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Misconfigured Redis database servers are the target of a novel cryptojacking campaign that leverages a legitimate and open source command-line file transfer service to implement its attack. "Underpinning this campaign was the use of transfer[.]sh," Cado Security  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It's possible that it's an attempt at evading detections based on other common code hosting domains (such as pastebin[.]com)." The cloud cybersecurity firm said the command line interactivity associated with transfer[.]sh has made it an ideal tool for hosting and delivering malicious payloads. The attack chain commences with targeting insecure Redis deployments, followed by registering a  cron job  that leads to arbitrary code execution when parsed by the scheduler. The job is designed to retrieve a payload hosted at transfer[.]sh. It's worth noting that  similar   attack mechanisms  have been employed by other threat actors like TeamTNT and

At least 1,200 Redis database servers worldwide have been corralled into a botnet using an "elusive and severe threat" dubbed HeadCrab since early September 2021. "This advanced threat actor utilizes a state-of-the-art, custom-made malware that is undetectable by agentless and traditional anti-virus solutions to compromise a large number of Redis servers," Aqua security researcher Asaf Eitani  said  in a Wednesday report. A significant concentration of infections has been recorded in China, Malaysia, India, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. to date. The origins of the threat actor are presently unknown. The findings come two months after the cloud security firm shed light on a Go-based malware codenamed  Redigo  that has been found compromising Redis servers. The attack is designed to target Redis servers that are exposed to the internet, followed by issuing a  SLAVEOF command  from another Redis server that's already under the adversary's control. In

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A group of academics has demonstrated novel attacks that leverage Text-to-SQL models to produce malicious code that could enable adversaries to glean sensitive information and stage denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. "To better interact with users, a wide range of database applications employ AI techniques that can translate human questions into SQL queries (namely  Text-to-SQL ),"  Xutan Peng , a researcher at the University of Sheffield, told The Hacker News. "We found that by asking some specially designed questions, crackers can fool Text-to-SQL models to produce malicious code. As such code is automatically executed on the database, the consequence can be pretty severe (e.g., data breaches and DoS attacks)." The  findings , which were validated against two commercial solutions  BAIDU-UNIT  and  AI2sql , mark the first empirical instance where natural language processing (NLP) models have been exploited as an attack vector in the wild. The black box attacks a

A high-severity vulnerability has been disclosed in the SQLite database library, which was introduced as part of a code change dating all the way back to October 2000 and could enable attackers to crash or control programs. Tracked as  CVE-2022-35737  (CVSS score: 7.5), the 22-year-old issue affects SQLite versions  1.0.12  through 3.39.1, and has been addressed in  version 3.39.2  released on July 21, 2022. "CVE-2022-35737 is  exploitable  on 64-bit systems, and exploitability depends on how the program is compiled," Trail of Bits researcher Andreas Kellas  said  in a technical write-up published today. "Arbitrary code execution is confirmed when the library is compiled without stack canaries, but unconfirmed when stack canaries are present, and denial-of-service is confirmed in all cases." Programmed in C, SQLite is the most widely used database engine , included by default in Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS, as well as popular web browsers such as Googl

Researchers have disclosed seven new security vulnerabilities in an open-source database management system solution called ClickHouse that could be weaponized to crash the servers, leak memory contents, and even lead to the execution of arbitrary code. "The vulnerabilities require authentication, but can be triggered by any user with read permissions," Uriya Yavnieli and Or Peles, researchers from DevSecOps firm JFrog,  said  in a report published Tuesday. "This means the attacker must perform reconnaissance on the specific ClickHouse server target to obtain valid credentials. Any set of credentials would do, since even a user with the lowest privileges can trigger all of the vulnerabilities." The list of seven flaws is below – CVE-2021-43304 and CVE-2021-43305  (CVSS scores: 8.8) – Heap buffer overflow flaws in the LZ4 compression codec that could lead to remote code execution CVE-2021-42387 and CVE-2021-42388  (CVSS scores: 7.1) – Heap out-of-bounds read

Cloud infrastructure security company Wiz on Thursday revealed details of a now-fixed Azure Cosmos database vulnerability that could have been potentially exploited to grant any Azure user full admin access to other customers' database instances without any authorization. The flaw, which grants read, write, and delete privileges, has been dubbed " ChaosDB ," with Wiz researchers noting that "the vulnerability has a trivial exploit that doesn't require any previous access to the target environment, and impacts thousands of organizations, including numerous Fortune 500 companies." Cosmos DB is Microsoft's proprietary  NoSQL database  that's advertised as "a fully managed service" that "takes database administration off your hands with automatic management, updates and patching." The Wiz Research Team reported the issue to Microsoft on August 12, after which the Windows maker took steps to mitigate the issue within 48 hours of r

