remote code execution | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Meta has warned that a security vulnerability impacting the FreeType open-source font rendering library may have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-27363 , and carries a CVSS score of 8.1, indicating high severity. Described as an out-of-bounds write flaw, it could be exploited to achieve remote code execution when parsing certain font files. "An out-of-bounds write exists in FreeType versions 2.13.0 and below when attempting to parse font subglyph structures related to TrueType GX and variable font files," the company said in an advisory. "The vulnerable code assigns a signed short value to an unsigned long and then adds a static value causing it to wrap around and allocate too small of a heap buffer. The code then writes up to 6 signed long integers out of bounds relative to this buffer. This may result in arbitrary code execution." The company did not share any specifics on how the shortcoming is be...

Microsoft on Tuesday released security updates to address 57 security vulnerabilities in its software, including a whopping six zero-days that it said have been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 56 flaws, six are rated Critical, 50 are rated Important, and one is rated Low in severity. Twenty-three of the addressed vulnerabilities are remote code execution bugs and 22 relate to privilege escalation. The updates are in addition to 17 vulnerabilities Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update , one of which is a spoofing flaw specific to the browser ( CVE-2025-26643 , CVSS score: 5.4). The six vulnerabilities that have come under active exploitation are listed below - CVE-2025-24983 (CVSS score: 7.0) - A Windows Win32 Kernel Subsystem use-after-free (UAF) vulnerability that allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally CVE-2025-24984 (CVSS score: 4.6) - A Windows NTFS information disclosu...

Unpatched TP-Link Archer routers have become the target of a new botnet campaign dubbed Ballista, according to new findings from the Cato CTRL team. "The botnet exploits a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in TP-Link Archer routers (CVE-2023-1389) to spread itself automatically over the Internet," security researchers Ofek Vardi and Matan Mittelman said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. CVE-2023-1389 is a high-severity security flaw impacting TP-Link Archer AX-21 routers that could lead to command injection, which could then pave the way for remote code execution. The earliest evidence of active exploitation of the flaw dates back to April 2023, with unidentified threat actors using it to drop Mirai botnet malware. Since then, it has also been abused to propagate other malware families like Condi and AndroxGh0st . Cato CTRL said it detected the Ballista campaign on January 10, 2025. The most recent exploitation attempt was recorded on Februa...

Threat actors of unknown provenance have been attributed to a malicious campaign predominantly targeting organizations in Japan since January 2025. "The attacker has exploited the vulnerability CVE-2024-4577 , a remote code execution (RCE) flaw in the PHP-CGI implementation of PHP on Windows, to gain initial access to victim machines," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in a technical report published Thursday. "The attacker utilizes plugins of the publicly available Cobalt Strike kit 'TaoWu' for-post exploitation activities." Targets of the malicious activity encompass companies across technology, telecommunications, entertainment, education, and e-commerce sectors in Japan. It all starts with the threat actors exploiting the CVE-2024-4577 vulnerability to gain initial access and run PowerShell scripts to execute the Cobalt Strike reverse HTTP shellcode payload to grant themselves persistent remote access to the compromised endpoint. Th...

Elastic has rolled out security updates to address a critical security flaw impacting the Kibana data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch that could result in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-25015 , carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been described as a case of prototype pollution. "Prototype pollution in Kibana leads to arbitrary code execution via a crafted file upload and specifically crafted HTTP requests," the company said in an advisory released Wednesday. Prototype pollution vulnerability is a security flaw that allows attackers to manipulate an application's JavaScript objects and properties, potentially leading to unauthorized data access, privilege escalation, denial-of-service, or remote code execution.  The vulnerability affects all versions of Kibana between 8.15.0 and 8.17.3. It has been addressed in version 8.17.3. That said, in Kibana versions from 8.15.0 and prior to 8.17....

Cybersecurity researchers are alerting of an ongoing malicious campaign targeting the Go ecosystem with typosquatted modules that are designed to deploy loader malware on Linux and Apple macOS systems. "The threat actor has published at least seven packages impersonating widely used Go libraries, including one (github[.]com/shallowmulti/hypert) that appears to target financial-sector developers," Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said in a new report. "These packages share repeated malicious filenames and consistent obfuscation techniques, suggesting a coordinated threat actor capable of pivoting rapidly." While all of them continue to be available on the official package repository, their corresponding GitHub repositories barring "github[.]com/ornatedoctrin/layout" are no longer accessible. The list of offending Go packages is below - shallowmulti/hypert (github.com/shallowmulti/hypert) shadowybulk/hypert (github.com/shadowybulk/hypert) belate...

