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Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions suffer from a severe privilege escalation vulnerability that could allow a local attacker or a malicious program to obtain root privileges and total control over the targeted system. Dubbed " Dirty_Sock " and identified as CVE-2019-7304 , the vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Chris Moberly, who privately disclosed it to Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, late last month. The vulnerability resides in the REST API for snapd service , a universal Linux packaging system that makes an application compatible for various Linux distributions without requiring any modification. Built by Canonical, snapd comes by default installed on all versions of Ubuntu and also used by other Linux distributions, including Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Solus, and Fedora. Snap packages are basically applications compressed together with their dependencies that also includes instructions on how to run and interact with other software o...

What could be more frightening than a service informing you that all your data is gone—every file and every backup servers are entirely wiped out? The worst nightmare of its kind. Right? But that's precisely what just happened this week with VFEmail.net, a US-based secure email provider that lost all data and backup files for its users after unknown hackers destroyed its entire U.S. infrastructure, wiping out almost two decades' worth of data and backups in a matter of few hours for no apparent reason. Started in 2001 by Rick Romero, VFEmail provides secure, private email services to companies and end users, both free and paid-for. Describing the attack as "catastrophic," the privacy-focused email service provider revealed that the attack took place on February 11 and that "all data" on their US servers—both the primary and the backup systems—has been completely wiped out, and it's seemingly beyond recovery. "Yes, @VFEmail is effectivel...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a way to hide malicious code in Intel SGX enclaves, a hardware-based memory encryption feature in modern processors that isolates sensitive code and data to protect it from disclosure or modification. In other words, the technique allows attackers to implant malware code in a secure memory that uses protection features of SGX which are otherwise designed to protect important data from prying eyes or from being tampered, even on a compromised system. Introduced with Intel's Skylake processors, SGX (Software Guard Extensions) allows developers to run selected application modules in a completely isolated secure region of memory, called enclaves, which are designed to be protected from processes running at higher privilege levels like the operating system, kernel, BIOS, SMM, hypervisor, etc. However, a team of researchers, some of whom were behind the discovery of the Spectre-Meltdown CPU flaws , managed to bypass this protection and g...

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Microsoft has issued its second Patch Tuesday for this year to address a total of 77 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other products, 20 of which are rated critical, 54 important and 3 moderate in severity. February security update addresses flaws in Adobe Flash Player, Internet Explorer, Edge, Windows, MS Office, and Office Services and Web Apps, ChakraCore, .NET Framework, Exchange Server, Visual Studio, Azure IoT SDK, Dynamics, Team Foundation Server, and Visual Studio Code. Four of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month have been reported as being publicly known at the time of release, and one is being actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability actively being exploited in the wild is rated as important and resides in the way Internet Explorer handles objects in the memory. An attacker can trick victims into landing on a specially crafted website and exploit this vulnerability, identified as CVE-201...

A new security vulnerability has been discovered in the latest version of Apple's macOS Mojave that could allow a malicious application to access data stored in restricted folders which are otherwise not accessible to every app. Discovered by application developer Jeff Johnson on February 8, the vulnerability is unpatched at the time of writing and impacts all version of macOS Mojave, including macOS Mojave 10.14.3 Supplemental update released on February 7. Certain folders in macOS Mojave have restricted access that is forbidden by default, like ~/Library/Safari, which can be accessed by only a few applications, such as Finder. However, Johnson discovered a way to bypass these restrictions in Mojave, allowing applications to access ~/Library/Safari without needing any permission from the user or the system, and read users' web browsing history. "My bypass works with the 'hardened runtime' enabled," Johnson said in a blog post published last week. ...

Welcome back! Adobe has today released its monthly security updates to address a total of 75 security vulnerabilities across its various products, 71 of which resides in Adobe Acrobat and Reader alone. February 2019 patch Tuesday updates address several critical and important vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, Adobe Coldfusion, Creative Cloud Desktop Application, and Adobe Flash Player for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS. According to the advisory released today, 43 out of 71 vulnerabilities addressed by Adobe in Acrobat and Reader are rated as critical in severity, most of which could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user upon successful exploitation. The update also includes a permanent fix for a critical, publicly disclosed zero-day vulnerability (CVE 2019-7089) impacting Adobe Reader that could allow remote attackers to steal targeted Windows NTLM hash passwords just by tricking victims into opening a specially crafted PDF fi...

