cisco network switches | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Since last week, a new hacking group, calling itself ' JHT ,' hijacked a significant number of Cisco devices belonging to organizations in Russia and Iran, and left a message that reads—" Do not mess with our elections " with an American flag (in ASCII art). MJ Azari Jahromi, Iranian Communication and Information Technology Minister, said the campaign impacted approximately 3,500 network switches in Iran, though a majority of them were already restored. The hacking group is reportedly targeting vulnerable installations of Cisco Smart Install Client, a legacy plug-and-play utility designed to help administrators configure and deploy Cisco equipments remotely, which is enabled by default on Cisco IOS and IOS XE switches and runs over TCP port 4786. Some researchers believe the attack involves a recently disclosed remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2018-0171 ) in Cisco Smart Install Client that could allow attackers to take full control of the network

Cisco is warning of a new critical zero-day IOS / IOS XE vulnerability that affects more than 300 of its switch models. The company identified this highest level of vulnerability in its product while analyzing " Vault 7 " — a roughly 8,761 documents and files leaked by Wikileaks last week, claiming to detail hacking tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The vulnerability resides in the Cluster Management Protocol (CMP) processing code in Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE Software. If exploited, the flaw ( CVE-2017-3881 ) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a reboot of an affected device or remotely execute malicious code on the device with elevated privileges to take full control of the device, Cisco says in its  advisory . The CMP protocol has been designed to pass around information about switch clusters between cluster members using Telnet or SSH. The vulnerability is in the default configuration of affected Cisco devices,

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or