Microsoft has released security updates to address two Critical-rated flaws impacting Bing and Power Pages, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2025-21355 (CVSS score: 8.6) - Microsoft Bing Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2025-24989 (CVSS score: 8.2) - Microsoft Power Pages Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability "Missing Authentication for Critical Function in Microsoft Bing allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network," the tech giant said in an advisory for CVE-2025-21355. No customer action is required. On the other hand, CVE-2025-24989 concerns a case of improper access control in Power Pages , a low-code platform for creating, hosting, and managing secure business websites, that an unauthorized attacker could exploit to elevate privileges over a network and bypass user registration control. Microsoft, which credited its own employee Raj Kumar for flagging the vul...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new type of name confusion attack called whoAMI that allows anyone who publishes an Amazon Machine Image ( AMI ) with a specific name to gain code execution within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. "If executed at scale, this attack could be used to gain access to thousands of accounts," Datadog Security Labs researcher Seth Art said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The vulnerable pattern can be found in many private and open source code repositories." At its heart, the technique is a subset of a supply chain attack that involves publishing a malicious resource and tricking misconfigured software into using it instead of the legitimate counterpart. The attack exploits the fact that anyone can AMI, which refers to a virtual machine image that's used to boot up Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in AWS, to the community catalog and the fact that developers could omit to mention the "--owners...

Threat actors who were behind the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access (PRA) and Remote Support (RS) products in December 2024 likely also exploited a previously unknown SQL injection flaw in PostgreSQL, according to findings from Rapid7. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-1094 (CVSS score: 8.1), affects the PostgreSQL interactive tool psql. "An attacker who can generate a SQL injection via CVE-2025-1094 can then achieve arbitrary code execution (ACE) by leveraging the interactive tool's ability to run meta-commands," security researcher Stephen Fewer said . The cybersecurity company further noted that it made the discovery as part of its investigation into CVE-2024-12356 , a recently patched security flaw in BeyondTrust software that allows for unauthenticated remote code execution. Specifically, it found that "a successful exploit for CVE-2024-12356 had to include exploitation of CVE-2025-1094 in order to achie...

Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for 63 security flaws impacting its software products, including two vulnerabilities that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 63 vulnerabilities, three are rated Critical, 57 are rated Important, one is rated Moderate, and two are rated Low in severity. This is aside from the 23 flaws Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The update is notable for fixing two actively exploited flaws - CVE-2025-21391 (CVSS score: 7.1) - Windows Storage Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability  CVE-2025-21418 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability "An attacker would only be able to delete targeted files on a system," Microsoft said in an alert for CVE-2025-21391. "This vulnerability does not allow disclosure of any confidential information, but could allow an attacker to delete d...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned that a security flaw impacting Trimble Cityworks GIS-centric asset management software has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-0994 (CVSS v4 score: 8.6), a deserialization of untrusted data bug that could permit an attacker to conduct remote code execution. "This could allow an authenticated user to perform a remote code execution attack against a customer's Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) web server," CISA said in an advisory dated February 6, 2025. The flaw affects the following versions - Cityworks (All versions prior to 15.8.9) Cityworks with office companion (All versions prior to 23.10) While Trimble has released patches to address the security defect as of January 29, 2025, CISA has warned that it is being weaponized in real-world attacks. The Colorado-headquartered company also noted that it has received reports o...

