The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: red hat

Hold tight, this may blow your mind… A low-privileged user account on most Linux operating systems with UID value anything greater than 2147483647 can execute any systemctl command unauthorizedly—thanks to a newly discovered vulnerability. The reported vulnerability actually resides in PolicyKit (also known as polkit)—an application-level toolkit for Unix-like operating systems that defines policies, handles system-wide privileges and provides a way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones, such as "sudo," that does not grant root permission to an entire process. The issue, tracked as CVE-2018-19788 , impacts PolicyKit version 0.115 which comes pre-installed on most popular Linux distributions, including Red Hat , Debian ,  Ubuntu , and CentOS. The vulnerability exists due to PolicyKit's improper validation of permission requests for any low-privileged user with UID greater than INT_MAX. Where, INT_MAX is a constant in computer progra

It's been quite a year for the open source platforms. Earlier this year, Microsoft acquired popular code repository hosting service GitHub for $7.5 billion , and now IBM has just announced the biggest open-source business deal ever. IBM today confirmed that it would be acquiring open source Linux firm Red Hat for $190 per share in cash, working out to a total value of approximately $34 billion. Red Hat, known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, is a leading software company that offers open-source software products to the enterprise community. Even Oracle uses Red Hat's source code for its Oracle Linux product. Red Hat's last year revenue was $2.4 billion, and this year the company has earned $2.9 billion. But if Red Hat products are open source and updates are free, you might be wondering how does the company earn. Red Hat was one of the first companies who found a successful way to make money from free open-source software. It offers consul

An Indian security researcher has discovered a highly critical flaw in X.Org Server package that impacts OpenBSD and most Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, and Fedora. Xorg X server is a popular open-source implementation of the X11 system (display server) that offers a graphical environment to a wider range of hardware and OS platforms. It serves as an intermediary between client and user applications to manage graphical displays. According to a blog post published by software security engineer Narendra Shinde , Xorg X server doesn't correctly handle and validate arguments for at least two command-line parameters, allowing a low-privileged user to execute malicious code and overwrite any file—including files owned by privileged users like root. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-14665 , was introduced in X.Org server 1.19.0 package that remained undetected for almost two years and could have been exploited by a local attacker on the terminal or vi

Security researchers have published the details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits of an integer overflow vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could allow an unprivileged user to gain superuser access to the targeted system. The vulnerability, discovered by cloud-based security and compliance solutions provider Qualys, which has been dubbed "Mutagen Astronomy," affects the kernel versions released between July 2007 and July 2017, impacting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian distributions. The Mutagen Astronomy vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-14634, is a type of a local privilege escalation issue—one of the most common issues with operating systems as a whole—and exists in the Linux kernel's create_elf_tables() function that operates the memory tables. To successfully exploit this vulnerability, attackers need to have access to the targeted system and run their exploit that leads to a buffer overflow, thereby resulting in the execution of malici

RED HAT has fixed multiple web application security issues that allowed hackers to extract website database using Blind SQL injection. Red Hat also confirmed a cross site scripting and Local File Inclusion Vulnerabilities on their website. Mohamed Ramadan Security Researcher and Trainer Attack-Secure , told ' The Hacker News ' that last year he reported 3 flaws to the company and they finally confirm and patch those in January 2013. Blind SQL injection is identical to normal SQL Injection except that when an attacker attempts to exploit an application, rather than getting a useful error message, they get a generic page specified by the developer instead. This makes exploiting a potential SQL Injection attack more difficult but not impossible. Local file inclusion is a vulnerability that allows the attacker to read files, that are stored locally through the web application.This happens because the code of the application does not properly sanitize the include