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Google on Monday announced that it will pay security researchers to find exploits using vulnerabilities, previously remediated or otherwise, over the next three months as part of a new bug bounty program to improve the security of the Linux kernel. To that end, the company is expected to issue rewards worth $31,337 (a reference to Leet ) for exploiting privilege escalation in a lab environment for each patched vulnerability, an amount that can climb up to $50,337 for working exploits that take advantage of zero-day flaws in the kernel and other undocumented attack techniques. Specifically, the program aims to uncover attacks that could be launched against Kubernetes-based infrastructure to defeat process isolation barriers (via NSJail) and break out of the sandbox to leak secret information. The program is expected to last until January 31, 2022. "It is important to note, that the easiest exploitation primitives are not available in our lab environment due to the hardening ...

The iPhone of New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard was repeatedly hacked with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware tool over a three-year period stretching between June 2018 to June 2021, resulting in infections twice in July 2020 and June 2021. The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which  publicized  the findings on Sunday, said the "targeting took place while he was reporting on Saudi Arabia, and writing a book about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman." The research institute did not attribute the infiltrations to a specific government. In a  statement  shared with Hubbard, the Israeli company denied its involvement in the hacks and dismissed the findings as "speculation," while noting that the journalist was not "a target of Pegasus by any of NSO's customers." To date, NSO Group is believed to have leveraged at least three different iOS exploits — namely an iMessage zero-click exploit in December 2019, a  KISMET  exploit targeting iOS 13...

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Organizations' cybersecurity capabilities have improved over the past decade, mostly out of necessity. As their defenses get better, so do the methods, tactics, and techniques malicious actors devise to penetrate their environments. Instead of the standard virus or trojan, attackers today will deploy a variety of tools and methods to infiltrate an organization's environment and attack it from the inside. In an interesting twist of fate, one of the tools organizations have used to audit and improve their defenses has also become a popular tool attackers use to infiltrate. Cobalt Strike is an Adversary Simulation and Red Team Operations tool that allows organizations to simulate advanced attacks and test their security stacks in a close-to-real-world simulation. A new research webinar from XDR provider Cynet ( register here ) offers a better look at Cobalt Strike. The webinar, led by Cyber Operations Analyst for the Cynet MDR Team Yuval Fischer, will take a deep dive into the thr...

A seven-year-old privilege escalation vulnerability discovered in the polkit system service could be exploited by a malicious unprivileged local attacker to bypass authorization and escalate permissions to the root user. Tracked as  CVE-2021-3560  (CVSS score: 7.8), the flaw affects polkit versions between 0.113 and 0.118 and was discovered by GitHub security researcher Kevin Backhouse, who said the issue was  introduced in a code commit  made on Nov. 9, 2013. Red Hat's Cedric Buissart  noted  that Debian-based distributions, based on polkit 0.105, are also vulnerable. Polkit  (née PolicyKit) is a toolkit for defining and handling authorizations in Linux distributions, and is used for allowing unprivileged processes to communicate with privileged processes. "When a requesting process disconnects from dbus-daemon just before the call to polkit_system_bus_name_get_creds_sync starts, the process cannot get a unique uid and pid of the process and it c...

Security researchers from Newcastle University in the UK have found a way to steal larger amounts of money from people's pockets using just a mobile phone, due to a security glitch Visa's contactless payment cards. Contactless payment cards use a cryptoprocessor and RFID technology to perform secure transactions without a need to insert the card in a reader, even an NFC-equipped mobile device may also be used as a payment card. But there is a specified limits country-wise. Contactless payment cards are meant to have a limit of £20 per purchase in UK, using which shoppers can buy things by simply tapping their card on a scanner, without having to type in a PIN. But exploiting a flaw in its protocol could allow cyber criminals to manipulate the cards to transfer up to $999,999.99 in foreign currency into a scammer's account. Researchers on Wednesday at the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, detailed the attack which rely on a "rogue POS te...

Cyber criminals have explored one more way to exploit Heartbleed OpenSSL bug against organisations to hijack multiple active web sessions conducted over a virtual private network connection. The consulting and incident response Mandiant investigated targeted attack against an unnamed organization and said the hackers have exploited the " Heartbleed " security vulnerability in OpenSSL running in the client's SSL VPN concentrator to remotely access active sessions of an organization's internal network. The incident is the result of attacks leveraging the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerabilities, which resides in the OpenSSL's heartbeat functionality, if enabled would return 64KB of random memory in plaintext to any client or server requesting for a connection. The vulnerability infected almost two-third of internet web servers, including the popular websites. Recently, there has been an arrest of a Canadian teen of stealing usernames, credentials, session IDs and other da...

