remote code execution | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and National Security Agency (NSA), along with international partners from Australia and Canada, have released guidance to harden on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server instances from potential exploitation. "By restricting administrative access, implementing multi-factor authentication, enforcing strict transport security configurations, and adopting zero trust (ZT) security model principles, organizations can significantly bolster their defenses against potential cyber attacks," CISA said . The agencies said malicious activity aimed at Microsoft Exchange Server continues to take place, with unprotected and misconfigured instances facing the brunt of the attacks. Organizations are advised to decommission end-of-life on-premises or hybrid Exchange servers after transitioning to Microsoft 365. Some of the best practices outlined are listed below - Maintain security updates and patching cadence Migrate end-o...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a high-severity security flaw impacting Broadcom VMware Tools and VMware Aria Operations to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-41244 (CVSS score: 7.8), which could be exploited by an attacker to attain root level privileges on a susceptible system. "Broadcom VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools contain a privilege defined with unsafe actions vulnerability," CISA said in an alert. "A malicious local actor with non-administrative privileges having access to a VM with VMware Tools installed and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled may exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges to root on the same VM." The vulnerability was addressed by Broadcom-owned VMware last month, but not before it was exploited as a zero-day by unknown threat actors since mid-Oct...

Microsoft on Thursday released out-of-band security updates to patch a critical-severity Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) vulnerability with a proof-of-concept (Poc) exploit publicly available and has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-59287 (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution flaw in WSUS that was originally fixed by the tech giant as part of its Patch Tuesday update published last week. Three security researchers, MEOW, f7d8c52bec79e42795cf15888b85cbad, and Markus Wulftange with CODE WHITE GmbH, have been acknowledged for discovering and reporting the bug. The shortcoming concerns a case of deserialization of untrusted data in WSUS that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. It's worth noting that the vulnerability does not impact Windows servers that do not have the WSUS Server Role enabled. In a hypothetical attack scenario, a remote, unauthenticated attacker could send a crafted eve...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a high-severity flaw impacting the popular async-tar Rust library and its forks, including tokio-tar, that could result in remote code execution under certain conditions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-62518 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been codenamed TARmageddon by Edera, which discovered the issue in late August 2025. It impacts several widely-used projects, such as testcontainers and wasmCloud. "In the worst-case scenario, this vulnerability has a severity of 8.1 (High) and can lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE) through file overwriting attacks, such as replacing configuration files or hijacking build backends," the Seattle-based security company said . The problem is compounded by the fact that tokio-tar is essentially abandonware despite attracting thousands of downloads via crates.io. Tokio-tar is a Rust library for asynchronously reading and writing TAR archives built atop the Tokio runtime for the programmi...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a recently patched critical security flaw in WatchGuard Fireware that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-9242 (CVSS score: 9.3), is described as an out-of-bounds write vulnerability affecting Fireware OS 11.10.2 up to and including 11.12.4_Update1, 12.0 up to and including 12.11.3 and 2025.1. "An out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the WatchGuard Fireware OS iked process may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code," WatchGuard said in an advisory released last month. "This vulnerability affects both the mobile user VPN with IKEv2 and the branch office VPN using IKEv2 when configured with a dynamic gateway peer." It has been addressed in the following versions - 2025.1 - Fixed in 2025.1.1 12.x - Fixed in 12.11.4 12.3.1 (FIPS-certified release) - Fixed in 12.3.1_Update3 (B722811) 12.5.x (T15 & T35 models) -...