hacking news | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A security researcher has discovered a severe vulnerability in the popular, open source event-driven platform StackStorm that could allow remote attackers to trick developers into unknowingly execute arbitrary commands on targeted services. StackStorm, aka "IFTTT for Ops," is a powerful event-driven automation tool for integration and automation across services and tools that allows developers to configure actions, workflows, and scheduled tasks, in order to perform some operations on large-scale servers. For example, you can set instructions (if this, then that) on Stackstorm platform to automatically upload network packet files to a cloud-based network analyze service, like CloudShark, in events when your security software detects an intrusion or malicious activity in the network. Since StackStorm executes actions—which can be anything, from the HTTP request to an arbitrary command—on remote servers or services that developers integrate for automated tasks, the pl

Popular enterprise software company Citrix that provides services to the U.S. military, the FBI, many U.S. corporations, and various U.S. government agencies disclosed last weekend a massive data breach of its internal network by "international cyber criminals." Citrix said it was warned by the FBI on Wednesday of foreign hackers compromising its IT systems and stealing "business documents," adding that the company does not know precisely which documents the hackers obtained nor how they got in. However, the FBI believes that the miscreants likely used a "password spraying" attack where the attackers guessed weak passwords to gain an early foothold in the company's network in order to launch more extensive attacks. "While not confirmed, the FBI has advised that the hackers likely used a tactic known as password spraying, a technique that exploits weak passwords. Once they gained a foothold with limited access, they worked to circumvent

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,

Cybersecurity researcher at Google's Project Zero division has publicly disclosed details and proof-of-concept exploit of a high-severity security vulnerability in macOS operating system after Apple failed to release a patch within 90 days of being notified. Discovered by Project Zero researcher Jann Horn and demonstrated by Ian Beer, the vulnerability resides in the way macOS XNU kernel allows an attacker to manipulate filesystem images without informing the operating system. The flaw could eventually allow an attacker or a malicious program to bypass the copy-on-write (COW) functionality to cause unexpected changes in the memory shared between processes, leading to memory corruption attacks. Copy-On-Write, also referred to as COW, is a resource-management optimization strategy used in computer programming. In general, if any process (destination) requires a file or data that is already in the memory but created by another process (source), both processes can share the

Coinhive, a notorious in-browser cryptocurrency mining service popular among cybercriminals, has announced that it will discontinue its services on March 8, 2019. Regular readers of The Hacker News already know how Coinhive's service helped cyber criminals earn hundreds of thousands of dollars by using computers of millions of people visiting hacked websites . For a brief recap: In recent years, cybercriminals leveraged every possible web vulnerability [in Drupal , WordPress , and others ] to hack thousands of websites and wireless routers , and then modified them to secretly inject Coinhive's JavaScript-based Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency mining script on web-pages to financially benefit themselves. Millions of online users who visited those hacked websites immediately had their computers' processing power hijacked, also known as cryptojacking , to mine cryptocurrency without users' knowledge, potentially generating profits for cybercriminals in the background.

Security researchers have discovered two high-severity vulnerabilities in the SHAREit Android app that could allow attackers to bypass device authentication mechanism and steal files containing sensitive from a victim's device. With over 1.5 billion users worldwide, SHAREit is a popular file sharing application for Android, iOS, Windows and Mac that has been designed to help people share video, music, files, and apps across various devices. With more than 500 million users, the SHAREit Android app was found vulnerable to a file transfer application's authentication bypass flaw and an arbitrary file download vulnerability, according to a blog post RedForce researchers shared with The Hacker News. The vulnerabilities were initially discovered over a year back in December 2017 and fixed in March 2018, but the researchers decided not to disclose their details until Monday "given the impact of the vulnerability, its big attack surface and ease of exploitation."

Security researchers have discovered a new class of security vulnerabilities that impacts all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, allowing attackers to bypass protection mechanisms introduced to defend against DMA attacks. Known for years, Direct memory access (DMA)-based attacks let an attacker compromise a targeted computer in a matter of seconds by plugging-in a malicious hot plug device—such as an external network card, mouse, keyboard, printer, storage, and graphics card—into Thunderbolt 3 port or the latest USB-C port . The DMA-based attacks are possible because Thunderbolt port allows connected peripherals to bypass operating system security policies and directly read/write system memory that contains sensitive information including your passwords, banking logins, private files, and browser activity. That means, simply plugging in an infected device, created using tools like Interception , can manipulate the contents o