Cisco has released updates to address two critical security flaws Identity Services Engine (ISE) that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands and elevate privileges on susceptible devices. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2025-20124 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An insecure Java deserialization vulnerability in an API of Cisco ISE that could permit an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands as the root user on an affected device. CVE-2025-20125 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An authorization bypass vulnerability in an API of Cisco ISE could could permit an authenticated, remote attacker with valid read-only credentials to obtain sensitive information, change node configurations, and restart the node An attacker could weaponize either of the flaws by sending a crafted serialized Java object or an HTTP request to an unspecified API endpoint, leading to privilege escalation and code execution. Cisco said the two vulnerabilities are not dependent on...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in the Lightning AI Studio development platform that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed for remote code execution. The vulnerability, rated a CVSS score of 9.4, enables "attackers to potentially execute arbitrary commands with root privileges" by exploiting a hidden URL parameter, application security firm Noma said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This level of access could hypothetically be leveraged for a range of malicious activities, including the extraction of sensitive keys from targeted accounts," researchers Sasi Levi, Alon Tron, and Gal Moyal said. The issue is embedded in a piece of JavaScript code that could facilitate unfettered access to a victim's development environment, as well as run arbitrary commands on an authenticated target in a privileged context. Noma said it found a hidden parameter called "command" in user-specific URLs – e.g., ...

Three security flaws have been disclosed in the open-source PHP package Voyager that could be exploited by an attacker to achieve one-click remote code execution on affected instances. "When an authenticated Voyager user clicks on a malicious link, attackers can execute arbitrary code on the server," Sonar researcher Yaniv Nizry said in a write-up published earlier this week. The identified issues, which remain unpatched to date despite responsible disclosure on September 11, 2024, are listed below - CVE-2024-55417 - An arbitrary file write vulnerability in the "/admin/media/upload" endpoint CVE-2024-55416 - A reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the "/admin/compass" endpoint CVE-2024-55415 - An arbitrary file leak and deletion vulnerability  A malicious attacker could leverage Voyager's media upload feature to upload a malicious file in a manner that bypasses MIME type verification, and make use of a polyglot file that ap...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the Cacti open-source network monitoring and fault management framework that could allow an authenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution on susceptible instances. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-22604, carries a CVSS score of 9.1 out of a maximum of 10.0. "Due to a flaw in the multi-line SNMP result parser, authenticated users can inject malformed OIDs in the response," the project maintainers said in an advisory released this week. "When processed by ss_net_snmp_disk_io() or ss_net_snmp_disk_bytes(), a part of each OID will be used as a key in an array that is used as part of a system command, causing a command execution vulnerability." Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could permit an authenticated user with device management permissions to execute arbitrary code in the server, and steal, edit, or delete sensitive data. CVE-2025-22604 affects all versions of the software prior to and includ...

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in Meta's Llama large language model (LLM) framework that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the llama-stack inference server.  The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-50050 , has been assigned a CVSS score of 6.3 out of 10.0. Supply chain security firm Snyk, on the other hand, has assigned it a critical severity rating of 9.3. "Affected versions of meta-llama are vulnerable to deserialization of untrusted data, meaning that an attacker can execute arbitrary code by sending malicious data that is deserialized," Oligo Security researcher Avi Lumelsky said in an analysis earlier this week. The shortcoming, per the cloud security company, resides in a component called Llama Stack , which defines a set of API interfaces for artificial intelligence (AI) application development, including using Meta's own Llama models. Specifically, it has to do with a remote code execution ...

SonicWall is alerting customers of a critical security flaw impacting its Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 Series appliances that it said has been likely exploited in the wild as a zero-day. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-23006 , is rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. "Pre-authentication deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability has been identified in the SMA1000 Appliance Management Console (AMC) and Central Management Console (CMC), which in specific conditions could potentially enable a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary OS commands," the company said in an advisory. It's worth noting that CVE-2025-23006 does not affect its Firewall and SMA 100 series products. The flaw has been addressed in version 12.4.3-02854 (platform-hotfix). SonicWall also said that it has been notified of "possible active exploitation" by unspecified threat actors, necessitating that customers apply the fixes as soon as p...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed three security flaws in Planet Technology's WGS-804HPT industrial switches that could be chained to achieve pre-authentication remote code execution on susceptible devices. "These switches are widely used in building and home automation systems for a variety of networking applications," Claroty's Tomer Goldschmidt said in a Thursday report. "An attacker who is able to remotely control one of these devices can use them to further exploit devices in an internal network and do lateral movement." The operational technology security firm, which carried out an extensive analysis of the firmware used in these switches using the QEMU framework, said the vulnerabilities are rooted in the dispatcher.cgi interface used to provide a web service. The list of flaws is below - CVE-2024-52558 (CVSS score: 5.3) - An integer underflow flaw that can allow an unauthenticated attacker to send a malformed HTTP request, resulting in...