critical infrastructure | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the Erlang/Open Telecom Platform (OTP) SSH implementation that could permit an attacker to execute arbitrary code sans any authentication under certain conditions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-32433 , has been given the maximum CVSS score of 10.0. "The vulnerability allows an attacker with network access to an Erlang/OTP SSH server to execute arbitrary code without prior authentication," Ruhr University Bochum researchers Fabian Bäumer, Marcus Brinkmann, Marcel Maehren, and Jörg Schwenk said . The issue stems from improper handling of SSH protocol messages that essentially permit an attacker to send connection protocol messages prior to authentication. Successful exploitation of the shortcomings could result in arbitrary code execution in the context of the SSH daemon . Further exacerbating the risk, if the daemon process is running as root, it enables the attacker to have full control of the device, in ...

The U.S. government funding for non-profit research giant MITRE to operate and maintain its Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures ( CVE ) program will expire Wednesday, an unprecedented development that could shake up one of the foundational pillars of the global cybersecurity ecosystem. The 25-year-old CVE program is a valuable tool for vulnerability management, offering a de facto standard to identify, define, and catalog publicly disclosed security flaws using CVE IDs. The program has listed over 274,000 CVE records to date. Yosry Barsoum, MITRE's vice president and director of the Center for Securing the Homeland (CSH), said its funding to "develop, operate, and modernize CVE and related programs, such as the Common Weakness Enumeration ( CWE ), will expire." "If a break in service were to occur, we anticipate multiple impacts to CVE, including deterioration of national vulnerability databases and advisories, tool vendors, incident response operations, and al...

Intro: Why hack in when you can log in? SaaS applications are the backbone of modern organizations, powering productivity and operational efficiency. But every new app introduces critical security risks through app integrations and multiple users, creating easy access points for threat actors. As a result, SaaS breaches have increased, and according to a May 2024 XM Cyber report, identity and credential misconfigurations caused 80% of security exposures. Subtle signs of a compromise get lost in the noise, and then multi-stage attacks unfold undetected due to siloed solutions. Think of an account takeover in Entra ID, then privilege escalation in GitHub, along with data exfiltration from Slack. Each seems unrelated when viewed in isolation, but in a connected timeline of events, it's a dangerous breach. Wing Security's SaaS platform is a multi-layered solution that combines posture management with real-time identity threat detection and response. This allows organizations to get a ...

Microsoft has released security fixes to address a massive set of 125 flaws affecting its software products, including one vulnerability that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 125 vulnerabilities, 11 are rated Critical, 112 are rated Important, and two are rated Low in severity. Forty-nine of these vulnerabilities are classified as privilege escalation, 34 as remote code execution, 16 as information disclosure, and 14 as denial-of-service (DoS) bugs. The updates are aside from the 22 flaws the company patched in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability that has been flagged as under active attack is an elevation of privilege (EoP) flaw impacting the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver ( CVE-2025-29824 , CVSS score: 7.8) that stems from a use-after-free scenario, allowing an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally. CVE-2025-29824 is the sixth EoP vulnerability to be di...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has revealed that no less than three cyber attacks were recorded against state administration bodies and critical infrastructure facilities in the country with an aim to steal sensitive data. The campaign, the agency said , involved the use of compromised email accounts to send phishing messages containing links pointing to legitimate services like DropMeFiles and Google Drive. In some instances, the links are embedded within PDF attachments. The digital missives sought to induce a false sense of urgency by claiming that a Ukrainian government agency planned to cut salaries, urging the recipient to click on the link to view the list of affected employees. Visiting these links leads to the download of a Visual Basic Script (VBS) loader that's designed to fetch and execute a PowerShell script capable of harvesting files matching a specific set of extensions and capturing screenshots. The activity, attributed to a threat ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has shed light on a new malware called RESURGE that has been deployed as part of exploitation activity targeting a now-patched security flaw in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) appliances. "RESURGE contains capabilities of the SPAWNCHIMERA malware variant, including surviving reboots; however, RESURGE contains distinctive commands that alter its behavior," the agency said . "The file contains capabilities of a rootkit, dropper, backdoor, bootkit, proxy, and tunneler." The security issue associated with the deployment of the malware is CVE-2025-0282 , a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability affecting Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA Gateways that could result in remote code execution. It impacts the following versions - Ivanti Connect Secure before version 22.7R2.5 Ivanti Policy Secure before version 22.7R1.2, and  Ivanti Neurons for ZTA gateways before version 22.7R2.3 According...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed 46 new security flaws in products from three solar power system vendors, Sungrow, Growatt, and SMA, that could be exploited by a bad actor to seize control of devices or execute code remotely, posing severe risks to electrical grids.  The vulnerabilities have been collectively codenamed SUN:DOWN by Forescout Vedere Labs. "The new vulnerabilities can be exploited to execute arbitrary commands on devices or the vendor's cloud, take over accounts, gain a foothold in the vendor's infrastructure, or take control of inverter owners' devices," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Some of the notable flaws identified are listed below - Attackers can upload .aspx files that will be executed by the web server of SMA (sunnyportal[.]com), resulting in remote code execution Unauthenticated attackers can perform username enumeration via the exposed "server.growatt.com/userCenter.do" endpoint Unauthen...

