privilege escalation | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws that could be exploited to gain root privileges on machines running major Linux distributions. The vulnerabilities , discovered by Qualys, are listed below - CVE-2025-6018 - LPE from unprivileged to allow_active in SUSE 15's Pluggable Authentication Modules ( PAM ) CVE-2025-6019 - LPE from allow_active to root in libblockdev via the udisks daemon "These modern 'local-to-root' exploits have collapsed the gap between an ordinary logged-in user and a full system takeover," Saeed Abbasi, Senior Manager at Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), said . "By chaining legitimate services such as udisks loop-mounts and PAM/environment quirks, attackers who own any active GUI or SSH session can vault across polkit's allow_active trust zone and emerge as root in seconds." The cybersecurity company said CVE-2025-6018 is present in the PAM configuration of openSUSE Leap ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday placed a security flaw impacting the Linux kernel in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, stating it has been actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2023-0386 (CVSS score: 7.8), is an improper ownership bug in the Linux kernel that could be exploited to escalate privileges on susceptible systems. It was patched in early 2023. "Linux kernel contains an improper ownership management vulnerability, where unauthorized access to the execution of the setuid file with capabilities was found in the Linux kernel's OverlayFS subsystem in how a user copies a capable file from a nosuid mount into another mount," the agency said. "This uid mapping bug allows a local user to escalate their privileges on the system." It's currently not known how the security flaw is being exploited in the wild. In a report published in May 2023, Datadog said the vulnerability...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a new phishing campaign that's targeting users in Taiwan with malware families such as HoldingHands RAT and Gh0stCringe. The activity is part of a broader campaign that delivered the Winos 4.0 malware framework earlier this January by sending phishing messages impersonating Taiwan's National Taxation Bureau, Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company said it identified additional malware samples through continuous monitoring and that it observed the same threat actor, referred to as Silver Fox APT, using malware-laced PDF documents or ZIP files distributed via phishing emails to deliver Gh0stCringe and a malware strain based on HoldingHands RAT. It's worth noting that both HoldingHands RAT (aka Gh0stBins) and Gh0stCringe are variants of a known remote access trojan called Gh0st RAT, which is widely used by Chinese hacking groups. The starting point of the attack is a p...

For many organizations, Active Directory (AD) service accounts are quiet afterthoughts, persisting in the background long after their original purpose has been forgotten. To make matters worse, these orphaned service accounts (created for legacy applications, scheduled tasks, automation scripts, or test environments) are often left active with non-expiring or stale passwords. It's no surprise that AD service accounts often evade routine security oversight. Security teams, overwhelmed by daily demands and lingering technical debt, often overlook service accounts (unlinked to individual users and rarely scrutinized) allowing them to quietly fade into the background. However, this obscurity makes them prime targets for attackers seeking stealthy ways into the network. And left unchecked, forgotten service accounts can serve as silent gateways for attack paths and lateral movement across enterprise environments. In this article, we'll examine the risks that forgotten AD service accounts...

Microsoft has released patches to fix 67 security flaws , including one zero-day bug in Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 67 vulnerabilities, 11 are rated Critical and 56 are rated Important in severity. This includes 26 remote code execution flaws, 17 information disclosure flaws, and 14 privilege escalation flaws. The patches are in addition to 13 shortcomings addressed by the company in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability that has been weaponized in real-world attacks concerns a remote code execution in WebDAV ( CVE-2025-33053 , CVSS score: 8.8) that can be triggered by deceiving users into clicking on a specially crafted URL. The tech giant credited Check Point researchers Alexandra Gofman and David Driker for discovering and reporting the bug. It's worth mentioning that CVE-2025-33053 is the first zero-day vulnerab...