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 uncovered a sustained malicious campaign dating back to May 2018 that targets Windows machines running MS-SQL servers to deploy backdoors and other kinds of malware, including multi-functional remote access tools (RATs) and cryptominers. Named " Vollgar " after the Vollar cryptocurrency it mines and its offensive "vulgar" modus operandi, researchers at Guardicore Labs said the attack employs password brute-force to breach Microsoft SQL servers with weak credentials exposed to the Internet. Researchers claim the attackers managed to successfully infect nearly 2,000-3,000 database servers daily over the past few weeks, with potential victims belonging to healthcare, aviation, IT & telecommunications, and higher education sectors across China, India, the US, South Korea, and Turkey. Thankfully for those concerned, researchers have also released a script to let sysadmins detect if any of their Windows MS-SQL servers have been

International hotel chain Marriott today disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 5.2 million hotel guests, making it the second security incident to hit the company in recent years. "At the end of February 2020, we identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property," Marriott said in a statement . "We believe this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, we confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests." The incident exposed guests' personal information such as contact details (name, mailing address, email address, and phone number), loyalty account information (account number and points balance), and additional information such as company, gender, dates of births, room preferences, and language preferences. The ho

For the first time ever, the Apache Pulsar PMC team is publishing a user survey report. The 2020 Apache Pulsar User Survey Report reveals Pulsar's accelerating rate of global adoption, details how organizations are leveraging Pulsar to build real-time streaming applications, and highlights key features on Pulsar's product roadmap. Apache Pulsar is a cloud-native, distributed open source publish-subscribe (pub/sub) based high-performance server-to-server messaging and streaming system that manages hundreds of billions of events per day. It provides very low end-to-end latency, guaranteed message delivery, zero data loss, and a serverless lightweight computing framework for stream native data processing. Pulsar adoption has largely been driven by the market's increased demand for real-time, data-enabled technologies. While companies have tried to leverage monolithic messaging systems to build-out real-time offerings, they've hit major roadblocks. Ultimately, the

On the same day yesterday, when the US-based telecom giant T-Mobile admitted a data breach , the UK-based telecommunication provider Virgin Media announced that it has also suffered a data leak incident exposing the personal information of roughly 900,000 customers. What happened? Unlike the T-Mobile data breach that involved a sophisticated cyber attack, Virgin Media said the incident was neither a cyber attack nor the company's database was hacked. Rather the personal details of around 900,000 Virgin Media UK-based customers were exposed after one of its marketing databases was left unsecured on the Internet and accessible to anyone without requiring any authentication. "The precise situation is that information stored on one of our databases has been accessed without permission. The incident did not occur due to a hack, but as a result of the database being incorrectly configured," the company said in a note published on its website on Thursday night. Acc

More than 200 million records containing a wide range of property-related information on US residents were left exposed on a database that was accessible on the web without requiring any password or authentication. The exposed data — a mix of personal and demographic details — included the name, address, email address, age, gender, ethnicity, employment, credit rating, investment preferences, income, net worth, and property information, such as: Market value Property type Mortgage amount, rate, type, and lender Refinance amount, rate, type, and lender Previous owners Year built Number of beds and bathrooms Tax assessment information According to security firm Comparitech , the database, which was hosted on Google Cloud, is said to have been first indexed by search engine BinaryEdge on 26th January and discovered a day later by cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko. But after failing to identify the database owner, the server was eventually taken offline more than a

An election campaigning website operated by Likud―the ruling political party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu―inadvertently exposed personal information of all 6.5 million eligible Israeli voters on the Internet, just three weeks before the country is going to have a legislative election. In Israel, all political parties receive personal details of voters before the election, which they can't share with any third party and are responsible for protecting the privacy of their citizens and erasing it after the elections are over. Reportedly, Likud shared the entire voter registry with Feed-b, a software development company, who then uploaded it a website (elector.co.il) designed to promote the voting management app called 'Elector.' According to Ran Bar-Zik , a web security researcher who disclosed the issue, the voters' data was not leaked using any security vulnerability in the Elector app; instead, the incident occurred due to negligence by the softw

