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Google has stepped in to address a security flaw that could have made it possible to brute-force an account's recovery phone number, potentially exposing them to privacy and security risks. The issue, according to Singaporean security researcher "brutecat," leverages an issue in the company's account recovery feature. That said, exploiting the vulnerability hinges on several moving parts, specifically targeting a now-deprecated JavaScript-disabled version of the Google username recovery form ("accounts.google[.]com/signin/usernamerecovery") that lacked anti-abuse protections designed to prevent spammy requests. The page in question is designed to help users check if a recovery email or phone number is associated with a specific display name (e.g., "John Smith"). But circumventing the CAPTCHA-based rate limit ultimately made it possible to try out all permutations of a Google account's phone number in a short space of time and arrive at t...

Microsoft has announced a new Windows Resiliency Initiative as a way to improve security and reliability, as well as ensure that system integrity is not compromised. The idea, the tech giant said, is to avoid incidents like that of CrowdStrike's earlier this July, enable more apps and users to be run without admin privileges, add controls surrounding the use of unsafe apps and drivers, and offer options to encrypt personal data. One of the most important features is Quick Machine Recovery that's expected to be available to the Windows Insider Program community in early 2025. "This feature will enable IT administrators to execute targeted fixes from Windows Update on PCs, even when machines are unable to boot, without needing physical access to the PC," David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, said . "This remote recovery will unblock your employees from broad issues much faster than what has been possible in the past." ...

Google has revealed that a security flaw that was patched as part of a software update rolled out last week to its Chrome browser has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-7965 , the vulnerability has been described as an inappropriate implementation bug in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Inappropriate implementation in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 128.0.6613.84 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page," according to a description of the bug in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). A security researcher who goes by the online pseudonym TheDog has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on July 30, 2024, earning them a bug bounty of $11,000. Additional specifics about the nature of the attacks exploiting the flaw or the identity of the threat actors that may be utilizing it have not been released. The tech giant, however, acknowledged that it's aware of the ...

Ivanti has released security updates to address four security flaws impacting Connect Secure and Policy Secure Gateways that could result in code execution and denial-of-service (DoS). The list of flaws is as follows - CVE-2024-21894  (CVSS score: 8.2) - A heap overflow vulnerability in the IPSec component of Ivanti Connect Secure (9.x, 22.x) and Ivanti Policy Secure allows an unauthenticated malicious user to send specially crafted requests in order to crash the service thereby causing a DoS attack. In certain conditions, this may lead to execution of arbitrary code. CVE-2024-22052  (CVSS score: 7.5) - A null pointer dereference vulnerability in IPSec component of Ivanti Connect Secure (9.x, 22.x) and Ivanti Policy Secure allows an unauthenticated malicious user to send specially crafted requests in order to crash the service thereby causing a DoS attack. CVE-2024-22053  (CVSS score: 8.2) - A heap overflow vulnerability in the IPSec component of Ivanti Connect ...

Section four of the " Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity " introduced a lot of people in tech to the concept of a "Software Supply Chain" and securing it. If you make software and ever hope to sell it to one or more federal agencies, you  have  to pay attention to this. Even if you never plan to sell to a government, understanding your Software Supply Chain and learning how to secure it will pay dividends in a stronger security footing and the benefits it provides. This article will look at three ways to supercharge your  Software Supply Chain Security . What is your Software Supply Chain? It's essentially everything that goes into building a piece of software: from the IDE in which the developer writes code, to the third-party dependencies, to the build systems and scripts, to the hardware and operating system on which it runs. Instabilities and vulnerabilities can be introduced, maliciously or not, from inception to deployment and even beyond....

The U.K. and U.S., along with international partners from 16 other countries, have released new guidelines for the development of secure artificial intelligence (AI) systems. "The approach prioritizes ownership of security outcomes for customers, embraces radical transparency and accountability, and establishes organizational structures where secure design is a top priority," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said . The goal is to  increase cyber security levels of AI  and help ensure that the technology is designed, developed, and deployed in a secure manner, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)  added . The guidelines also build upon the U.S. government's  ongoing   efforts  to manage the risks posed by AI by ensuring that new tools are tested adequately before public release, there are guardrails in place to address societal harms, such as bias and discrimination, and privacy concerns, and setting up robust ...