Smart devices definitely make our lives easier, faster, and more efficient, but unfortunately, an insecure smart device can also ruin your day, or sometime could even turn into the worst nightmare of your life. If you are an electric scooter rider, you should be concerned about yourself. In a report shared with The Hacker News in advance, researchers from mobile security firm Zimperium said to have discovered an easy-to-execute but serious vulnerability in M365 Folding Electric Scooter by Xiaomi that could potentially putting riders life at risk. Xiaomi e-Scooter has a significant market share and is also being used by different brands with some modifications. Xiaomi M365 Electric Scooter comes with a mobile app that utilizes password-protected Bluetooth communication, allowing its riders to securely interact with their scooters remotely for multiple features like changing password, enabling the anti-theft system, cruise-control, eco mode, updating the scooter's firmwar...

A serious security vulnerability has been discovered in the core runC container code that affects several open-source container management systems, potentially allowing attackers to escape Linux container and obtain unauthorized, root-level access to the host operating system. The vulnerability, identified as  CVE-2019-5736 , was discovered by open source security researchers Adam Iwaniuk and Borys Popławski and publicly disclosed by Aleksa Sarai, a senior software engineer and runC maintainer at SUSE Linux GmbH on Monday. The flaw resides in runC—a lightweight low-level command-line tool for spawning and running containers, an operating-system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated systems on a host using a single kernel. Originally created by Docker, runC is the default container run-time for Docker, Kubernetes, ContainerD, CRI-O, and other container-dependent programs, and is widely being used by major cloud hosting and server providers. runC Cont...

A malicious Windows EXE file can even infect your Mac computer as well. Yes, you heard me right — a .exe malware on macOS. Security researchers at antivirus firm Trend Micro have discovered a novel way hackers are using in the wild to bypass Apple's macOS security protection and infect Mac computers by deploying malicious EXE files that normally run only on Windows computers. Researchers found several samples of malicious macOS application (.dmg) masquerading as installers for popular software on a torrent site that includes an EXE application compiled with Mono framework to make it compatible with macOS. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework that allows developers to create cross-platform .NET applications, which work across all supported platforms, including Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Usually, running any Windows executable results in error on macOS systems, and its built-in protection mechanisms such as Gatekeeper also skips scann...

A security researcher has discovered yet another cryptocurrency-stealing malware on the official Google Play Store that was designed to secretly steal bitcoin and cryptocurrency from unwitting users. The malware, described as a " Clipper ," masqueraded as a legitimate cryptocurrency app and worked by replacing cryptocurrency wallet addresses copied into the Android clipboard with one belonging to attackers, ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko explained in a blog post . Since cryptocurrency wallet addresses are made up of long strings of characters for security reasons, users usually prefer copying and pasting the wallet addresses using the clipboard over typing them out. The newly discovered clipper malware, dubbed Android/Clipper.C by ESET, took advantage of this behavior to steal users cryptocurrency. To do this, attackers first tricked users into installing the malicious app that impersonated a legitimate cryptocurrency service called MetaMask , claiming to let users...

Google has launched a new encryption algorithm that has been built specifically to run on mobile phones and smart IoT devices that don't have the specialized hardware to use current encryption methods to encrypt locally stored data efficiently. Encryption has already become an integral part of our everyday digital activities. However, it has long been known that encryption is expensive, as it causes performance issues, especially for low-end devices that don't have hardware support for making the encryption and decryption process faster. Since data security concerns have recently become very important, not using encryption is no more a wise tradeoff, and at the same time, using a secure but slow device on which apps take much longer to launch is also not a great idea. Currently Android OS supports AES-128-CBC-ESSIV for full-disk encryption and AES-256-XTS for file-based encryption, and Google has already made it mandatory for device manufacturers to include AES encry...

Apple has finally released iOS 12.1.4 software update to patch the terrible Group FaceTime privacy bug that could have allowed an Apple user to call you via the FaceTime video chat service and hear or see you before you even pick up the call without your knowledge. The Facetime bug (CVE-2019-6223) was discovered by 14-year-old Grant Thompson of Catalina Foothills High School while he was trying to set up a Group FaceTime session with his friends. Thompson reported the bug to the company a week before it made headlines across the internet, forcing Apple to temporarily disable the group calling feature within FaceTime. In its advisory published Thursday, Apple described the bug as "a logic issue existed in the handling of Group FaceTime calls," that also impacted the group FaceTime calling feature on Apple's macOS Mojave 10.14.2. Along with Thompson, Apple has also credited Daven Morris of Arlington, Texas, in its official advisory for reporting this bug. Acc...