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A Google security researcher, ' James Forshaw ' has discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows 8.1 that could allow a hacker to modify contents or even to take over victims' computers completely, leaving millions of users vulnerable. The researcher also provided a Proof of Concept (PoC) program for the vulnerability. Forshaw says that he has tested the PoC only on an updated Windows 8.1 and that it is unclear whether earlier versions, specifically Windows 7, are vulnerable. Forshaw unearthed the bug in September 2014 and thereby notified on the Google Security Research mailing list about the bug on 30th September. Now, after 90 days disclosure deadline the vulnerability and Proof of Concept program was made public on Wednesday. The vulnerability resides in the function AhcVerifyAdminContext , an internal function and not a public API which actually checks whether the user is an administrator. "This function has a vulnerability where i

A Serious vulnerability has been discovered in the Web browser installed by default on a large number (Approximately 70%) of Android devices, that could allow an attacker to hijack users' open websites, and there is now a Metasploit module available to easily exploit this dangerous flaw. The exploit targets vulnerability ( CVE-2014-6041 ) in Android versions 4.2.1 and all older versions and was first disclosed right at the start of September by an independent security researcher Rafay Baloch, but there has not been much public discussion on it. The Android bug has been called a " privacy disaster " by Tod Beardsley, a developer for the Metasploit security toolkit, and in order to explain you why, he has promised to post a video that is " sufficiently shocking ." " By malforming a javascript: URL handler with a prepended null byte, the AOSP, or Android Open Source Platform (AOSP) Browser) fails to enforce the Same-Origin Policy (SOP) browser secur

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Yahoo-owned Flickr, one of the biggest online photo management and sharing website in the world was recently impacted by a web application vulnerability , which could allow an attacker to modify users' profile image. Flickr is one of the most popular photo sharing website with more than 87 million users, therefore some top major target for cybercriminals. The site was vulnerable to the most common vulnerability known as Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF or CSRF), which is very easy to exploit by attackers. Cross-Site Request Forgery is a method of attacking a Web site in which an intruder masquerades as a legitimate and trusted user. All the attacker need to do is get the target browser to make a request to your website on their behalf. If they can either: Convince your users to click on a HTML page they've constructed Insert arbitrary HTML in a target website that your users visit Not too difficult, is it? Abdullah Hussam , a 17 years old programmer from Iraq found that just

A critical vulnerability in Tor — an encrypted anonymizing network considered to be one of the most privacy oriented service, which is used by online users in order to hide their activities from law enforcement, government censors and others — was probably being used to de-anonymize the identity of Tor users, Tor project warned on Wednesday. 115 MALICIOUS ToR RELAYS WERE DE-ANONYMIZING USERS According to a security advisory , Tor Team has found a group of 115 malicious fast non-exit relays (6.4% of whole Tor network), those were actively monitoring the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit in an effort to de-anonymize users. " While we don't know when they started doing the attack, users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they were affected, " Tor said. When you use Tor anonymizing network, your IP address remains hidden and it appears that your connection is coming from the IP address of a Tor exit rela

A French information security company VUPEN has recently disclosed that it held onto a serious Internet Explorer (IE) vulnerability for at least three years before revealing it at the Pwn2Own hacker competition held in March this year. The critical zero-day vulnerability affected versions 8, 9, 10 and 11 of Internet Explorer browser that allowed attackers to remotely bypass the IE Protected Mode sandbox. An attacker can exploit this issue to gain elevated privileges. VULNERABILITY DISCLOSURE TIMELINE According to a disclosure made by the security company last week, the vulnerability with ID  CVE-2014-2777  was discovered by the company on 12 February 2011, which was  patched by Microsoft  last month. 12 February 2011 - IE Zero-day discovered by Vupen. 13 March 2014 - Vupen reported to Microsoft. 11 June 2014 - Microsoft Released patch and publicly released the advisory . Sandbox is security mechanism used to run an application in a restricted environment. If an attacker is ab

A Remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability has been discovered in the comment and discussion service, Disqus plugin for the most popular Blogging Platform Wordpress . While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, about 1.3 million of them use the ' Disqus Comment System ' Plugin, making it one of the popular plugins of Wordpress for web comments and discussions. The security team at the security firm Sucuri discovered a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw while analyzing some custom JSON parser of the Disqus plugin and found that the variable parsing function could allow anyone to execute commands on the server using insecurely coded PHP eval() function. WHO ARE VULNERABLE The Remote Code Execution ( RCE ) Vulnerability could be triggered by a remote attacker, only if it is using following application versions on the server/website. PHP version 5.1.6 or earlier WordPress 3.1.4 or earlier Wordpress Plugin