OpenAI, the company behind the massively popular ChatGPT AI chatbot, has launched a  bug bounty program  in an attempt to ensure its systems are "safe and secure." To that end, it has partnered with the crowdsourced security platform  Bugcrowd  for independent researchers to report vulnerabilities discovered in its product in exchange for rewards ranging from "$200 for low-severity findings to up to $20,000 for exceptional discoveries." It's worth noting that the program does not cover  model safety or hallucination issues , wherein the chatbot is prompted to generate malicious code or other faulty outputs. The company noted that "addressing these issues often involves substantial research and a broader approach." Other prohibited categories are denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, brute-forcing OpenAI APIs, and demonstrations that aim to destroy data or gain unauthorized access to sensitive information beyond what's necessary to highlight the prob...

As 2022 comes to an end, now's the time to level up your bug bounty program with Intigriti. Are you experiencing slow bug bounty lead times, gaps in security skills, or low-quality reports from researchers? Intigriti's expert triage team and global community of ethical hackers are enabling businesses to protect themselves against every emerging cybersecurity threat. Join the likes of Intel, Yahoo, and Sixt who levelled up their security with Intigriti to enjoy higher quality bug bounty reports, faster lead times, and an intuitive platform. Our expert triage team, renowned community management, and impact-focused customer support are enabling businesses to protect themselves against emerging cybersecurity threats. Build a better bug bounty program   Intigriti is more than a bug bounty platform. Our managed security service takes the pain out of vulnerability disclosure and uses our active hacking community to suit your exact security needs. Moving bug bounties can feel li...

Vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform HackerOne on Friday disclosed that a former employee at the firm improperly accessed security reports submitted to it for personal gain. "The person anonymously disclosed this vulnerability information outside the HackerOne platform with the goal of claiming additional bounties," it  said . "In under 24 hours, we worked quickly to contain the incident by identifying the then-employee and cutting off access to data." The employee, who had access to HackerOne systems between April 4 and June 23, 2022, for triaging vulnerability disclosures associated with different customer programs, has since been terminated by the San Francisco-headquartered company as of June 30. Calling the incident as a "clear violation" of its values, culture, policies, and employment contracts, HackerOne said it was alerted to the breach on June 22 by an unnamed customer, which asked it to "investigate a suspicious vulnerabi...

A security researcher claims to have discovered an unpatched vulnerability in PayPal's money transfer service that could allow attackers to trick victims into unknowingly completing attacker-directed transactions with a single click. Clickjacking, also called UI redressing, refers to a technique wherein an unwitting user is tricked into clicking seemingly innocuous webpage elements like buttons with the goal of downloading malware, redirecting to malicious websites, or disclose sensitive information. This is typically achieved by displaying an invisible page or HTML element on top of the visible page, resulting in a scenario where users are fooled into thinking that they are clicking the legitimate page when they are in fact clicking the rogue element overlaid atop it. "Thus, the attacker is 'hijacking' clicks meant for [the legitimate] page and routing them to another page, most likely owned by another application, domain, or both," security researcher h4x0r...

Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, has announced that it's expanding its  bug bounty program  to start rewarding valid reports of scraping vulnerabilities across its platforms as well as include reports of scraping data sets that are available online. "We know that automated activity designed to scrape people's public and private data targets every website or service," said Dan Gurfinkel, security engineering manager at Meta. "We also know that it is a highly adversarial space where scrapers — be it malicious apps, websites or scripts — constantly adapt their tactics to evade detection in response to the defenses we build and improve." To that end, the social media giant aims to  monetarily compensate  for valid reports of scraping bugs in its service and identify unprotected or openly public databases containing no less than 100,000 unique Facebook user records with personally identifiable information (PII) such as email, phone numb...

Instagram has patched a new flaw that allowed anyone to view archived posts and stories posted by private accounts without having to follow them. "This bug could have allowed a malicious user to view targeted media on Instagram," security researcher Mayur Fartade  said  in a Medium post today. "An attacker could have been able to see details of private/archived posts, stories, reels, IGTV without following the user using Media ID." Fartade disclosed the issue to Facebook's security team on April 16, 2021, following which the shortcoming was patched on June 15. He was also awarded $30,000 as part of the company's bug bounty program. Although the attack requires knowing the media ID associated with an image, video, or album, by brute-forcing the identifiers, Fartade demonstrated that it was possible to craft a POST request to a GraphQL endpoint and retrieve sensitive data. As a consequence of the flaw, details such as like/comment/save count, display_...

While Gartner does not have a dedicated Magic Quadrant for Bug Bounties or Crowd Security Testing yet, Gartner Peer Insights already lists 24 vendors in the "Application Crowdtesting Services" category. We have compiled the top 5 most promising bug bounty platforms for those of you who are looking to enhance your existing software testing arsenal with knowledge and expertise from international security researchers:  1. HackerOne Being a unicorn backed by numerous reputable venture capitalists,  HackerOne  is probably the most well-known and recognized Bug Bounty brand in the world. According to their most recent annual report, over 1,700 companies trust the HackerOne platform to augment their in-house application security testing capacities. The report likewise says that their security researchers earned approximately $40 million in bounties in 2019 alone and $82 million cumulatively. HackerOne is also famous for hosting US government Bug Bounty programs, including ...

