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Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has been made available for a recently disclosed and patched critical flaw impacting VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRealize Network Insight). The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-34039 , is rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 for severity and has been described as a case of authentication bypass due to a lack of unique cryptographic key generation. "A malicious actor with network access to Aria Operations for Networks could bypass SSH authentication to gain access to the Aria Operations for Networks CLI," VMware said earlier this week. Summoning Team's Sina Kheirkhah, who published the PoC following an analysis of the patch released by VMware, said the root cause can be traced back to a bash script containing a method named refresh_ssh_keys(), which is responsible for overwriting the current SSH keys for the support and ubuntu users in the authorized_keys file. "There is SSH authentication in place; however, VMware forgot to regenerate th

A new IoT botnet malware dubbed RapperBot has been observed rapidly evolving its capabilities since it was first discovered in mid-June 2022. "This family borrows heavily from the original  Mirai source code , but what separates it from other IoT malware families is its built-in capability to brute force credentials and gain access to SSH servers instead of Telnet as implemented in Mirai," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs  said  in a report. The malware, which gets its name from an embedded URL to a YouTube rap music video in an earlier version, is said to have amassed a growing collection of compromised SSH servers, with over 3,500 unique IP addresses used to scan and brute-force their way into the servers. RapperBot's current implementation also delineates it from Mirai, allowing it to primarily function as an SSH brute-force tool with limited capabilities to carry out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The deviation from traditional Mirai behavior is further

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Microsoft has shared technical details about a now-fixed, actively exploited critical security vulnerability affecting SolarWinds Serv-U managed file transfer service that it has attributed with "high confidence" to a threat actor operating out of China. In mid-July, the Texas-based company  remedied  a remote code execution flaw ( CVE-2021-35211 ) that was rooted in Serv-U's implementation of the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, which could be abused by attackers to run arbitrary code on the infected system, including the ability to install malicious programs and view, change, or delete sensitive data. "The Serv-U SSH server is subject to a pre-auth remote code execution vulnerability that can be easily and reliably exploited in the default configuration," Microsoft Offensive Research and Security Engineering team said in a  detailed write-up  describing the exploit. "An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by connecting to the open SSH port and sendin

In recent years, several groups of cybersecurity researchers have disclosed dozens of memory side-channel vulnerabilities in modern processors and DRAM s, like Rowhammer , RAMBleed , Spectre, and Meltdown . Have you ever noticed they all had at least one thing in common? That's OpenSSH. As a proof-of-concept, many researchers demonstrated their side-channel attacks against OpenSSH application installed on a targeted computer, where an unprivileged attacker-owned process exploits memory read vulnerabilities to steal secret SSH private keys from the restricted memory regions of the system. That's possible because OpenSSH has an agent that keeps a copy of your SSH key in the memory so that you don't have to type your passphrase every time you want to connect to the same remote server. However, modern operating systems by default store sensitive data, including encryption keys and passwords, in the kernel memory which can not be accessed by user-level privileged p

The popular SSH client program PuTTY has released the latest version of its software that includes security patches for 8 high-severity security vulnerabilities. PuTTY is one of the most popular and widely used open-source client-side programs that allows users to remotely access computers over SSH, Telnet, and Rlogin network protocols. Almost 20 months after releasing the last version of its software, the developers of PuTTY earlier this week released the latest version 0.71 for Windows and Unix operating systems. According to an advisory available on its website, all previous versions of the PuTTY software have been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious server or a compromised server to hijack client's system in different ways. Here below I have listed all 8 vulnerabilities with brief information that PuTTY 0.71 has patched: 1) Authentication Prompt Spoofing — Since PuTTY doesn't have a way to indicate whether a piec

Libssh2, a popular open source client-side C library implementing the SSHv2 protocol, has released the latest version of its software to patch a total of nine security vulnerabilities. The Libssh2 library is available for all major distributors of the Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, and also comes bundled within some distributions and software as a default library. According to an  advisory published Monday, all the below listed vulnerabilities that were patched with the release of libssh2 version 1.8.1 lead to memory corruption issues which could result in arbitrary code execution on a client system in certain circumstances. Here's the list of security vulnerabilities patched in Libssh: 1. CVE-2019-3855: Possible integer overflow in transport read that could lead to an out-of-bounds write. A malicious server, or a remote attacker who compromises an SSH server, could send a specially crafted packet which could result in executing malicious

A set of 36-year-old vulnerabilities has been uncovered in the Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) implementation of many client applications that can be exploited by malicious servers to overwrite arbitrary files in the SCP client target directory unauthorizedly. Session Control Protocol (SCP), also known as secure copy, is a network protocol that allows users to securely transfer files between a local host and a remote host using RCP (Remote Copy Protocol) and SSH protocol. In other terms, SCP, which dates back to 1983, is a secure version of RCP that uses authentication and encryption of SSH protocol to transfer files between a server and a client. Discovered by Harry Sintonen, one of F-Secure's Senior Security Consultants, the vulnerabilities exist due to poor validations performed by the SCP clients, which can be abused by malicious servers or man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attackers to drop or overwrite arbitrary files on the client's system. "Many scp clients fail to ver

A four-year-old severe vulnerability has been discovered in the Secure Shell (SSH) implementation library known as Libssh that could allow anyone to completely bypass authentication and gain unfettered administrative control over a vulnerable server without requiring a password. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-10933 , is an authentication-bypass issue that was introduced in Libssh version 0.6 released earlier 2014, leaving thousands of enterprise servers open to hackers for the last four years. But before you get frightened, you should know that neither the widely used OpenSSH nor Github's implementation of libssh was affected by the vulnerability. The vulnerability resides due to a coding error in Libssh and is "ridiculously simple" to exploit. According to a security advisory published Tuesday, all an attacker needs to do is sending an "SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS" message to a server with an SSH connection enabled when it expects an &

WikiLeaks has today published the 15th batch of its ongoing Vault 7 leak , this time detailing two alleged CIA implants that allowed the agency to intercept and exfiltrate SSH (Secure Shell) credentials from targeted Windows and Linux operating systems using different attack vectors. Secure Shell or SSH is a cryptographic network protocol used for remote login to machines and servers securely over an unsecured network. Dubbed BothanSpy — implant for Microsoft Windows Xshell client, and Gyrfalcon — targets the OpenSSH client on various distributions of Linux OS, including CentOS, Debian, RHEL (Red Hat), openSUSE and Ubuntu. Both implants steal user credentials for all active SSH sessions and then sends them to a CIA-controlled server. BothanSpy — Implant for Windows OS BothanSpy is installed as a Shellterm 3.x extension on the target machine and only works if Xshell is running on it with active sessions. Xshell is a powerful terminal emulator that supports SSH, SFTP,