A 20 year old critical subtle integer overflow vulnerability has been discovered in Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO), an extremely efficient data compression algorithm that focuses on decompression speed, which is almost five times faster than zlib and bzip compression algorithms. Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) was developed in 1994 by Markus Oberhumer and currently it is one of the most popular and widespread compression algorithm used in the Linux kernel , some Samsung Android mobile devices, other embedded devices and several open-source libraries including OpenVPN, MPlayer2, Libav, FFmpeg. 20 YEAR OLD VULNERABILITY IN LZO ALGORITHM Don A. Bailey, founder and CEO of Lab Mouse Security, who disclosed the technical details of the buffer overrun vulnerability in LZO/LZ4 algorithm, explains that if an attacker carefully craft a piece of compressed data that would run malicious code when the software attempted to decompress it. According to advisory, if buffers of 16MB or more

A critical code-execution vulnerability almost affecting everyone those are not running the most updated version of Google Android , i.e. Android version 4.4 also known as KitKat. After nine months of vulnerability disclosure to the Android security team, researchers of the Application Security team at IBM have finally revealed all the possible details of a serious code-execution vulnerability that still affects the Android devices running versions 4.3 and earlier, which could allow attackers to exfiltrate sensitive information from the vulnerable devices. " Considering Android's fragmented nature and the fact that this was a code-execution vulnerability, we decided to wait a bit with the public disclosure ," said Roee Hay, a security research group leader at IBM. The researchers found the stack buffer overflow vulnerability that resides in the Android's KeyStore storage service, which according to the Android developers' website is the service code running in Androi

Do you own a blog on WordPress.com website? If Yes, then you should take some extra cautious while signing into your Wordpress account from the next time when connected to public Wi-Fi, because it can be hacked without your knowledge, even if you have enabled two-factor authentication. Yan Zhu , a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) noticed that the blogs hosted on WordPress are sending user authentication cookies in plain text, rather than encrypting it. So, it can be easily hijacked by even a Script-Kiddie looking to steal information. HIJACKING  AUTHENTICATION COOKIES When Wordpress users log into their account, WordPress.com servers set a web cookie with name " wordpress_logged_in " into the users' browser, Yan Zhu explained in a blog post. He noticed that this authentication cookie being sent over clear HTTP, in a very insecure manner. One can grab HTTP cookies from the same Wi-Fi Network by using some specialized tools, such as F

Smartphones are always ready to connect to the Internet and contains sensitive information such as Contacts, SMS, Photos, and GPS information and this sensitive information is always in danger of leakage. According to a report, Cyber criminals and state-sponsored hackers are developing 55,000 new malware variants, each and every day; and many of them try to elevate privileges for unfettered control of the user device. North Carolina State University Researchers have developed a new software, called Practical Root Exploit Containment ( PREC ) , with the sole purpose of detecting mobile malware that attempts to run Root exploits in Android devices. Root exploits take control of system administration functions of the operating system that gives the hacker an unrestricted control of user's Smartphone. That means, an application has not permission to read your messages or contacts or the GPS location, but after getting root access it will be able to steal any data from your d

Which Wireless Router do you have at your Home or Office? If it's a Linksys Router you could be in the danger to a new malware that attacks your firmware and replicates itself. Security researcher Johannes B. Ullrich from the SANS Technology Institute has warned about a self-replicating malware which is exploiting authentication bypass and code-execution vulnerabilities in the Linksys wireless routers. The Malware named as ' THE MOON ', scans for other vulnerable devices to spread from router to router and Johannes confirmed that the malicious worm has already infected around 1,000 Linksys E1000, E1200, and E2400 routers. In order to hack the Router, malware remotely calls the Home Network Administration Protocol (HNAP), allows identification, configuration and management of networking devices. The Malware first request the model and firmware version of the router using HNAP and if the device founds vulnerable, it sends a CGI script exploit to get the local command execution

A location based Social Networking platform with 45 million users,' Foursquare ' was vulnerable to the primary email address disclosed.  Foursquare is a Smartphone application that gives you details of nearby cafes, bars, shops, parks using GPS location and also tells about your friends nearby. According to a Penetration tester and hacker ' Jamal Eddin e ',  an attacker can extract email addresses of all 45 million users just by using a few lines of scripting tool. Basically the flaw exists in the Invitation system of the Foursquare app. While testing the app, he found that invitation received on the recipient's end actually disclosing the sender's email address, as shown above. Invitation URL:  https://foursquare.com/mehdi?action=acceptFriendship&expires=1378920415&src=wtbfe& uid = 64761059 &sig=mmlx96RwGrQ2fJAg4OWZhAWnDvc%3D Where 'uid' parameter represents the sender's profile ID.  Hacker noticed th