On Saturday, the Senior Administration Officials cast light on the subject of Internet Security and said President Obama has clearly decided that whenever the U.S. Intelligence agency like NSA discovers major vulnerabilities, in most of the situations the agency should reveal them rather than exploiting for national purpose, according to The New York Times . OBAMA's POLICY WITH LOOPHOLE FOR NSA Yet, there is an exception to the above statement, as Mr. President carved a detailed exception to the policy " Unless there is a clear national security or law enforcement need, " which means that the policy creates a loophole for the spying agencies like NSA to sustain their surveillance programs by exploiting security vulnerabilities to create Cyber Weapons. After three-month review of recommendations [ PDF-file ], the Final Report of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies was submitted to Mr. Obama on last December, out of which one of the recommendation on pa...

Microsoft warned about a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Word that is being actively exploited in targeted attacks and discovered by the Google security team. " At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks directed at Microsoft Word 2010… " company said. According to Microsoft's security advisory , Microsoft Word is vulnerable to  a remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2014-1761 ) that can be exploited by a specially crafted Rich Text Format (RTF). An Attacker can simply infect the victim's system with malware if a user opens a malicious Rich Text Format (RTF), or merely preview the message in Microsoft Outlook. " The issue is caused when Microsoft Word parses specially crafted RTF-formatted data causing system memory to become corrupted in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code. " Microsoft acknowledged that remote code execution flaw also exists in Microsoft Word 2003, 2007, 2013, Word Viewer and Office for Mac ...

Security Firm FireEye has uncovered yet another critical zero-day vulnerability in widely used Adobe Flash Software and Adobe has been forced to issue a second emergency patch update  in less than a month. All versions of Adobe Flash Player released before today's patch are vulnerable to the zero-day exploit and the patch addresses a critical vulnerability  CVE-2014-0502 , being used in a watering hole attack -dubbed " Operation Greedywonk",  that allows attackers to remotely take control of infected systems. The vulnerability affects the latest versions of Flash, is reported to be targeting the websites of three non-profit institutions, being redirected to an malicious server hosting the zero-day exploit. " Visitors to the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics (www.piie[.]com) were redirected to an exploit server hosting this Flash zero-day through a hidden iframe ." FireEye said. Security updates tackle a number of flaws includi...

Hackers are using a zero day vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser and targeting US military personnels in an active attack campaign, dubbed as ' Operation Snowman' . FireEye Researchers have discovered that a U.S. veterans website was compromised to serve a zero day exploit, known as CVE-2014-0322 , which typically involves the compromise of a specific website in order to target a group of visitors known to frequent it. FireEye identified drive-by-download attack which has altered HTML code of the website and introduced JavaScript which creates malicious iFrame. " A zero-day exploit (CVE-2014-0322) being served up from the U.S. Veterans of Foreign Wars' website (VFW[.]org). We believe the attack is a strategic Web compromise targeting American military personnel, amid a paralyzing snowstorm at the U.S. " According to FireEye, the zero day CVE-2014-0322 ' vulnerability is a previously unknown use-after-free bug in Microsof...

Pwnium is the annual Hacking competition where Google invites coders from around the world to find security holes in Google Chrome. Google has announced its 4th Pwnium Hacking Contest hosted at the Canadian Security conference in March, offering more than $2.7 million in potential rewards for hacking Chrome OS-running ARM and Intel Chromebook. This year the security researchers have a choice in between an ARM-based Chromebook, the HP Chromebook 11 (WiFi) and the Acer C720 Chromebook (2GB WiFi) based on Intel's Haswell microarchitecture . The attack must be demonstrated against one of these devices running " then-current " stable version of Chrome OS. " Security is a core tenet of Chromium, which is why we hold regular competitions to learn from security researchers. Contests like Pwnium help us make Chromium even more secure ," Jorge Lucángeli Obes, Google Security Engineer said. Amongst the payouts are $110,000 for the browser or s...

