user privilege | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Hold tight, this may blow your mind… A low-privileged user account on most Linux operating systems with UID value anything greater than 2147483647 can execute any systemctl command unauthorizedly—thanks to a newly discovered vulnerability. The reported vulnerability actually resides in PolicyKit (also known as polkit)—an application-level toolkit for Unix-like operating systems that defines policies, handles system-wide privileges and provides a way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones, such as "sudo," that does not grant root permission to an entire process. The issue, tracked as CVE-2018-19788 , impacts PolicyKit version 0.115 which comes pre-installed on most popular Linux distributions, including Red Hat , Debian ,  Ubuntu , and CentOS. The vulnerability exists due to PolicyKit's improper validation of permission requests for any low-privileged user with UID greater than INT_MAX. Where, INT_MAX is a constant in computer progra...

The informational systems that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) run are loaded with several critical vulnerabilities that could leave it vulnerable to cyber attacks. According to the findings of an audit recently conducted by the Department of Commerce's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the Joint Polar Satellite System's (JPSS) ground system is vulnerable to a large number of high-risk vulnerabilities. The JPSS ground system is used to collect data from several polar-orbiting weather satellites, and distribute the information to users worldwide. This system also provides command, control and data processing for current and future weather satellites. But, the vulnerabilities identified in the system could impair technology controlling the United States' next generation of polar-orbiting environmental satellites. " Our analysis of the JPSS program's assessments of system vulnerabilities found that, since FY 2012, the number of high-ris...