linux | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Network-attached storage (NAS) appliance maker QNAP on Monday warned of a recently disclosed Linux vulnerability affecting its devices that could be abused to elevate privileges and gain control of affected systems. "A local privilege escalation vulnerability, also known as 'Dirty Pipe,' has been reported to affect the Linux kernel on QNAP NAS running QTS 5.0.x and QuTS hero h5.0.x," the company  said . "If exploited, this vulnerability allows an unprivileged user to gain administrator privileges and inject malicious code." The Taiwanese firm said it's continuing to thoroughly  investigate its product line  for the vulnerability and that QNAP NAS devices running QTS versions 4.x are immune to the Dirty Pipe flaw. Tracked as  CVE-2022-0847  (CVSS score: 7.8), the shortcoming resides in the Linux kernel that could permit an attacker to overwrite arbitrary data into any read-only files and allow for a complete takeover of vulnerable machines. "A

Details have emerged about a now-patched high-severity vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could potentially be abused to escape a container in order to execute arbitrary commands on the container host. The shortcoming resides in a Linux kernel feature called  control groups , also referred to as cgroups version 1 (v1), which allows processes to be organized into hierarchical groups, thereby making it possible to limit and monitor the usage of resources such as CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network. Tracked as  CVE-2022-0492  (CVSS score: 7.0), the  issue   concerns  a  case  of  privilege escalation  in the cgroups v1 release_agent functionality, a script that's executed following the termination of any process in the cgroup. "The issue stands out as one of the simplest Linux privilege escalations discovered in recent times: The Linux kernel mistakenly exposed a privileged operation to unprivileged users," Unit 42 researcher Yuval Avrahami  said  in a report publishe

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,

There's something about craftsmanship. It's personal, its artistry, and it can be incredibly effective in achieving its goals. On the other hand, mass-market production can be effective in other ways, through speed, efficiency, and cost savings. The story of data centers is one of going from craftsmanship – where every individual machine is a pet project, maintained with great care – to mass production with big server farms where individual units are completely disposable. In this article, we take a look at how data centers have changed shape over the decades. We examine the implications for data center workloads, and for the people that run them – who have now lost their pet systems. We'll also review the cybersecurity implications of the new data center landscape. Pet system with a big purpose For any sysadmin who started their career before the advent of virtualization and other cloud and automation technologies, systems were finely crafted pieces of hardware – and

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Canonical's  Snap  software packaging and deployment system, the most critical of which can be exploited to escalate privilege to gain root privileges. Snaps are self-contained application packages that are designed to work on operating systems that use the Linux kernel and can be installed using a tool called snapd. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44731 , the issue concerns a privilege escalation flaw in the  snap-confine  function, a program used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications. The shortcoming is rated 7.8 on the CVSS scoring system. "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain root privileges on the vulnerable host," Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys,  said , adding the weakness could be abused to "obtain full root privileges on default installations of Ubuntu." Red Hat, in an independ

A 12-year-old security vulnerability has been disclosed in a system utility called Polkit that grants attackers root privileges on Linux systems, even as a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit has emerged in the wild merely hours after technical details of the bug became public. Dubbed "PwnKit" by cybersecurity firm Qualys, the weakness impacts a component in polkit called pkexec, a program that's installed by default on every major Linux distribution such as Ubunti, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS. Polkit  (formerly called PolicyKit ) is a toolkit for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems, and provides a mechanism for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged processes. "This vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain full root privileges on a vulnerable host by exploiting this vulnerability in its default configuration," Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys,  said , adding it "has

Cybersecurity teams have many demands competing for limited resources. Restricted budgets are a problem, and restricted staff resources are also a bottleneck. There is also the need to maintain business continuity at all times. It's a frustrating mix of challenges – with resources behind tasks such as patching rarely sufficient to meet security prerogatives or compliance deadlines. The multitude of different security-related standards have ever stringent deadlines, and it is often the case that business needs don't necessarily align with those requirements. At the core of what TuxCare does is automated live patching – a way to consistently keep critical services safe from security threats, without the need to expend significant resources in doing so, or the need to live with business disruption. In this article, we'll outline how  TuxCare  helps organizations such as yours deal better with security challenges including patching, and the support of end-of-life operating s

A new  cross-platform backdoor  called " SysJoker " has been observed targeting machines running Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems as part of an ongoing espionage campaign that's believed to have been initiated during the second half of 2021. "SysJoker masquerades as a system update and generates its [command-and-control server] by decoding a string retrieved from a text file hosted on Google Drive," Intezer researchers Avigayil Mechtinger, Ryan Robinson, and Nicole Fishbein  noted  in a technical write-up publicizing their findings. "Based on victimology and malware's behavior, we assess that SysJoker is after specific targets." The Israeli cybersecurity company, attributing the work to an advanced threat actor, said it first discovered evidence of the implant in December 2021 during an active attack against a Linux-based web server belonging to an unnamed educational institution. A C++-based malware, SysJoker is delivered via a dr

Government agencies publish notices and directives all the time. Usually, these are only relevant to government departments, which means that nobody else really pays attention. It's easy to see why you would assume that a directive from CISA just doesn't relate to your organization. But, in the instance of the latest CISA directive, that would be making a mistake. In this article, we explain why, even if you're in the private or non-government sector, you should nonetheless take a close look at CISA Binding Operational Directive 22-01. We outline why CISA was forced to issue this directive, and why that firm action has implications for all organizations – inside and outside of government. Acting on cybersecurity issues isn't as simple as flicking a switch, of course, so keep reading to find out how you can address the core issue behind the CISA directive. Okay, so what exactly is a CISA directive? Let's take a step back to gain some context. Just like any organ