How many of you use Google Chrome for surfing the Internet and feel safe while working on it? I think many of you. Chrome is one of the most trusted Web Browsers that provide a user friendly environment and cyber security, but this we all know that every product has its negative side too, and so has Google's Chrome. Chrome has a 'Voice Recognition' feature, that use your system's microphone and allows you to speak instead of typing into any text box, to make hands-free web searches, quick conversions, and audio translator also work with them. Google's browser is also not immune to bugs and this time the new bug discovered in Chrome is capable to listen and record your whole private conversations without your knowledge, by abusing the voice recognition feature. While working on ' Annyang ', a voice to text software for websites, the web developer ' Tal Ater ' discovered a vulnerability that can be exploited and lets malicious sites to turn your Go...

After Snapchat hack, this can be another worst data breach of the new year. A Pakistani hacker ' H4x0r HuSsY ' has successfully compromised the official Forum of ' openSUSE ', a Linux distro developed, sponsored & supported by SUSE. The hacker managed to deface the Forum and uploaded its custom message page as shown and account information of 79,500 registered users' may have been compromised. (The forum was defaced at the time of writing - Check Here ) The popular website MacRumors's Forum was compromised  in last November using an alleged zero day exploit, which is based on  vBulletin , a famous forum software. The openSUSE Forum is also based upon  vBulletin . Another interesting fact is that openSUSE is still using vBulletin 4.2.1 , which is vulnerable to  inject rogue administrator accounts flaw. Whereas,  the latest patched  vBulletin 5.0.5 is available. Possibly, Hacker exploits same or another known vBulletin version 4.2.1 vuln...

I am sure that you all have been familiar with the above shown annoying Window Operating System error messages that many times pop ups on your screen while working on the system in case of process failure i.e. " The system has recovered from a serious error. A log of this error has been created. Please tell Microsoft about this problem " The message that prompts ask the user to report the problem to Microsoft followed by the options to Send an error report or Not send . Most of the time Gentle users like you and me used to submit these error reports to aware the Microsoft about the problem. But What if these crash reports can be abused to identify the vulnerabilities of your system for Spying? NSA is intercepting wide range of Internet Traffic including many Encrypted connections and naturally unencrypted also and surprisingly, by default Microsoft encrypts its reports, but the messages are transmitted unencrypted or over standard HTTP connections to watson.microsoft.c...

Microsoft has  released  11 Security Patch this Tuesday, including one for CVE-2013-5065  zero-day vulnerability, recently discovered Local privilege escalation vulnerability that could allow a hacker to launch an attack using corrupted TIFF images to take over victims' computers. FireEye researchers said they found the exploit in the wild being used alongside a PDF-based exploit against a patched Adobe Reader vulnerability. December's Patch Tuesday update bundle brings five bulletins ranked critical, including a patch for a vulnerability that could allow remote code execution in Internet Explorer and another remote code execution vulnerability in Office and Microsoft Server is also addressed. Other patches addressing remote code execution vulnerabilities in Lync, all versions of Office and Microsoft Exchange. All supported versions of Windows, from XP to RT and 8.1, are affected by at least one of the critical vulnerabilities. The Six S...

LinkedIn's iOS application is prone to a vulnerability that may permit remote attackers to execute arbitrary code. Security Researcher Zouheir Abdallah  has disclosed HTML parsing vulnerability in LinkedIn iOS an app, that can be used to phish for credentials or be escalated into a full blown attack. LinkedIn's vulnerability occurs when the messaging feature of LinkedIn's mobile app parses invalid HTML and an attacker can exploit this vulnerability remotely from his/her account, which could have serious impact on LinkedIn's users.  He created Proof of concept of the flaw and submitted it to the LinkedIn Security team in September 2013. Later in October 2013, the vulnerable application was patched. One of the possible attack vector is that, using this vulnerability attacker can easily phish LinkedIn user on iOS app. As shown in the screenshot, POC message says: Hey, Can you please view my LinkedIn profile and endorse me! Thanks! I appreciate it! The iOS app wil...

NSS Labs issued the report titled " The Known Unknowns " to explain the dynamics behind the market of zero-day exploits. Last week I discussed about the necessity to define a model for " cyber conflict " to qualify the principal issues related to the use of cyber tools and cyber weapons in an Information Warfare context, today I decided to give more info to the readers on cyber arsenals of governments. Governments consider the use of cyber weapons as a coadiuvant to conventional weapons, these malicious application could be used for sabotage or for cyber espionage, they could be used to hit a specifically designed software (e.g. SCADA within a critical infrastructure ) or they could be used for large scale operations infecting thousand of machines exploiting zero-day in common application ( e.g. Java platform, Adobe software ). The zero-day flaw are the most important component for the design of an efficient cyber weapon, governments have recently created dedic...