As cloud applications are built, tested and updated, they wind their way through an ever-complex series of different tools and teams. Across hundreds or even thousands of technologies that make up the patchwork quilt of development and cloud environments, security processes are all too often applied in only the final phases of software development.  Placing security at the very end of the production pipeline puts both devs and security on the back foot. Developers want to build and ship secure apps; security teams want to support this process by strengthening application security. However, today's security processes are legacy approaches that once worked brilliantly for the tight constraints of on-prem production, but struggle in ever-shifting cloud environments. As a result, security is an afterthought, and any attempt to squeeze siloed security into agile SDLC can  swell the cost of patching by 600% . A new cloud security operating model is long overdue. Shift-left is an ...

A new fileless attack dubbed  PyLoose  has been observed striking cloud workloads with the goal of delivering a cryptocurrency miner, new findings from Wiz reveal. "The attack consists of Python code that loads an XMRig Miner directly into memory using  memfd , a known Linux fileless technique," security researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Oren Ofer, and Itamar Gilad  said . "This is the first publicly documented Python-based fileless attack targeting cloud workloads in the wild." The cloud security firm said it found nearly 200 instances where the attack method was employed for cryptocurrency mining. No other details about the threat actor are currently known other than the fact that they possess sophisticated capabilities. In the infection chain documented by Wiz, initial access is achieved through the exploitation of a publicly accessible Jupyter Notebook service that allowed for the execution of system commands using Python modules. PyLoose , first detected on...

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 ...

Microsoft has patched a misconfiguration issue impacting the Azure Active Directory ( AAD ) identity and access management service that exposed several "high-impact" applications to unauthorized access. "One of these apps is a content management system (CMS) that powers Bing.com and allowed us to not only modify search results, but also launch high-impact XSS attacks on Bing users," cloud security firm Wiz  said  in a report. "Those attacks could compromise users' personal data, including Outlook emails and SharePoint documents." The issues were reported to Microsoft in January and February 2022, following which the tech giant applied fixes and awarded Wiz a $40,000 bug bounty. Redmond  said  it found no evidence that the misconfigurations were exploited in the wild. The crux of the vulnerability stems from what's called "Shared Responsibility confusion," wherein an Azure app can be incorrectly configured to allow users from any Micro...