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Hackers have siphoned $611 million worth of cryptocurrencies from a blockchain-based financial network in what's believed to be one of the largest heists targeting the digital asset industry, putting it ahead of breaches targeting exchanges Coincheck and Mt. Gox in recent years. Poly Network, a China-based cross-chain decentralized finance (DeFi) platform for swapping tokens across multiple blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, on Tuesday  disclosed  unidentified actors had exploited a vulnerability in its system to plunder thousands of digital tokens such as Ether. "The hacker exploited a vulnerability between contract calls," Poly Network said.  The stolen Binance Chain, Ethereum, and Polygon assets are said to have been transferred to three different wallets, with the company urging miners of affected blockchain and centralized crypto exchanges to blocklist tokens coming from the addresses. The three wallet addresses are as follows -  Ethereum: 0xC8a6...

Adobe on Tuesday shipped  security updates  to remediate multiple critical vulnerabilities in its Magento e-commerce platform that could be abused by an attacker to execute arbitrary code and take control of a vulnerable system. The  issues  affect 2.3.7, 2.4.2-p1, 2.4.2, and earlier versions of Magento Commerce, and 2.3.7, 2.4.2-p1, and all prior versions of Magento Open Source edition. Of the 26 flaws addressed, 20 are rated critical, and six are rated Important in severity. None of the vulnerabilities fixed this month by Adobe are listed as publicly known or under active attack at the time of release. The most concerning of the bugs are as follows - CVE-2021-36021, CVE-2021-36024, CVE-2021-36025, CVE-2021-36034, CVE-2021-36035, CVE-2021-36040, CVE-2021-36041, and CVE-2021-36042  (CVSS score: 9.1) - Arbitrary code execution due to improper input validation CVE-2021-36022 and CVE-2021-36023  (CVSS score: 9.1) - Arbitrary code execution due to OS com...

Microsoft on Tuesday rolled out  security updates  to address a total of 44 security issues affecting its software products and services, one of which it says is an actively exploited zero-day in the wild. The update, which is the smallest release since December 2019, squashes seven Critical and 37 Important bugs in Windows, .NET Core & Visual Studio, Azure, Microsoft Graphics Component, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Scripting Engine, Microsoft Windows Codecs Library, Remote Desktop Client, among others. This is in addition to  seven security flaws  it patched in the Microsoft Edge browser on August 5. Chief among the patched issues is  CVE-2021-36948  (CVSS score: 7.8), an elevation of privilege flaw affecting Windows Update Medic Service — a service that enables remediation and protection of Windows Update components — which could be abused to run malicious programs with escalated permissions. Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center has been credite...

A Chinese cyber espionage group has been linked to a string of intrusion activities targeting Israeli government institutions, IT providers, and telecommunications companies at least since 2019, with the hackers masquerading themselves as Iranian actors to mislead forensic analysis. FireEye's Mandiant threat intelligence arm attributed the campaign to an operator it tracks as "UNC215", a Chinese espionage operation that's believed to have singled out organizations around the world dating back as far as 2014, linking the group with "low confidence" to an advanced persistent threat (APT) widely known as  APT27 , Emissary Panda, or Iron Tiger. "UNC215 has compromised organizations in the government, technology, telecommunications, defense, finance, entertainment, and health care sectors," FireEye's Israel and U.S. threat intel teams  said  in a report published today. "The group targets data and organizations which are of great interest ...

Unidentified threat actors are actively exploiting a critical authentication bypass vulnerability to hijack home routers as part of an effort to co-opt them to a Mirai-variant botnet used for carrying out DDoS attacks, merely two days after its public disclosure. Tracked as  CVE-2021-20090  (CVSS score: 9.9), the  weakness  concerns a  path traversal vulnerability  in the web interfaces of  routers with Arcadyan firmware  that could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to bypass authentication. Disclosed by Tenable on August 3, the issue is believed to have existed for at least 10 years, affecting at least 20 models across 17 different vendors, including Asus, Beeline, British Telecom, Buffalo, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telstra, Telus, Verizon, and Vodafone. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could enable an attacker to circumvent authentication barriers and potentially gain access to sensitive information, including valid request...

A critical vulnerability has been disclosed in hardware random number generators used in billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices whereby it fails to properly generate random numbers, thus undermining their security and putting them at risk of attacks. "It turns out that these 'randomly' chosen numbers aren't always as random as you'd like when it comes to IoT devices," Bishop Fox researchers Dan Petro and Allan Cecil  said  in an analysis published last week. "In fact, in many cases, devices are choosing encryption keys of 0 or worse. This can lead to a catastrophic collapse of security for any upstream use." Random number generation ( RNG ) is a  crucial process  that undergirds several cryptographic applications, including key generation, nonces, and salting. On traditional operating systems, it's derived from a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG) that uses entropy obtained from a high-quality seed source. ...