It's not just the critical Drupal vulnerability that is being exploited by in the wild  cybercriminals to attack vulnerable websites that have not yet applied patches already available by its developers, but hackers are also exploiting a critical WinRAR vulnerability that was also revealed last week. A few days ago, The Hacker News reported about a 19-year-old remote code execution vulnerability disclosed by Check Point in the UNACEV2.dll library of WinRAR that could allow a maliciously-crafted ACE archive file to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system. WinRAR is a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide, but a critical "Absolute Path Traversal" bug (CVE-2018-20250) in its old third-party library, called UNACEV2.DLL, could allow attackers to extract a compressed executable file from the ACE archive to one of the Windows Startup folders, where the file would automatically run on the next reboot. To successfully exploit the

Cybercriminals have actively started exploiting an already patched security vulnerability in the wild to install cryptocurrency miners on vulnerable Drupal websites that have not yet applied patches and are still vulnerable. Last week, developers of the popular open-source content management system Drupal patched a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2019-6340) in Drupal Core that could allow attackers to hack affected websites. Despite releasing no technical details of the security vulnerability, the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for the vulnerability was made publicly available on the Internet just two days after the Drupal security team rolled out the patched version of its software. Now, security researchers at data center security vendor Imperva discovered a series of attacks—that began just a day after the exploit code went public—against its customers' websites using an exploit that leverages the CVE-2019-6340 security flaw. The attacks or

Great news. If you have already installed the latest update of Google Play Services released earlier today, and your Android device is running Android version 7.0 Nougat or above—Congratulations! Your device is now FIDO2 Certified. Are you thinking… what the heck that actually means? It means, instead of remembering complex passwords for your online accounts, you can now actually use your Android's built-in fingerprint sensor or FIDO security keys for secure password-less access to log into apps and websites that support the FIDO2 protocols, Google and the FIDO Alliance—a consortium that develops open source authentication standards—announced Monday. FIDO2 (Fast Identity Online) protocol offers strong passwordless authentication based on standard public key cryptography using hardware FIDO authenticators like security keys, mobile phones, and other built-in devices. FIDO2 protocol is a combination of W3C's WebAuthn API that allows developers to integrate FIDO aut

At NDSS Symposium 2019, a group of university researchers yesterday revealed newly discovered cellular network vulnerabilities that impact both 4G and 5G LTE protocols. According to a paper published by the researchers, " Privacy Attacks to the 4G and 5G Cellular Paging Protocols Using Side Channel Information, " the new attacks could allow remote attackers to bypass security protections implemented in 4G and 5G, re-enabling IMSI catching devices like " Stingrays " to intercept users' phone calls and track their location. Here below, we have described all the three attacks, how they work, what are their impacts, and why you should be concerned about these attacks. ToRPEDO Attack — Location Verification, DoS, Inject Fake Alerts Short for "TRacking via Paging mEssage DistributiOn," TorPEDO is the most concerning attack that leverages paging protocol, allowing remote attackers to verify a victim device's location, inject fabricated paging mess

A team of cybersecurity researchers from the University of New Haven yesterday released a video demonstrating how vulnerabilities that most programmers often underestimate could have allowed hackers to evade privacy and security of your virtual reality experience as well as the real world. According to the researchers—Ibrahim Baggili, Peter Casey and Martin Vondráček—the underlying vulnerabilities, technical details of which are not yet publicly available but shared exclusively with The Hacker News , resided in a popular virtual reality (VR) application called Bigscreen and the Unity game development platform, on which Bigscreen is built. Bigscreen is a popular VR application that describes itself as a "virtual living room," enabling friends to hang out together in virtual world, watch movies in a virtual cinema, chat in the lobby, make private rooms, collaborate on projects together, share their computer screens or control in a virtual environment and more. Scary

Exclusive — A security researcher has identified an unsecured server that was leaking detailed personal details of nearly half a million Indian citizens... thanks to another MongoDB database instance that company left unprotected on the Internet accessible to anyone without password. In a report shared with The Hacker News, Bob Diachenko  disclosed that two days ago he found a 4.1 GB-sized highly sensitive database online, named " GNCTD ," containing information collected on 458,388 individuals located in Delhi, including their  Aadhaar numbers and voter ID numbers. Though it's not clear if the exposed database is linked to the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD), Diachenko found that the database contains references and email addresses with "transerve.com" domain for users registered with "senior supervisor," and "super admin" designations. Based upon the information available on  Transerve Technologies  webs

Developers of Drupal—a popular open-source content management system software that powers millions of websites—have released the latest version of their software to patch a critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to hack your site. The update came two days after the Drupal security team released an advance security notification of the upcoming patches, giving websites administrators early heads-up to fix their websites before hackers abuse the loophole. The vulnerability in question is a critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Drupal Core that could "lead to arbitrary PHP code execution in some cases," the Drupal security team said. While the Drupal team hasn't released any technical details of the vulnerability (CVE-2019-6340), it mentioned that the flaw resides due to the fact that some field types do not properly sanitize data from non-form sources and affects Drupal 7 and 8 Core. It should also be noted that your Drupal-based website