The U.S. multinational computer software company Adobe has suffered a serious security breach earlier this month that exposed user records' database belonging to the company's popular Creative Cloud service. With an estimated 15 million subscribers, Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe CC is a subscription service that gives users access to the company's full suite of popular creative software for desktop and mobile, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Lightroom, and many more. What happened? — Earlier this month, security researcher Bob Diachenko collaborated with the cybersecurity firm Comparitech to uncover an unsecured Elasticsearch database belonging to Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service that was accessible to anyone without any password or authentication. How many victims? — The inadvertently exposed database, which has now been secured, contained personal information of nearly 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud user accounts. What type

Cybersecurity researchers claim to have discovered a previously undocumented backdoor specifically designed for Microsoft SQL servers that could allow a remote attacker to control an already compromised system stealthily. Dubbed Skip-2.0 , the backdoor malware is a post-exploitation tool that runs in the memory and lets remote attackers connect to any account on the server running MSSQL version 11 and version 12 by using a "magic password." What's more? The malware manages to remain undetected on the victim's MSSQL Server by disabling the compromised machine's logging functions, event publishing, and audit mechanisms every time the "magic password" is used. With these capabilities, an attacker can stealthily copy, modify, or delete the content stored in a database, the impact of which varies from application to application integrated with targeted servers. "This could be used, for example, to manipulate in-game currencies for financial gai

After fining British Airways with a record fine of £183 million earlier this week, the UK's data privacy regulator is now planning to slap world's biggest hotel chain Marriott International with a £99 million ($123 million) fine under GDPR over 2014 data breach. This is the second major penalty notice in the last two days that hit companies for failing to protect its customers' personal and financial information compromised and implement adequate security measures. In November 2018, Marriott discovered that unknown hackers compromised their guest reservation database through its Starwood hotels subsidiary and walked away with personal details of approximately 339 million guests. The compromised database leaked guests' names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. The breach, which likely happened in 2014, also exposed unencrypted passport

At its developer conference held earlier this week in New York, the MongoDB team announced the latest version of its database management software that includes a variety of advanced features, including Field Level Encryption, Distributed Transactions, and Wildcard Indexes. The newly introduced Field Level Encryption (FLE), which will be available in the upcoming MongoDB 4.2 release, is an end-to-end encryption feature that encrypts and decrypts sensitive users' data on the client-side, preventing hackers from accessing plaintext data even if the database instance left exposed online or the server itself gets compromised. Almost every website, app, and service on the Internet today usually encrypt (particularly "hashing") only users' passwords before storing them into the databases, but unfortunately left other sensitive information unencrypted, including users' online activity data and their personal information. Moreover, even if there is an encryption

Flipboard, a popular social sharing and news aggregator service used by over 150 million people, has disclosed that its databases containing account information of certain users have been hacked. According to a public note published yesterday by the company, unknown hackers managed to gain unauthorized access to its systems for nearly 10 months—between June 2, 2018, and March 23, 2019, and then again on April 21-22, 2019. The hackers then potentially downloaded database containing Flipboard users' real name, usernames, cryptographically (salted hash) protected passwords and email addresses, including digital tokens for users who linked their Flipboard account to a third-party social media service. According to a breach notification email sent out to affected users and seen by The Hacker News, the company has now reset passwords for all users as a precautionary measure, forcing users to create a new strong password for their accounts. "You can continue to use Flipb

Elastic, the company behind the most widely used enterprise search engine ElasticSearch and the Elastic Stack, today announced that it has decided to make core security features of the Elastic Stack free and accessible to all users. ELK Stack or Elastic Stack is a collection of three powerful open source projects—Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana—that many large and small companies are using to format, search, analyze, and visualize a large amount of data in real time. In recent months, we have seen how thousands of instances of insecure, poorly configured Elasticsearch and Kibana servers had left millions of users sensitive data exposed on the Internet. Since the free version of Elastic Stack by default does not have any authentication or authorization mechanism, many developers and administrators fail to properly implement important security features manually. The core security features—like encrypted communication, role-based access control, authentication realms—in p

Not a week goes without a new Facebook blunder. Remember the most recent revelation of Facebook being caught asking users new to the social network platform for their email account passwords to verify their identity? At the time, it was suspected that Facebook might be using access to users' email accounts to unauthorizedly and secretly gather a copy of their saved contacts. Now it turns out that the collection of email contacts was true, Facebook finally admits. In a statement released on Wednesday, Facebook said the social media company "unintentionally" uploaded email contacts from up to 1.5 million new users on its servers, without their consent or knowledge, since May 2016. In other words, nearly 1.5 million users had shared passwords for their email accounts with Facebook as part of its dubious verification process. A Facebook spokesperson shared information with Business Insider that the company was using harvested data to "build Facebook'