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Nearly two dozen security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Advantech EKI industrial-grade wireless access point devices, some of which could be weaponized to bypass authentication and execute code with elevated privileges. "These vulnerabilities pose significant risks, allowing unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges, thereby fully compromising the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the affected devices," cybersecurity company Nozomi Networks said in a Wednesday analysis. Following responsible disclosure, the weaknesses have been addressed in the following firmware versions - 1.6.5 (for EKI-6333AC-2G and EKI-6333AC-2GD) 1.2.2 (for EKI-6333AC-1GPO) Six of the identified 20 vulnerabilities have been deemed critical, allowing an attacker to obtain persistent access to internal resources by implanting a backdoor, trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition, and even repurpose infected endpoints as Linux workstations to enable latera

Two critical security flaws impacting the Spam protection, Anti-Spam, and FireWall plugin for WordPress could allow an unauthenticated attacker to install and enable malicious plugins on susceptible sites and potentially achieve remote code execution. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2024-10542 and CVE-2024-10781 , carry a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. They were addressed in versions 6.44 and 6.45 released this month. Installed on over 200,000 WordPress sites, CleanTalk's Spam protection,f Anti-Spam, FireWall plugin is advertised as a "universal anti-spam plugin" that blocks spam comments, registrations, surveys, and more. According to Wordfence, both vulnerabilities concern an authorization bypass issue that could allow a malicious actor to install and activate arbitrary plugins. This could then pave the way for remote code execution if the activated plugin is vulnerable of its own. The plugin is "vulnerable to unauthorized Arbitrary Plugin

As a relatively new security category, many security operators and executives I've met have asked us "What are these Automated Security Validation (ASV) tools?" We've covered that pretty extensively in the past, so today, instead of covering the " What is ASV?" I wanted to address the " Why ASV?" question. In this article, we'll cover some common use cases and misconceptions of how people misuse and misunderstand ASV tools daily (because that's a lot more fun). To kick things off, there's no place to start like the beginning. Automated security validation tools are designed to provide continuous, real-time assessment of an organization's cybersecurity defenses. These tools are continuous and use exploitation to validate defenses like EDR, NDR, and WAFs. They're more in-depth than vulnerability scanners because they use tactics and techniques that you'll see in manual penetration tests. Vulnerability scanners won't relay hashes or combine vulnerabilities to further attacks, whic

Palo Alto Networks has released new indicators of compromise (IoCs) a day after the network security vendor confirmed that a zero-day vulnerability impacting its PAN-OS firewall management interface has been actively exploited in the wild. To that end, the company said it observed malicious activity originating from below IP addresses and targeting PAN-OS management web interface IP addresses that are accessible over the internet - 136.144.17[.]* 173.239.218[.]251 216.73.162[.]* The company, however, warned that these IP addresses may possibly represent "third-party VPNs with legitimate user activity originating from these IPs to other destinations." Palo Alto Networks' updated advisory indicates that the flaw is being exploited to deploy a web shell on compromised devices, allowing threat actors to gain persistent remote access. The vulnerability, which is yet to be assigned a CVE identifier, carries a CVSS score of 9.3, indicating critical severity. It allow

A security analysis of the OvrC cloud platform has uncovered 10 vulnerabilities that could be chained to allow potential attackers to execute code remotely on connected devices. "Attackers successfully exploiting these vulnerabilities can access, control, and disrupt devices supported by OvrC; some of those include smart electrical power supplies, cameras, routers, home automation systems, and more," Claroty researcher Uri Katz said in a technical report. Snap One's OvrC, pronounced "oversee," is advertised as a "revolutionary support platform" that enables homeowners and businesses to remotely manage, configure, and troubleshoot IoT devices on the network. According to its website, OvrC solutions are deployed at over 500,000 end-user locations. According to a coordinated advisory issued by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), successful exploitation of the identified vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to "

