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Less than a month ago, Twitter indirectly acknowledged that some of its source code had been leaked on the code-sharing platform GitHub by sending a copyright infringement notice to take down the incriminated repository. The latter is now inaccessible, but according to the media, it was accessible to the public for several months. A user going by the name FreeSpeechEnthousiast committed thousands of documents belonging to the social media platform over several months.  While there is no concrete evidence to support this hypothesis, the timing of the leak and the ironic username used by the perpetrator suggest that the leak was a deliberate act aimed at causing harm to the company. Although it is still too early to measure the impact of this leak on the health of Twitter, this incident should be an opportunity for all software vendors to ask a simple question:  what if this happened to us? Protecting sensitive information in the software industry is becoming increasingly critical as

A sophisticated attack campaign dubbed  SCARLETEEL  is targeting containerized environments to perpetrate theft of proprietary data and software. "The attacker exploited a containerized workload and then leveraged it to perform privilege escalation into an AWS account in order to steal proprietary software and credentials," Sysdig  said  in a new report. The advanced cloud attack also entailed the deployment of crypto miner software, which the cybersecurity company said is either an attempt to generate illicit profits or a ploy to distract defenders and throw them off the trail. The initial infection vector banked on exploiting a vulnerable public-facing service in a self-managed Kubernetes cluster hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Upon gaining a successful foothold, an XMRig crypto miner was launched and a bash script was used to obtain credentials that could be used to further burrow into the AWS cloud infrastructure and exfiltrate sensitive data. "Either cry

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Popular social news aggregation platform Reddit has disclosed that it was the victim of a security incident that enabled unidentified threat actors to gain unauthorized access to internal documents, code, and some unspecified business systems. The company blamed it on a "sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack" that took place on February 5, 2023, aimed at its employees. The attack entailed sending out "plausible-sounding prompts" that redirected to a website masquerading as Reddit's intranet portal in an attempt to steal credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) tokens. A single employee's credentials is said to have been phished in this manner, enabling the threat actor to access Reddit's internal systems. The affected employee self-reported the hack, it further added. The company, however, stressed that there is no evidence to suggest that its production systems were breached or that users' non-public data had been compromise

The maintainers of the  Git  source code version control system have released updates to remediate two critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a malicious actor to achieve remote code execution. The flaws, tracked as  CVE-2022-23521  and  CVE-2022-41903 , impacts the following versions of Git: v2.30.6, v2.31.5, v2.32.4, v2.33.5, v2.34.5, v2.35.5, v2.36.3, v2.37.4, v2.38.2, and v2.39.0. Patched versions include v2.30.7, v2.31.6, v2.32.5, v2.33.6, v2.34.6, v2.35.6, v2.36.4, v2.37.5, v2.38.3, and v2.39.1. X41 D-Sec security researchers Markus Vervier and Eric Sesterhenn as well as GitLab's Joern Schneeweisz have been credited with reporting the bugs. "The most severe issue discovered allows an attacker to trigger a heap-based memory corruption during clone or pull operations, which might result in code execution," the German cybersecurity company  said  of CVE-2022-23521. CVE-2022-41903, also a critical vulnerability, is triggered during an archive operatio

Chipmaker Intel has confirmed that proprietary source code related to its Alder Lake CPUs has been leaked, following its release by an unknown third-party on 4chan and GitHub last week. The published content contains Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) code for  Alder Lake , the company's 12th generation processors that was originally launched in November 2021. In a statement shared with Tom's Hardware, Intel  said  the leak doesn't expose "any new security vulnerabilities as we do not rely on obfuscation of information as a security measure." It's also encouraging the broader security research community to report any potential issues through its  bug bounty program , adding it's reaching out to customers to notify them of the matter. Besides the UEFI code, the leaked data dump includes a plethora of files and tools, some of which appear to come from firmware vendor Insyde Software. Exact details surrounding the nature of the hack, inclu

If one word could sum up the 2021 infosecurity year (well, actually three), it would be these: "supply chain attack".  A software supply chain attack happens when hackers manipulate the code in third-party software components to compromise the 'downstream' applications that use them. In 2021, we have seen a dramatic rise in such attacks: high profile security incidents like the SolarWinds, Kaseya, and  Codecov  data breaches have shaken enterprise's confidence in the security practices of third-party service providers. What does this have to do with secrets, you might ask? In short, a lot. Take the Codecov case (we'll go back to it quickly): it is a textbook example to illustrate how hackers leverage hardcoded credentials to gain initial access into their victims' systems and harvest more secrets down the chain.  Secrets-in-code remains one of the most overlooked vulnerabilities in the application security space, despite being a priority target in hack