Threat hunters have uncovered a new threat actor named UAT-5918 that has been attacking critical infrastructure entities in Taiwan since at least 2023. "UAT-5918, a threat actor believed to be motivated by establishing long-term access for information theft, uses a combination of web shells and open-sourced tooling to conduct post-compromise activities to establish persistence in victim environments for information theft and credential harvesting," Cisco Talos researchers Jungsoo An, Asheer Malhotra, Brandon White, and Vitor Ventura said . Besides critical infrastructure, some of the other targeted verticals include information technology, telecommunications, academia, and healthcare. Assessed to be an advanced persistent threat (APT) group looking to establish long-term persistent access in victim environments, UAT-5918 is said to share tactical overlaps with several Chinese hacking crews tracked as Volt Typhoon , Flax Typhoon , Tropic Trooper , Earth Estries , and Dalb...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of two critical flaws impacting mySCADA myPRO , a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system used in operational technology (OT) environments, that could allow malicious actors to take control of susceptible systems. "These vulnerabilities, if exploited, could grant unauthorized access to industrial control networks, potentially leading to severe operational disruptions and financial losses," Swiss security company PRODAFT said . The list of shortcomings, both rated 9.3 on the CVSS v4 scoring system, are below - CVE-2025-20014 - An operating system command injection vulnerability that could permit an attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the affected system via specially crafted POST requests containing a version parameter CVE-2025-20061 - An operating system command injection vulnerability that could permit an attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the affected system via specially crafted POST req...

Taiwanese company Moxa has released a security update to address a critical security flaw impacting its PT switches that could permit an attacker to bypass authentication guarantees. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-12297 , has been assigned a CVSS v4 score of 9.2 out of a maximum of 10.0. "Multiple Moxa PT switches are vulnerable to an authentication bypass because of flaws in their authorization mechanism," the company said in an advisory released last week. "Despite client-side and back-end server verification, attackers can exploit weaknesses in its implementation. This vulnerability may enable brute-force attacks to guess valid credentials or MD5 collision attacks to forge authentication hashes, potentially compromising the security of the device." Successful exploitation of the shortcoming, in other words, could lead to an authentication bypass and allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to sensitive configurations or disrupt services. The...

Why does ICS/OT need specific controls and its own cybersecurity budget today? Because treating ICS/OT security with an IT security playbook isn't just ineffective—it's high risk. In the rapidly evolving domain of cybersecurity, the specific challenges and needs for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Operational Technology (OT) security distinctly stand out from traditional IT security. ICS/OT engineering systems, which power critical infrastructure such as electric power grids, oil and gas processing, heavy manufacturing, food and beverage processes, and water management facilities, require tailored cybersecurity strategies, and controls. This is due to the increasing attacks towards ICS/OT, their unique operational missions, a different risk surface than that of traditional IT networks, and the significant safety consequences from cyber incidents that impact the physical world. Critical infrastructure should be protected against today's threats to continue supporting national sa...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday said there are no indications that the cyber attack targeting the Treasury Department impacted other federal agencies. The agency said it's working closely with the Treasury Department and BeyondTrust to get a better understanding of the breach and mitigate its impacts. "The security of federal systems and the data they protect is of critical importance to our national security," CISA said . "We are working aggressively to safeguard against any further impacts and will provide updates, as appropriate." The latest statement comes a week after the Treasury Department said it was the victim of a "major cybersecurity incident" that allowed Chinese state-sponsored threat actors to remotely access some computers and unclassified documents. The cyber attack, which came to light in early December 2024, involved a breach of BeyondTrust's systems that allowed the adversary to in...

New research has uncovered more than 145,000 internet-exposed Industrial Control Systems (ICS) across 175 countries, with the U.S. alone accounting for over one-third of the total exposures. The analysis , which comes from attack surface management company Censys, found that 38% of the devices are located in North America, 35.4% in Europe, 22.9% in Asia, 1.7% in Oceania, 1.2% in South America, and 0.5% in Africa. The countries with the most ICS service exposures include the U.S. (more than 48,000), Turkey, South Korea, Italy, Canada, Spain, China, Germany, France, the U.K., Japan, Sweden, Taiwan, Poland, and Lithuania. The metrics are derived from the exposure of several commonly-used ICS protocols like Modbus, IEC 60870-5-104, CODESYS, OPC UA, and others. One important aspect that stands out is that the attack surfaces are regionally unique: Modbus, S7, and IEC 60870-5-104 are more widely observed in Europe, while Fox, BACnet, ATG, and C-more are more commonly found in North Ame...

A new China-linked cyber espionage group has been attributed as behind a series of targeted cyber attacks targeting telecommunications entities in South Asia and Africa since at least 2020 with the goal of enabling intelligence collection. Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is tracking the adversary under the name Liminal Panda , describing it as possessing deep knowledge about telecommunications networks, the protocols that undergird telecommunications, and the various interconnections between providers. The threat actor's malware portfolio includes bespoke tools that facilitate clandestine access, command-and-control (C2), and data exfiltration. "Liminal Panda has used compromised telecom servers to initiate intrusions into further providers in other geographic regions," the company's Counter Adversary Operations team said in a Tuesday analysis. "The adversary conducts elements of their intrusion activity using protocols that support mobile telecommunicati...