Microsoft on Tuesday revealed that two security flaws impacting Windows NT LAN Manager ( NTLM ) and Task Scheduler have come under active exploitation in the wild. The security vulnerabilities are among the 90 security bugs the tech giant addressed as part of its Patch Tuesday update for November 2024. Of the 90 flaws, four are rated Critical, 85 are rated Important, and one is rated Moderate in severity. Fifty-two of the patched vulnerabilities are remote code execution flaws. The fixes are in addition to 31 vulnerabilities Microsoft resolved in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of the October 2024 Patch Tuesday update. The two vulnerabilities that have been listed as actively exploited are below - CVE-2024-43451 (CVSS score: 6.5) - Windows NTLM Hash Disclosure Spoofing Vulnerability CVE-2024-49039 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Windows Task Scheduler Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability "This vulnerability discloses a user's NTLMv2 hash to the attacker who c

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed new security flaws impacting Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop that could be exploited to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) The issue, per findings from watchTowr , is rooted in the Session Recording component that allows system administrators to capture user activity, and record keyboard and mouse input, along with a video stream of the desktop for audit, compliance, and troubleshooting purposes. Particularly, the vulnerability exploits the "combination of a carelessly-exposed MSMQ instance with misconfigured permissions that leverages BinaryFormatter can be reached from any host via HTTP to perform unauthenticated RCE," security researcher Sina Kheirkhah said. The vulnerability details are listed below - CVE-2024-8068 (CVSS score: 5.1) - Privilege escalation to NetworkService Account access CVE-2024-8069 (CVSS score: 5.1) - Limited remote code execution with the privilege of a NetworkService Account acces

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities impacting Aruba Networking Access Point products, including two critical bugs that could result in unauthenticated command execution. The flaws affect Access Points running Instant AOS-8 and AOS-10 - AOS-10.4.x.x: 10.4.1.4 and below Instant AOS-8.12.x.x: 8.12.0.2 and below Instant AOS-8.10.x.x: 8.10.0.13 and below The most severe among the six newly patched vulnerabilities are CVE-2024-42509 (CVSS score: 9.8) and CVE-2024-47460 (CVSS score: 9.0), two critical unauthenticated command injection flaws in the CLI Service that could result in the execution of arbitrary code. "Command injection vulnerability in the underlying CLI service could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution by sending specially crafted packets destined to the PAPI (Aruba's Access Point management protocol) UDP port (8211)," HPE said in an advisory for both the flaws. "Successful exp

Palo Alto Networks on Friday issued an informational advisory urging customers to ensure that access to the PAN-OS management interface is secured because of a potential remote code execution vulnerability. "Palo Alto Networks is aware of a claim of a remote code execution vulnerability via the PAN-OS management interface," the company said . "At this time, we do not know the specifics of the claimed vulnerability. We are actively monitoring for signs of any exploitation." In the interim, the network security vendor has recommended that users correctly configure the management interface in line with the best practices, and make sure that access to it is possible only via trusted internal IPs to limit the attack surface. It goes without saying that the management interface should not be exposed to the Internet. Some of the other guidelines to reduce exposure are listed below - Isolate the management interface on a dedicated management VLAN Use jump servers

A little over three dozen security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in various open-source artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models, some of which could lead to remote code execution and information theft. The flaws, identified in tools like ChuanhuChatGPT, Lunary, and LocalAI, have been reported as part of Protect AI's Huntr bug bounty platform. The most severe of the flaws are two shortcomings impacting Lunary, a production toolkit for large language models (LLMs) - CVE-2024-7474 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) vulnerability that could allow an authenticated user to view or delete external users, resulting in unauthorized data access and potential data loss CVE-2024-7475 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An improper access control vulnerability that allows an attacker to update the SAML configuration, thereby making it possible to log in as an unauthorized user and access sensitive information Also discovered in Lunary is anot