Adobe on Tuesday pushed security updates to address a total of 254 security flaws impacting its software products, a majority of which affect Experience Manager (AEM). Of the 254 flaws, 225 reside in AEM, impacting AEM Cloud Service (CS) as well as all versions prior to and including 6.5.22. The issues have been resolved in AEM Cloud Service Release 2025.5 and version 6.5.23. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could result in arbitrary code execution, privilege escalation, and security feature bypass," Adobe said in an advisory. Almost all the 225 vulnerabilities have been classified as cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, specifically a mix of stored XSS and DOM-based XSS, that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. Adobe has credited security researchers Jim Green (green-jam), Akshay Sharma (anonymous_blackzero), and lpi for discovering and reporting the XSS flaws. The most severe of the flaws patched by the company as part of ...

A privilege escalation flaw has been demonstrated in Windows Server 2025 that makes it possible for attackers to compromise any user in Active Directory (AD). "The attack exploits the delegated Managed Service Account (dMSA) feature that was introduced in Windows Server 2025, works with the default configuration, and is trivial to implement," Akamai security researcher Yuval Gordon said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This issue likely affects most organizations that rely on AD. In 91% of the environments we examined, we found users outside the domain admins group that had the required permissions to perform this attack." What makes the attack pathway notable is that it leverages a new feature called Delegated Managed Service Accounts ( dMSA ) that allows migration from an existing legacy service account. It was introduced in Windows Server 2025 as a mitigation to Kerberoasting attacks. The attack technique has been codenamed BadSuccessor by the w...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered multiple critical security vulnerabilities impacting the Versa Concerto network security and SD-WAN orchestration platform that could be exploited to take control of susceptible instances. It's worth noting that the identified shortcomings remain unpatched despite responsible disclosure on February 13, 2025, prompting a public release of the issues following the end of the 90-day deadline. "These vulnerabilities, when chained together, could allow an attacker to fully compromise both the application and the underlying host system," ProjectDiscovery researchers Harsh Jaiswal, Rahul Maini, and Parth Malhotra said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The security defects are listed below - CVE-2025-34025 (CVSS score: 8.6) - A privilege escalation and Docker container escape vulnerability that's caused by unsafe default mounting of host binary paths and could be exploited to gain code execution on the underlying host m...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered risky default identity and access management (IAM) roles impacting Amazon Web Services that could open the door for attackers to escalate privileges, manipulate other AWS services, and, in some cases, even fully compromise AWS accounts. "These roles, often created automatically or recommended during setup, grant overly broad permissions, such as full S3 access," Aqua researchers Yakir Kadkoda and Ofek Itach said in an analysis. "These default roles silently introduce attack paths that allow privilege escalation, cross-service access, and even potential account compromise." The cloud security firm said it identified security issues in default IAM roles created by AWS services like SageMaker, Glue, EMR, and Lightsail. A similar flaw has also been unearthed in a popular open-source framework called Ray, which automatically creates a default IAM role (ray-autoscaler-v1) with the AmazonS3FullAccess policy. What's concer...

Microsoft on Tuesday shipped fixes to address a total of 78 security flaws across its software lineup, including a set of five zero-days that have come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 78 flaws resolved by the tech giant, 11 are rated Critical, 66 are rated Important, and one is rated Low in severity. Twenty-eight of these vulnerabilities lead to remote code execution, 21 of them are privilege escalation bugs, and 16 others are classified as information disclosure flaws. The updates are in addition to eight more security defects patched by the company in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The five vulnerabilities that have come under active exploitation in the wild are listed below - CVE-2025-30397 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability CVE-2025-30400 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Microsoft Desktop Window Manager (DWM) Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2025-3270...

A second security flaw impacting the OttoKit (formerly SureTriggers ) WordPress plugin has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-27007 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a privilege escalation bug impacting all versions of the plugin prior to and including version 1.0.82.  "This is due to the create_wp_connection() function missing a capability check and insufficiently verifying a user's authentication credentials," Wordfence said . "This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to establish a connection, which ultimately can make privilege escalation possible." That said, the vulnerability is exploitable only in two possible scenarios - When a site has never enabled or used an application password, and OttoKit has never been connected to the website using an application password before When an attacker has authenticated access to a site and can generate a valid application password Wordfence revealed that it obs...