Microsoft on Tuesday  confirmed  that the LAPSUS$ extortion-focused hacking crew had gained "limited access" to its systems, as authentication services provider Okta revealed that nearly 2.5% of its customers have been potentially impacted in the wake of the breach. "No customer code or data was involved in the observed activities," Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said, adding that the breach was facilitated by means of a single compromised account that has since been remediated to prevent further malicious activity. The Windows maker, which was already tracking the group under the moniker DEV-0537 prior to the public disclosure,  said  it "does not rely on the secrecy of code as a security measure and viewing source code does not lead to elevation of risk." "This public disclosure escalated our action allowing our team to intervene and interrupt the actor mid-operation, limiting broader impact," the company's security

Microsoft and authentication services provider Okta said they are investigating claims of a potential breach alleged by the LAPSUS$ extortionist gang. The development, which was first reported by  Vice  and  Reuters , comes after the cyber criminal group posted screenshots and source code of what it said were the companies' internal projects and systems on its Telegram channel. The leaked 37GB archive shows that the group may have accessed the repositories related to Microsoft's Bing, Bing Maps, and Cortana, with the  images  highlighting Okta's Atlassian suite and in-house Slack channels. "For a service that powers authentication systems to many of the largest corporations (and FEDRAMP approved) I think these security measures are pretty poor," the hacking cartel wrote on Telegram. On top of this, the group alleged that it breached LG Electronics (LGE) for the "second time" in a year. Bill Demirkapi, an independent security researcher,  noted  th

Samsung on Monday confirmed a security breach that resulted in the exposure of internal company data, including the source code related to its Galaxy smartphones. "According to our initial analysis, the breach involves some source code relating to the operation of Galaxy devices, but does not include the personal information of our consumers or employees," the electronics giant  told  Bloomberg. The South Korean chaebol also confirmed that it doesn't anticipate any impact to its business or its customers as a result of the incident and that it has implemented new security measures to prevent such breaches in the future. The confirmation comes after the LAPSUS$ hacking group dumped 190GB of Samsung data on its Telegram channel towards the end of last week, allegedly exposing the source code for trusted applets installed within  TrustZone , algorithms for biometric authentication, bootloaders for recent devices, and even confidential data from its chip supplier Qualcom

A security flaw has been unearthed in Microsoft's Azure App Service that resulted in the exposure of source code of customer applications written in Java, Node, PHP, Python, and Ruby for at least four years since September 2017. The vulnerability, codenamed " NotLegit ," was reported to the tech giant by Wiz researchers on October 7, 2021, following which mitigations have been undertaken to fix the information disclosure bug in November. Microsoft  said  a "limited subset of customers" are at risk, adding "Customers who deployed code to App Service Linux via Local Git after files were already created in the application were the only impacted customers." The  Azure App Service  (aka Azure Web Apps) is a cloud computing-based platform for building and hosting web applications. It allows users to deploy source code and artifacts to the service using a local  Git  repository, or via repositories hosted on GitHub and Bitbucket. The insecure default be

A novel class of vulnerabilities could be leveraged by threat actors to inject visually deceptive malware in a way that's semantically permissible but alters the logic defined by the source code, effectively opening the door to more first-party and supply chain risks. Dubbed " Trojan Source attacks ," the technique "exploits subtleties in text-encoding standards such as  Unicode  to produce source code whose tokens are logically encoded in a different order from the one in which they are displayed, leading to vulnerabilities that cannot be perceived directly by human code reviewers," Cambridge University researchers Nicholas Boucher and Ross Anderson said in a newly published paper. The  vulnerabilities  — tracked as CVE-2021-42574 and CVE-2021-42694 — affect compilers of all popular programming languages such as C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Java, Rust, Go, and Python. Compilers are programs that translate high-level human-readable source code into their lower-l

Interactive livestreaming platform Twitch  acknowledged  a "breach" after an anonymous poster on the 4chan messaging board leaked its source code, an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios, details of creator payouts , proprietary software development kits, and other internal tools. The Amazon-owned service said it's "working with urgency to understand the extent of this," adding the data was exposed "due to an error in a Twitch server configuration change that was subsequently accessed by a malicious third party." "At this time, we have no indication that login credentials have been exposed," Twitch  noted  in a post published late Wednesday. "Additionally, full credit card numbers are not stored by Twitch, so full credit card numbers were not exposed." The forum user claimed the hack is designed to "foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space" because "their communi