Among the problems stemming from our systemic failure with cybersecurity, which ranges from decades-old software-development practices to Chinese and Russian cyber-attacks, one problem gets far less attention than it should—the insider threat. But the reality is that most organizations should be at least as worried about user management as they are about Bond villain-type hackers launching compromises from abroad. Most organizations have deployed single sign-on and modern identity-management solutions. These generally allow easy on-boarding, user management, and off-boarding. However, on mobile devices, these solutions have been less effective. Examples include mobile applications such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or even SMS-which are common in the workforce. All of these tools allow for low-friction, agile communication in an increasingly mobile business environment. Today, many of these tools offer end-to-end encryption (e2ee), which is a boon when viewed through the lens of ...

A new Android trojan has been found to compromise Facebook accounts of over 10,000 users in at least 144 countries since March 2021 via fraudulent apps distributed through Google Play Store and other third-party app marketplaces. Dubbed " FlyTrap ," the previously undocumented malware is believed to be part of a family of trojans that employ social engineering tricks to breach Facebook accounts as part of a session hijacking campaign orchestrated by malicious actors operating out of Vietnam, according to a  report  published by Zimperium's zLabs today and shared with The Hacker News. Although the offending nine applications have since been pulled from Google Play, they continue to be available in third-party app stores, "highlighting the risk of sideloaded applications to mobile endpoints and user data," Zimperium malware researcher Aazim Yaswant said. The list of apps is as follows - GG Voucher (com.luxcarad.cardid)  Vote European Football (com.gardengu...

Pulse Secure has shipped a fix for a critical post-authentication remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in its Connect Secure virtual private network (VPN) appliances to address an incomplete patch for an actively exploited flaw it previously resolved in October 2020. "The Pulse Connect Secure appliance suffers from an uncontrolled archive extraction vulnerability which allows an attacker to overwrite arbitrary files, resulting in Remote Code Execution as root," NCC Group's Richard Warren  disclosed  on Friday. "This vulnerability is a bypass of the patch for  CVE-2020-8260 ." "An attacker with such access will be able to circumvent any restrictions enforced via the web application, as well as remount the filesystem, allowing them to create a persistent backdoor, extract and decrypt credentials, compromise VPN clients, or pivot into the internal network," Warren added. The disclosure comes days after Ivanti, the company behind Pulse Secure,  p...

Apple on Thursday said it's introducing new child safety features in iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS as part of its efforts to limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in the U.S. To that effect, the iPhone maker said it intends to begin client-side scanning of images shared via every Apple device for known child abuse content as they are being uploaded into iCloud Photos, in addition to leveraging on-device machine learning to vet all iMessage images sent or received by minor accounts (aged under 13) to warn parents of sexually explicit photos shared over the messaging platform. Furthermore, Apple also plans to update Siri and Search to stage an intervention when users try to perform searches for CSAM-related topics, alerting that the "interest in this topic is harmful and problematic." "Messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo is sexually explicit," Apple  noted . "The feature is desi...

Amazon earlier this April addressed a critical vulnerability in its Kindle e-book reader platform that could have been potentially exploited to take full control over a user's device, resulting in the theft of sensitive information by just deploying a malicious e-book. "By sending Kindle users a single malicious e-book, a threat actor could have stolen any information stored on the device, from Amazon account credentials to billing information," Yaniv Balmas, head of cyber research at Check Point, said in an emailed statement. "The security vulnerabilities allow an attacker to target a very specific audience." In other words, if a threat actor wanted to single out a specific group of people or demographic, it's possible for the adversary to choose a popular e-book in a language or dialect that's widely spoken among the group to tailor and orchestrate a highly targeted cyber attack. Upon responsibly disclosing the issue to Amazon in February 2021, t...

Koo, India's homegrown Twitter clone, recently patched a serious security vulnerability that could have been exploited to execute arbitrary JavaScript code against hundreds of thousands of its users, spreading the attack across the platform. The vulnerability involves a  stored cross-site scripting flaw  (also known as persistent XSS) in Koo's web application that allows malicious scripts to be embedded directly into the affected web application. To carry out the attack, all a malicious actor had to do was log into the service via the web application and post an XSS-encoded payload to its timeline, which automatically gets executed on behalf of all users who saw the post. The issue was discovered by security researcher  Rahul Kankrale  in July, following which a fix was rolled out by Koo on July 3. Using cross-site scripting, an attacker can perform actions on behalf of users with the same privileges as the user and steal web browser's secrets, such as authenti...

VMware has released security updates for multiple products to address a critical vulnerability that could be exploited to gain access to confidential information. Tracked as  CVE-2021-22002  (CVSS score: 8.6) and  CVE-2021-22003  (CVSS score: 3.7), the flaws affect VMware Workspace One Access (Access), VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), VMware Cloud Foundation, and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. CVE-2021-22002 concerns an issue with how VMware Workspace One Access and Identity Manager allow the "/cfg" web app and diagnostic endpoints to be accessed via port 443 by tampering with a host header, resulting in a server-side request. "A malicious actor with network access to port 443 could tamper with host headers to facilitate access to the /cfg web app, in addition a malicious actor could access /cfg diagnostic endpoints without authentication," the company  said  in its advisory. Suleyman Bayir of Trendyol has been credi...