Beware Windows users... a new dangerous remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the WinRAR software, affecting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point have disclosed technical details of a critical vulnerability in WinRAR—a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide—that affects all versions of the software released in last 19 years. The flaw resides in the way an old third-party library, called UNACEV2.DLL, used by the software handled the extraction of files compressed in ACE data compression archive file format. However, since WinRAR detects the format by the content of the file and not by the extension, attackers can merely change the .ace extension to .rar extension to make it look normal. According to researchers, they found an "Absolute Path Traversal" bug in the library that could be leveraged to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system attempting to uncompre

Exclusive — If you have not updated your website to the latest WordPress version 5.0.3, it's a brilliant idea to upgrade the content management software of your site now. From now, I mean immediately. Cybersecurity researchers at RIPS Technologies GmbH today shared their latest research with The Hacker News, revealing the existence of a critical remote code execution vulnerability that affects all previous versions of WordPress content management software released in the past 6 years. The remote code execution attack, discovered and reported to the WordPress security team late last year, can be exploited by a low privileged attacker with at least an "author" account using a combination of two separate vulnerabilities—Path Traversal and Local File Inclusion—that reside in the WordPress core. The requirement of at least an author account reduces the severity of this vulnerability to some extent, which could be exploited by a rogue content contributor or an attacker w

Wohooo! Great news for hackers and penetration testers. Offensive Security has just released Kali Linux 2019.1, the first 2019 version of its Swiss army knife for cybersecurity professionals. The latest version of Kali Linux operating system includes kernel up to version 4.19.13 and patches for numerous bugs, along with many updated software, like Metasploit, theHarvester, DBeaver, and more. Kali Linux 2019.1 comes with the latest version of Metasploit (version 5.0) penetration testing tool, which "includes database and automation APIs, new evasion capabilities, and usability improvements throughout," making it more efficient platform for penetration testers. Metasploit version 5.0 is the software's first major release since version 4.0 which came out in 2011. Talking about ARM images, Kali Linux 2019.1 has now once again added support for Banana Pi and Banana Pro that are on kernel version 4.19. "Veyron has been moved to a 4.19 kernel, and the Raspbe

It's not at all surprising that downloading movies and software from the torrent network could infect your computer with malware, but it's more heartbreaking when a popular, trusted file uploader goes rogue. Popular software cracks/keygens uploader "CracksNow," who had trusted status from many torrent sites, has now been banned from several torrent sites after he was repeatedly found distributing the malware bundled with his uploads. In recent months, according to TorrentFreak , many downloaders complained that the files they downloaded, shared by CracksNow on torrents, found containing GandCrab ransomware and other malware that can do severe damage to computers. Discovered earlier last year, GandCrab is a widespread ransomware threat, like every other ransomware in the market, that encrypts all files on an infected system and blackmails victims to pay a ransom in digital currency to unlock them. GandCrab ransomware was being distributed late last month via a

It's 2019, and just clicking on a specially crafted URL would have allowed an attacker to hack your Facebook account without any further interaction. A security researcher discovered a critical cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the most popular social media platform that could have been allowed attackers to hijack Facebook accounts by simply tricking the targeted users into clicking on a link. The researcher, who goes by the online alias "Samm0uda," discovered the vulnerability after he spotted a flawed endpoint (facebook.com/comet/dialog_DONOTUSE/) that could have been exploited to bypass CSRF protections and takeover victim's account. "This is possible because of a vulnerable endpoint which takes another given Facebook endpoint selected by the attacker along with the parameters and makes a POST request to that endpoint after adding the fb_dtsg parameter," the researcher says on his blog . "Also this endpoint is located under t

All these numbers…. "More than 5 billion records from 6,500 data breaches were exposed in 2018" — a report from Risk Based Security says. "More than 59,000 data breaches have been reported across the European since the GDPR came into force in 2018" — a report from DLA Piper says. …came from data breaches that were reported to the public, but in reality, more than half of all data breaches actually go unreported. Just last week, we disclosed the existence of some massive unreported data breaches in two rounds, which a hacker has now started monetizing by selling stolen user databases publicly. Now, a new set of databases containing millions of hacked accounts from several websites has been made available for sale on the dark web marketplace by the same hacker who goes by online alias Gnosticplayers. Gnosticplayers last week made two rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on the popular dark web marketplace called Dream Market , posting details of near