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The Indian Government said it has addressed a critical vulnerability in its secure document wallet service Digilocker that could have potentially let a remote attacker bypass mobile one-time passwords (OTP) and sign in as other users. Discovered separately by two independent bug bounty researchers, Mohesh Mohan and Ashish Gahlot , the vulnerability could have been exploited easily to unauthorisedly access sensitive documents uploaded by targeted users' on the Government-operated platform. "The OTP function lacks authorization which makes it possible to perform OTP validation with submitting any valid users details and then manipulation flow to sign in as a totally different user," Mohesh Mohan said in a disclosure shared with The Hacker News. With over 38 million registered users, Digilocker is a cloud-based repository that acts as a digital platform to facilitate online processing of documents and speedier delivery of various government-to-citizen services.

A Chinese threat actor has developed new capabilities to target air-gapped systems in an attempt to exfiltrate sensitive data for espionage, according to a newly published research by Kaspersky yesterday. The APT, known as Cycldek, Goblin Panda, or Conimes, employs an extensive toolset for lateral movement and information stealing in victim networks, including previously unreported custom tools, tactics, and procedures in attacks against government agencies in Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos. "One of the newly revealed tools is named USBCulprit and has been found to rely on USB media in order to exfiltrate victim data," Kaspersky said. "This may suggest Cycldek is trying to reach air-gapped networks in victim environments or relies on physical presence for the same purpose." First observed by CrowdStrike in 2013, Cycldek has a long history of singling out defense, energy, and government sectors in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, using decoy documents th

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A new set of critical vulnerabilities uncovered in SAP's Sybase database software can grant unprivileged attackers complete control over a targeted database and even the underlying operating system in certain scenarios. The six flaws, disclosed by cybersecurity firm Trustwave today, reside in Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise ( ASE ), a relational database management software geared towards transaction-based applications. The cybersecurity company said the issues — both specific to the operating system and the platform as a whole — were discovered during a security testing of the product, one of which has a CVSS rating of 9.1. Identified as CVE-2020-6248 , the most severe vulnerability allows arbitrary code execution when making database backups, thus allowing an attacker to trigger the execution of malicious commands. "During database backup operations, there are no security checks for overwriting critical configuration files," Trustwave researchers said  in a

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details for a new vulnerability in VMware's Cloud Director platform that could potentially allow an attacker to gain access to sensitive information and control private clouds within an entire infrastructure. Tracked as CVE-2020-3956 , the code injection flaw stems from an improper input handling that could be abused by an authenticated attacker to send malicious traffic to Cloud Director, leading to the execution of arbitrary code. It's rated 8.8 out of 10 on the CVSS v.3 vulnerability severity scale, making it a critical vulnerability. VMware Cloud Director is a popular deployment, automation, and management software that's used to operate and manage cloud resources, allowing businesses to data centers distributed across different geographical locations into virtual data centers. According to the company, the vulnerability can be exploited through the HTML5- and Flex-based UIs, the API Explorer interface, and API acces

Much like technology itself, the tools, techniques, and optimum processes for developing code evolve quickly. We humans have an insatiable need for more software, more features, more functionality… and we want it faster than ever before, more qualitative, and on top of that: Secure. With an estimated 68% of organizations experiencing zero-day attacks from undisclosed/unknown vulnerabilities in 2019, this is an upward trend that we need to address as an industry by shipping secure code at a reasonable speed. While many people and organizations are moving on from Waterfall to Agile — and not everybody is there yet, let's be real — they are already encountering a new problem. Development teams and their operations counterparts are still working in silos, and this is still causing headaches for development managers and their counterparts across the business. In this environment, how can small teams working in an Agile way deliver on that promise of faster deployment, and fast

Joomla, one of the most popular Open-source content management systems (CMS), last week announced a new data breach impacting 2,700 users who have an account with its resources directory (JRD) website, i.e., resources.joomla.org. The breach exposed affected users' personal information, such as full names, business addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. The company said the incident came to light during an internal website audit that revealed that a member of the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) team stored a full unencrypted backup of the JRD website on an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket owned by the third-party company. The affected JRD portal lists developers and service providers specialized in Joomla, allowing registered users to extend their CMS with additional functionalities. Joomla said the investigation is still ongoing and that accesses to the website have been temporarily suspended. It has also reached out to the concerned third-pa

Modern Intel and AMD processors are susceptible to a new form of side-channel attack that makes flush-based cache attacks resilient to system noise, newly published research shared with The Hacker News has revealed. The findings are from a paper " DABANGG: Time for Fearless Flush based Cache Attacks " published by a pair of researchers, Biswabandan Panda and Anish Saxena, from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur earlier this week. Dubbed " Dabangg " (meaning fearless), the approach builds upon the Flush+Reload and Flush+Flush attacks, which have been exploited previously by other researchers to leak data from Intel CPUs. However, the new variant aims to improve the accuracy of these attacks even in a noisy multi-core system. It also works seamlessly against non-Linux Operating Systems, like macOS. "Like any other cache attacks, flush based cache attacks rely on the calibration of cache latency," Biswabandan Panda, assistant profes

The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact on our society has resulted in many dramatic changes to how people are traveling, interacting with each other, and collaborating at work. There are several trends taking place as a consequence of the outbreak, which has only continued to heighten the need for the tightest possible cybersecurity. Tools for Collaboration There has been a massive spike in the adoption of Tools for Collaboration as a consequence of COVID-19. Concerns about the coronavirus have caused an enormous increase in remote working, with many organizations requiring or at least encouraging their workers to stay at home—especially when cities, states, and even some entire nations are ultimately into lock down in a bid to spread the stem of the disease. Meanwhile, with millions working from home for many weeks now, there has been a spike in the video conferencing and online collaboration software, many of which are fortunately entirely free, allowing orga