X.Org Foundation develops the X-Window System, the standard window system for open source operating systems and devices. Most of the graphical user interfaces for Unix and Linux systems rely on it. At the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Germany, Ilja van Sprundel , a security researcher gave the presentation titled  " X11 Server security with being 'worse than it looks.'". He found more than 120 bugs in a few months. In the presentation, he has presented a 23 year old Stack overflow vulnerability in X11 System that could lead to privilege escalation to root and affects all versions of the X Server back to X11R5. Later today, X.Org Foundation released a security Advisory , states " A BDF font file containing a longer than expected string could overflow the buffer on the stack. Testing in X servers built with Stack Protector resulted in an immediate crash when reading a user-provided specially crafted font. " The flaw resides in a file at " libXfo

How is it possible to exploit SD Card, USB stick and other mobile devices for hacking? Another interesting hack was presented at the Chaos Computer Congress (30C3), in Hamburg, Germany. The researchers demonstrated how it is possible to hack the microcontroller inside every SD and MicroSD flash cards that allow arbitrary code execution and can be used to perform a man in the middle attack . The Hardware Hackers  Andrew " bunnie " Huang and Sean "xobs"  described the exploitation method on their blog post ," it also enables the possibility for hardware enthusiasts to gain access to a very cheap and ubiquitous source of microcontrollers. " It seems that to reduce SD cards price and increase their storage capability, engineers have to consider a form of internal entropy that could affect data integrity on every Flash drive. Almost every NAND flash memory is affected by defects and presents problems like electron leakage between adjacent cells. " Flash memory is really

A Symantec researcher has discovered a new Linux worm, targeting machine-to-machine devices, and exploits a PHP vulnerability ( CVE-2012-1823 ) to propagate that has been patched as far back as May 2012. Linux worm, which has been dubbed Linux.Darlloz , poses a threat to devices such as home routers and set-top boxes, Security Cameras, and even industrial control systems. It is based on proof-of-concept code released in late October and it helps spread malware by exploiting a vulnerability in php-cgi . " Upon execution, the worm generates IP addresses randomly, accesses a specific path on the machine with well-known ID and passwords, and sends HTTP POST requests, which exploit the vulnerability. If the target is unpatched, it downloads the worm from a malicious server and starts searching for its next target. " the Symantec researchers explained. The malware does not appear to perform any malicious activity other than silently spreading itself and wiping a load of system

Japanese most popular word processing software ' Ichitaro ' and Multiple Products are vulnerable to a zero day Remote Code Execution Flaw Vulnerability, allowing the execution of arbitrary code to compromise a user's system. According to assigned CVE-2013-5990 ,  malicious attacker is able to gain system access and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of a local user. The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error when handling certain document files. " We confirm the existence of vulnerabilities in some of our products. " company blog says. In a blog post, Antivirus Firm Symantec confirmed that in September 2013, they have discovered attacks in the wild attempting to exploit this vulnerability during, detected as  Trojan.Mdropper , which is a variant of  Backdoor.Vidgrab . Researchers mentioned that  Backdoor.Vidgrab variant was used as a payload for a watering hole attack exploiting the Microsoft Internet Explorer Memory

Hackers are focusing on vulnerabilities in the PHP web application development platform threatening 80% websites in the world, including many big website i.e. Facebook and Wikipedia. PHP has several predefined variables that are called SuperGlobals i.e. POST, GET, COOKIES, FILES etc. Imperva Releases Hacker Intelligence Initiative Report , particularly concerned about two vulnerabilities that can be used to execute code on servers running PHP and fail to stop PHP SuperGlobal parameter variables being modified by external sources. Dubbed as  CVE-2011-2505 , describes a vulnerability in the authentication feature in PhpMyAdmin (PMA) that enables attackers to modify the  _SESSION  SuperGlobal variable. CVE-2010-3065 describes a problem in the PHP's session serialization mechanism. By injecting malicious value into an internal variable using PHP's Superglobal mechanism, the attacker is able to change the application flow and execute arbitrary commands to take control over

A USB Internet Modems or Data card, is a type of modem that allows your computer to receive Internet access using USB Port and connect to a GSM/CDMA network there by creating a PPPoE  ( Point to Point protocol over Ethernet) interface to your computer. Indian Security Researcher ' Rahul Sasi ' found a new Innovative critical flaw in these USB Internet Modems that allows an attacker to execute malicious code remotely, just via sending an SMS. While talking to ' The Hacker News ' , he claimed that the reported vulnerability  allows him to even hack computers remotely to gain the Meterpreter shell or  full access to the victim's PC. Vulnerability can be used by a malicious attacker for Mass exploitation, since these modems have a phone number which lies in a particular series, so all the phone numbers starting with xxxxxx1000 to xxxxxx2000 would be running a particular version of the USB modem software. USB Internet Modems are supplied with diale