E-commerce platforms in the U.S., Germany, and France have come under attack from a new form of malware that targets Nginx servers in an attempt to masquerade its presence and slip past detection by security solutions. "This novel code injects itself into a host Nginx application and is nearly invisible," Sansec Threat Research team  said  in a new report. "The parasite is used to steal data from eCommerce servers, also known as 'server-side Magecart.'"  A free and open-source software, Nginx is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache. NginRAT, as the advanced malware is called, works by hijacking a host Nginx application to embed itself into the webserver process. The remote access trojan itself is delivered via  CronRAT , another piece of malware the Dutch cybersecurity firm disclosed last week as hiding its malicious payloads in cron jobs scheduled to execute on February 31st, a non-existent ca

Researchers have unearthed a new remote access trojan (RAT) for Linux that employs a never-before-seen stealth technique that involves masking its malicious actions by scheduling them for execution on February 31st, a non-existent calendar day. Dubbed CronRAT, the sneaky malware "enables  server-side Magecart data theft  which bypasses browser-based security solutions," Sansec Threat Research said. The Dutch cybersecurity firm said it found samples of the RAT on several online stores, including an unnamed country's largest outlet. CronRAT's standout feature is its ability to leverage the  cron  job-scheduler utility for Unix to hide malicious payloads using task names programmed to execute on February 31st. Not only does this allow the malware to evade detection from security software, but it also enables it to launch an array of attack commands that could put Linux eCommerce servers at risk. "The CronRAT adds a number of tasks to crontab with a curious date

Weaknesses in e-commerce portals are being exploited to deploy a Linux backdoor as well as a credit card skimmer that's capable of stealing payment information from compromised websites. "The attacker started with automated e-commerce attack probes, testing for dozens of weaknesses in common online store platforms," researchers from Sansec Threat Research  said  in an analysis. "After a day and a half, the attacker found a file upload vulnerability in one of the store's plugins." The name of the affected vendor was not revealed. The initial foothold was then leveraged to upload a malicious web shell and alter the server code to siphon customer data. Additionally, the attacker delivered a Golang-based malware called " linux_avp " that serves as a backdoor to execute commands remotely sent from a command-and-control server hosted in Beijing. Upon execution, the program is designed to remove itself from the disk and camouflage as a " ps -ef

Researchers from Qihoo 360's Netlab security team have released details of a new evolving botnet called " Abcbot " that has been observed in the wild with worm-like propagation features to infect Linux systems and launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against targets. While the earliest version of the botnet dates back to July 2021, new variants observed as recently as October 30 have been equipped with additional updates to strike Linux web servers with weak passwords and are susceptible to N-day vulnerabilities, including a custom implementation of DDoS functionality, indicating that the malware is under continuous development. Netlab's findings also build on a report from Trend Micro early last month, which  publicized  attacks targeting Huawei Cloud with cryptocurrency-mining and cryptojacking malware. The intrusions were also notable for the fact that the malicious shell scripts specifically disabled a process designed to monitor and scan the ser

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed 14 critical vulnerabilities in the BusyBox Linux utility that could be exploited to result in a denial-of-service (DoS) condition and, in select cases, even lead to information leaks and remote code execution. The security weaknesses, tracked from CVE-2021-42373 through CVE-2021-42386, affect multiple versions of the tool ranging from 1.16-1.33.1, DevOps company JFrog and industrial cybersecurity company Claroty  said  in a joint report. Dubbed "the Swiss Army Knife of Embedded Linux,"  BusyBox  is a widely used software suite combining a variety of common Unix utilities or applets (e.g.,  cp ,  ls ,  grep ) into a single executable file that can run on Linux systems such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), and remote terminal units (RTUs). A quick list of the flaws and the applets they impact is below — man  - CVE-2021-42373 lzma/unlzma  - CVE-2021-42374 ash  - CVE-2021-42375 hus

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security flaw in the Linux Kernel's Transparent Inter Process Communication ( TIPC ) module that could potentially be leveraged both locally as well as remotely to execute arbitrary code within the kernel and take control of vulnerable machines. Tracked as CVE-2021-43267 (CVSS score: 9.8), the heap overflow vulnerability "can be exploited locally or remotely within a network to gain kernel privileges, and would allow an attacker to compromise the entire system," cybersecurity firm SentinelOne  said  in a report published today and shared with The Hacker News. TIPC is a transport layer  protocol   designed  for nodes running in dynamic cluster environments to reliably communicate with each other in a manner that's more efficient and fault-tolerant than other protocols such as TCP. The vulnerability identified by SentinelOne has to do with insufficient validation of user-supplied sizes for a new message type called "

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

Winter is Coming for CentOS 8—but here is how you can enjoy your holidays after all. The server environment is complex and if you're managing thousands of Linux servers, the last thing you want is for an operating system vendor to do something completely unexpected. That is exactly what Red Hat, the parent company of the CentOS Project, did when it suddenly announced a  curtailment of support for CentOS 8  – sending thousands of organizations scrambling for an alternative. In this article, we'll review what happened with CentOS 8 and what it means for users who have already upgraded from CentOS release 7 to release 8. We'll also look at your alternatives for replacing CentOS 8. Finally, we'll do a review of your other option: choosing extended support. Extended lifecycle support (ELS) can reduce the pressure to decide on alternative distribution and it may well be the most practical route for many CentOS 8 users. Official support is critical The difficulties arou