In yet another instance of a software supply chain attack, unidentified actors hacked the official Git server of the PHP programming language and pushed unauthorized updates to insert a secret backdoor into its source code. The two malicious commits were pushed to the self-hosted "php-src" repository hosted on the git.php.net server, illicitly using the names of Rasmus Lerdorf, the author of the programming language, and Nikita Popov, a software developer at Jetbrains. The changes are said to have been made yesterday on March 28. "We don't yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points towards a compromise of the git.php.net server (rather than a compromise of an individual git account)," Popov  said  in an announcement. The changes, which were committed as " Fix Typo " in an attempt to slip through undetected as a typographical correction, involved provisions for execution of arbitrary PHP code. "This line executes PHP code fro

Email security firm Mimecast on Tuesday revealed that the state-sponsored SolarWinds hackers who broke into its internal network also downloaded source code out of a limited number of repositories. "The threat actor did access a subset of email addresses and other contact information and hashed and salted credentials," the company  said  in a write-up detailing its investigation, adding the adversary "accessed and downloaded a limited number of our source code repositories, as the threat actor is reported to have done with other victims of the SolarWinds Orion supply chain attack." But Mimecast said the source code downloaded by the attackers was incomplete and would be insufficient to build and run any aspect of the Mimecast service and that it did not find signs of any tampering made by the threat actor to the build process associated with the executables that are distributed to its customers.  On January 12, Mimecast  disclosed  that "a sophisticated th

Microsoft on Thursday said it concluded its probe into the SolarWinds hack, finding that the attackers stole some source code but confirmed there's no evidence that they abused its internal systems to target other companies or gained access to production services or customer data. The disclosure builds upon an  earlier update  on December 31, 2020, that uncovered a compromise of its own network to view source code related to its products and services. "We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories," the Windows maker had previously disclosed. "The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated.". Now according to the company, besides viewing few individual files by searching throug

Microsoft on Thursday revealed that the threat actors behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack were able to gain access to a small number of internal accounts and escalate access inside its internal network. The "very sophisticated nation-state actor" used the unauthorized access to view, but not modify, the source code present in its repositories, the company said. "We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories," the Windows maker  disclosed  in an update. "The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated." The development is the latest in the far-reaching  espionage saga  that came to light earlier in December following revelations by cybersecurity firm FireEye that attac

The investigation into how the attackers managed to compromise SolarWinds' internal network and poison the company's software updates is still underway, but we may be one step closer to understanding what appears to be a very meticulously planned and highly-sophisticated supply chain attack. A new report published by ReversingLabs today and shared in advance with The Hacker News has revealed that the operators behind the  espionage campaign  likely managed to compromise the software build and code signing infrastructure of SolarWinds Orion platform as early as October 2019 to deliver the malicious backdoor through its software release process. "The source code of the affected library was directly modified to include malicious backdoor code, which was compiled, signed, and delivered through the existing software patch release management system," ReversingLabs' Tomislav Pericin said. Cybersecurity firm FireEye earlier this week  detailed  how multiple SolarWin

Microsoft's long-lived operating system Windows XP—that still powers over 1% of all laptops and desktop computers worldwide—has had its source code leaked online, allegedly, along with Windows Server 2003. Yes, you heard that right. The source code for Microsoft's 19-year-old operating system was published as a torrent file on notorious bulletin board website 4chan, and it's for the very first time when source code for Microsoft's operating system has been leaked to the public. Several reports suggest that the collection of torrent files, which weigh 43GB in size, also said to include the source code for Windows Server 2003 and several Microsoft's older operating systems, including: Windows 2000 Windows CE 3  Windows CE 4  Windows CE 5  Windows Embedded 7 Windows Embedded CE Windows NT 3.5 Windows NT 4 MS-DOS 3.30  MS-DOS 6.0 The torrent download also includes the alleged source code for various Windows 10 components that  appeared in 2017  and sour

The source code of the popular social media app Snapchat was recently surfaced online after a hacker leaked and posted it on the Microsoft-owned code repository GitHub. A GitHub account under the name Khaled Alshehri with the handle i5xx , who claimed to be from Pakistan, created a GitHub repository called Source-Snapchat with a description " Source Code for SnapChat ," publishing the code of what purported to be Snapchat's iOS app. The underlying code could potentially expose the company's extremely confidential information, like the entire design of the hugely-successful messaging app, how the app works and what future features are planned for the app. Snapchat's parent company, Snap Inc., responded to the leak by filing a copyright act request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), helping it takedown the online repository hosting the Snapchat code. SnapChat Hack: Github Took Down Repository After DMCA Notice Though it is not clear