VMware has released software updates to address an already patched security flaw in vCenter Server that could pave the way for remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38812 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns a case of heap-overflow vulnerability in the implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol. "A malicious actor with network access to vCenter Server may trigger this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted network packet potentially leading to remote code execution," Broadcom-owned virtualization services provider said . The flaw was originally reported by zbl and srs of team TZL at the Matrix Cup cybersecurity competition held in China earlier this year. "VMware by Broadcom has determined that the vCenter patches released on September 17, 2024, did not fully address CVE-2024-38812," the company noted. Patches for the flaw are available in the below vCenter Server versions - 8.0 U3d 8.0 U2e, and  7.0 U3t It's also available as an a

The North Korean threat actor known as ScarCruft has been linked to the zero-day exploitation of a now-patched security flaw in Windows to infect devices with malware known as RokRAT . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-38178 (CVSS score: 7.5), a memory corruption bug in the Scripting Engine that could result in remote code execution when using the Edge browser in Internet Explorer Mode. It was patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for August 2024. However, successful exploitation requires an attacker to convince a user to click on a specially crafted URL in order to initiate the execution of malicious code. The AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC) and the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) of the Republic of Korea, which were credited with discovering and reporting the shortcoming, have assigned the activity cluster the name Operation Code on Toast. The organizations are tracking ScarCruft under the moniker TA-RedAnt, which was previously

A suspected nation-state adversary has been observed weaponizing three security flaws in Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance (CSA) a zero-day to perform a series of malicious actions. That's according to findings from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, which said the vulnerabilities were abused to gain unauthenticated access to the CSA, enumerate users configured in the appliance, and attempt to access the credentials of those users. "The advanced adversaries were observed exploiting and chaining zero-day vulnerabilities to establish beachhead access in the victim's network," security researchers Faisal Abdul Malik Qureshi, John Simmons, Jared Betts, Luca Pugliese, Trent Healy, Ken Evans, and Robert Reyes said . The flaws in question are listed below - CVE-2024-8190 (CVSS score: 7.2) - A command injection flaw in the resource /gsb/DateTimeTab.php CVE-2024-8963 (CVSS score: 9.4) - A path traversal vulnerability on the resource /client/index.php CVE-2024-9380 (CVSS score:

Threat actors are actively attempting to exploit a now-patched security flaw in Veeam Backup & Replication to deploy Akira and Fog ransomware. Cybersecurity vendor Sophos said it has been tracking a series of attacks in the past month leveraging compromised VPN credentials and CVE-2024-40711 to create a local account and deploy the ransomware. CVE-2024-40711, rated 9.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, refers to a critical vulnerability that allows for unauthenticated remote code execution. It was addressed by Veeam in Backup & Replication version 12.2 in early September 2024. Security researcher Florian Hauser of Germany-based CODE WHITE has been credited with discovering and reporting the security shortcoming. "In each of the cases, attackers initially accessed targets using compromised VPN gateways without multifactor authentication enabled," Sophos said . "Some of these VPNs were running unsupported software versions." "Each time, the attacker

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a critical security flaw impacting Fortinet products to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-23113 (CVSS score: 9.8), relates to a case of remote code execution that affects FortiOS, FortiPAM, FortiProxy, and FortiWeb. "A use of externally-controlled format string vulnerability [CWE-134] in FortiOS fgfmd daemon may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via specially crafted requests," Fortinet noted in an advisory for the flaw back in February 2024. As is typically the case, the bulletin is sparse on details related to how the shortcoming is being exploited in the wild, or who is weaponizing it and against whom. In light of active exploitation, Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies are mandated to apply the vendor-provided mitigations by Oc

Details have emerged about multiple security vulnerabilities in two implementations of the Manufacturing Message Specification ( MMS ) protocol that, if successfully exploited, could have severe impacts in industrial environments. "The vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to crash an industrial device or in some cases, enable remote code execution," Claroty researchers Mashav Sapir and Vera Mens said in a new analysis. MMS is an OSI application layer messaging protocol that enables remote control and monitoring of industrial devices by exchanging supervisory control information in an application-agnostic manner. Specifically, it allows for communication between intelligent electronic devices ( IEDs ) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems or programmable logic controllers (PLCs). The five shortcomings identified by the operational technology security company impact MZ Automation's libIEC61850 library and Triangle MicroWorks' TMW IEC 61