Can you imagine launching a global bug bounty platform with almost 500,000 submissions and 13,000 researchers without consuming a cent from venture capitalists? If not, this success story is for you. The once skyrocketing bug bounty industry seems to be not in the best shape today. While prominent security researchers are talking about a growing multitude of hurdles they experience with the leading commercial bug bounty platforms, the latter are trying to reinvent themselves as "next-generation penetration testing" or similar services. You be the judge of how successful they will be. Generous venture funds have poured many millions into rapidly spending bug bounty startups that have not replaced Managed Penetration Testing (MPT) services (as some declared). However, these startups have positively improved the price/quality ratio of pen testing services on the global market. Amid the uncertainty for the future of commercial bug bounty platforms, the not-for-profit Op...

It's 2019, and just clicking on a specially crafted URL would have allowed an attacker to hack your Facebook account without any further interaction. A security researcher discovered a critical cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the most popular social media platform that could have been allowed attackers to hijack Facebook accounts by simply tricking the targeted users into clicking on a link. The researcher, who goes by the online alias "Samm0uda," discovered the vulnerability after he spotted a flawed endpoint (facebook.com/comet/dialog_DONOTUSE/) that could have been exploited to bypass CSRF protections and takeover victim's account. "This is possible because of a vulnerable endpoint which takes another given Facebook endpoint selected by the attacker along with the parameters and makes a POST request to that endpoint after adding the fb_dtsg parameter," the researcher says on his blog . "Also this endpoint is located under t...

Another security vulnerability has been reported in Facebook that could have allowed attackers to obtain certain personal information about users and their friends, potentially putting the privacy of users of the world's most popular social network at risk. Discovered by cybersecurity researchers from Imperva, the vulnerability resides in the way Facebook search feature displays results for entered queries. According to Imperva researcher Ron Masas, the page that displays search results includes iFrame elements associated with each outcome, where the endpoint URLs of those iFrames did not have any protection mechanisms in place to protect against cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. It should be noted that the newly reported vulnerability has already been patched, and unlike previously disclosed flaw in Facebook that exposed personal information of 30 million users , it did not allow attackers to extract information from mass accounts at once. How Does the Facebo...

Facebook pays millions of dollars every year to researchers and bug hunters to stamp out security holes in its products and infrastructure, but following Cambridge Analytica scandal , the company today launched a bounty program to reward users for reporting "data abuse" on its platform. The move comes as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before Congress this week amid scrutiny over the data sharing controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm that obtained and misused data on potentially 87 million of its users . Through its new " Data Abuse Bounty " program, Facebook would ask users to help the social media giant find app developers misusing data, Facebook announced Tuesday. Similar to its existing bug bounty program, the Data Abuse Bounty program will reward a sum of money to anyone who reports valid events of data collection that violate Facebook's revamped data policies . "This program is complemen...

If you think a website whose value is more than $500 billion does not have any vulnerability in it, then you are wrong. Pouya Darabi, an Iranian web developer, discovered and reported a critical yet straightforward vulnerability in Facebook earlier this month that could have allowed anyone to delete any photo from the social media platform. The vulnerability resides in Facebook's new Poll feature, launched by the social media giant earlier this month, for posting polls that include images and GIF animations. Darabi analyzed the feature and found that when creating a new poll, anyone can easily replace the image ID (or gif URL) in the request sent to the Facebook server with the image ID of any photo on the social media network. Now, after sending the request with another user image ID (uploaded by someone else), that photo would appear in the poll. "Whenever a user tries to create a poll, a request containing gif URL or image id will be sent, poll_question_data[...

Better late than never. Google has finally launched a bug bounty program for Android apps on Google Play Store, inviting security researchers to find and report vulnerabilities in some of the most popular Android apps. Dubbed " Google Play Security Reward ," the bug bounty program offers security researchers to work directly with Android app developers to find and fix vulnerabilities in their apps, for which Google will pay $1000 in rewards. "The goal of the program is to further improve app security which will benefit developers, Android users, and the entire Google Play ecosystem," the technology giant says in a blog post published today. Google has collaborated with bug bounty platform, HackerOne, to manage backend for this program, like submitting reports and inviting white-hat hackers and researchers. White-hat hackers who wish to participate can submit their findings directly to the app developers. Once the security vulnerability has been resolved, th...