The Ukrainian police have arrested a hacker who made headlines in January last year by posting a massive database containing some 773 million stolen email addresses and 21 million unique plaintext passwords for sale on various underground hacking forums. In an official statement released on Tuesday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it identified the hacker behind the pseudonym "Sanix," who is a resident of the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine, but it did not reveal his actual identity to the media. In January last year, the hacker tried to sell the massive 87-gigabyte database labeled as "the largest array of stolen data in history," which, according to security experts, was just a fraction of the stolen data Sanix collected. According to the authorities, Sanix had at least 6 more similar databases of stolen and broken passwords, totaling in terabytes in size, which also included billions of phone numbers, payment card details, and Social Secu

A cybersecurity researcher at ESET today published an analysis of a new piece of malware, a sample of which they spotted on the Virustotal malware scanning engine and believe the hacker behind it is likely interested in some high-value computers protected behind air‑gapped networks. Dubbed ' Ramsay ,' the malware is still under development with two more variants (v2.a and v2.b) spotted in the wild and doesn't yet appear to be a complex attacking framework based upon the details researcher shared. However, before reading anything further, it's important to note that the malware itself doesn't leverage any extraordinary or advanced technique that could let attackers jump air-gapped networks to infiltrate or exfiltrate data from the targeted computers. According to ESET researcher Ignacio Sanmillan, Ramsay infiltrates targeted computers through malicious documents, potentially sent via a spear-phishing email or dropped using a USB drive, and then exploits an ol

A cybersecurity researcher today uncovers a set of 7 new unpatchable hardware vulnerabilities that affect all desktops and laptops sold in the past 9 years with Thunderbolt, or Thunderbolt-compatible USB-C ports. Collectively dubbed 'ThunderSpy,' the vulnerabilities can be exploited in 9 realistic evil-maid attack scenarios, primarily to steal data or read/write all of the system memory of a locked or sleeping computer—even when drives are protected with full disk encryption. In a nutshell, if you think someone with a few minutes of physical access to your computer—regardless of the location—can cause any form of significant harm to you, you're at risk for an evil maid attack. According to Björn Ruytenberg of the Eindhoven University of Technology, the ThunderSpy attack "may require opening a target laptop's case with a screwdriver, [but] it leaves no trace of intrusion and can be pulled off in just a few minutes." In other words, the flaw is not li

DigitalOcean, one of the biggest modern web hosting platforms, recently hit with a concerning data leak incident that exposed some of its customers' data to unknown and unauthorized third parties. Though the hosting company has not yet publicly released a statement, it did has started warning affected customers of the scope of the breach via an email. According to the breach notification email that affected customers [ 1 , 2 ] received, the data leak happened due to negligence where DigitalOcean 'unintentionally' left an internal document accessible to the Internet without requiring any password. "This document contained your email address and/or account name (the name you gave your account at sign-up) as well as some data about your account that may have included Droplet count, bandwidth usage, some support or sales communications notes, and the amount you paid during 2018," the company said in the warning email as shown below. Upon discovery, a qui

If you own a Xiaomi smartphone or have installed the Mi browser app on any of your other brand Android device, you should enable a newly introduced privacy setting immediately to prevent the company from spying on your online activities. The smartphone maker has begun rolling out an update to its Mi Browser/Mi Browser Pro (v12.1.4) and Mint Browser (v3.4.3) after concerns were raised over its practice of transmitting web browsing histories and device metadata to the company servers. The new privacy setting now allows Mi Browser users to disable aggregated data collection feature while in Incognito Mode, but it bears noting that it's not enabled by default. The option can be accessed by tapping the settings icon in the browser > Incognito mode settings > and then disable 'Enhanced incognito mode,' as shown in an attached screenshot below. Mint Browser and Mi Browser Pro have been downloaded more than 15 million times from Google Play to date. The devel

Cybersecurity researcher Mordechai Guri from Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev recently demonstrated a new kind of malware that could be used to covertly steal highly sensitive data from air-gapped and audio-gapped systems using a novel acoustic quirk in power supply units that come with modern computing devices. Dubbed ' POWER-SUPPLaY ,' the latest research builds on a series of techniques leveraging electromagnetic, acoustic, thermal, optical covert channels, and even power cables to exfiltrate data from non-networked computers. "Our developed malware can exploit the computer power supply unit (PSU) to play sounds and use it as an out-of-band, secondary speaker with limited capabilities," Dr. Guri outlined in a paper published today and shared with The Hacker News. "The malicious code manipulates the internal switching frequency of the power supply and hence controls the sound waveforms generated from its capacitors and transformers.&q

Two severe security flaws have been discovered in the open-source SaltStack Salt configuration framework that could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The vulnerabilities were identified by F-Secure researchers earlier this March and disclosed on Thursday, a day after SaltStack released a patch (version 3000.2) addressing the issues , rated with CVSS score 10. "The vulnerabilities, allocated CVE IDs CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652 , are of two different classes," the cybersecurity firm said . "One being authentication bypass where functionality was unintentionally exposed to unauthenticated network clients, the other being directory traversal where untrusted input (i.e., parameters in network requests) was not sanitized correctly allowing unconstrained access to the entire filesystem of the master server." The researchers warned that the flaws could be exploited in the wild imm