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Network-attached storage (NAS) appliance maker QNAP said it's  currently   investigating  two recently patched security flaws in OpenSSL to determine their potential impact, adding it will release security updates should its products turn out to be vulnerable. Tracked as CVE-2021-3711 (CVSS score: 7.5) and CVE-2021-3712 (CVSS score: 4.4), the  weaknesses  concern a high-severity buffer overflow in SM2 decryption function and a buffer overrun issue when processing ASN.1 strings that could be abused by adversaries to run arbitrary code, cause a denial-of-service condition, or result in disclosure of private memory contents, such as private keys, or sensitive plaintext — CVE-2021-3711  - OpenSSL SM2 decryption buffer overflow CVE-2021-3712  - Read buffer overruns processing ASN.1 strings "A malicious attacker who is able present SM2 content for decryption to an application could cause attacker chosen data to overflow the buffer by up to a maximum o...

New vulnerabilities have been discovered in Fortress S03 Wi-Fi Home Security System that could be potentially abused by a malicious party to gain unauthorized access with an aim to alter system behavior, including disarming the devices without the victim's knowledge. The two unpatched issues, tracked under the identifiers CVE-2021-39276 (CVSS score: 5.3) and CVE-2021-39277 (CVSS score: 5.7), were discovered and reported by cybersecurity firm Rapid7 in May 2021 with a 60-day deadline to fix the weaknesses. The Fortress S03 Wi-Fi Home Security System is a do-it-yourself (DIY) alarm system that enables users to secure their homes and small businesses from burglars, fires, gas leaks, and water leaks by leveraging Wi-Fi and RFID technology for keyless entry. The company's security and surveillance systems are used by "thousands of clients and continued customers,"  according  to its website. Calling the vulnerabilities "trivially easy to exploit," Rapid7 re...

A group of academics has proposed a machine learning approach that uses authentic interactions between devices in Bluetooth networks as a foundation to handle device-to-device authentication reliably. Called " Verification of Interaction Authenticity " (aka VIA), the recurring authentication scheme aims to solve the problem of passive, continuous authentication and automatic deauthentication once two devices are paired with one another, which remain authenticated until an explicit deauthentication action is taken, or the authenticated session expires. "Consider devices that pair via Bluetooth, which commonly follow the pattern of pair once, trust indefinitely. After two devices connect, those devices are bonded until a user explicitly removes the bond. This bond is likely to remain intact as long as the devices exist, or until they transfer ownership," Travis Peters, one of the co-authors of the study,  said . "The increased adoption of (Bluetooth-enabled)...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday  added  single-factor authentication to the short list of "exceptionally risky" cybersecurity practices that could expose critical infrastructure as well as government and the private sector entities to devastating cyberattacks. Single-factor authentication is a  method  of signing in users to websites and remote systems by using only one way of verifying their identity, typically a combination of username and password. It's considered to be of low-security, since it heavily relies on "matching one factor — such as a password — to a username to gain access to a system." But with weak, reused, and common passwords posing a grave threat and emerging a lucrative attack vector, the use of single-factor authentication can lead to unnecessary risk of compromise and increase the possibility of account takeover by cybercriminals. With the latest development, the  list of bad practices  ...

Details have emerged about a now-patched security vulnerability impacting Microsoft Exchange Server that could be weaponized by an unauthenticated attacker to modify server configurations, thus leading to the disclosure of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The issue, tracked as  CVE-2021-33766  (CVSS score: 7.3) and coined " ProxyToken ," was discovered by Le Xuan Tuyen, a researcher at the Information Security Center of Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT-ISC), and reported through the Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI) program in March 2021. "With this vulnerability, an unauthenticated attacker can perform configuration actions on mailboxes belonging to arbitrary users," the ZDI  said  Monday. "As an illustration of the impact, this can be used to copy all emails addressed to a target and account and forward them to an account controlled by the attacker." Microsoft addressed the issue as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for July 2021...

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol or SMTP has easily exploitable security loopholes. Email routing protocols were designed in a time when cryptographic technology was at a nascent stage (e.g., the de-facto protocol for email transfer, SMTP, is nearly 40 years old now), and therefore security was not an important consideration.  As a result, in most email systems encryption is still opportunistic, which implies that if the opposite connection does not support TLS, it gets rolled back to an unencrypted one delivering messages in plaintext.  To mitigate SMTP security problems,  MTA-STS  (Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security) is the recommended email authentication standard. It enforces TLS in order to allow MTAs to send emails securely. This means that it will only allow mail from MTAs that support TLS encryption, and it will only allow mail to go to MX hosts that support TLS encryption. In case an encrypted connection cannot be negotiated between communicating...

Not all heroes wear capes. Cybersecurity professionals are digital warriors who use their knowledge and skill to battle malicious hackers.  Sounds like an exciting career, right?  If the comic-book comparisons aren't working for you, perhaps some figures will. According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary of a cybersecurity professional is just over $100,000 a year. The Complete 2021 CyberSecurity Super Bundle  can help you get started in this niche, with 24 courses working towards top certification exams.  If you went and bought these courses separately, you would pay a total of $7,080.  To bring the price down, The Hacker News has teamed up with iCollege to offer  all the training for just $69.99 . That is 99% off the full value! You don't need a college education to get a job in cybersecurity, but you do need to pass some exams.  This bundle gives you full prep for important tests, including CISSP, and CompTIA Security+, PenTest+, CySA+, and...

A new ransomware family that emerged last month comes with its own bag of tricks to bypass ransomware protection by leveraging a novel technique called "intermittent encryption." Called  LockFile , the operators of the ransomware have been found exploiting recently disclosed flaws such as  ProxyShell  and  PetitPotam  to compromise Windows servers and deploy file-encrypting malware that scrambles only every alternate 16 bytes of a file, thereby giving it the ability to evade ransomware defences. "Partial encryption is generally used by ransomware operators to speed up the encryption process and we've seen it implemented by BlackMatter, DarkSide and LockBit 2.0 ransomware," Mark Loman, Sophos director of engineering, said in a statement. "What sets LockFile apart is that, unlike the others, it doesn't encrypt the first few blocks. Instead, LockFile encrypts every other 16 bytes of a document." "This means that a file such as a text documen...

Microsoft is warning of a widespread credential phishing campaign that leverages  open redirector links  in email communications as a vector to trick users into visiting malicious websites while effectively bypassing security software. "Attackers combine these links with social engineering baits that impersonate well-known productivity tools and services to lure users into clicking," Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team  said  in a report published this week. "Doing so leads to a series of redirections — including a CAPTCHA verification page that adds a sense of legitimacy and attempts to evade some automated analysis systems — before taking the user to a fake sign-in page. This ultimately leads to credential compromise, which opens the user and their organization to other attacks." Although redirect links in email messages serve a vital tool to take recipients to third-party websites or track click rates and measure the success of sales and marketin...

Google and Microsoft said they are pledging to invest a total of $30 billion in cybersecurity advancements over the next five years, as the U.S. government  partners  with private sector companies to address threats facing the country in the wake of a string of sophisticated malicious cyber activity targeting critical infrastructure, laying bare the risks to data, organizations, and governments worldwide. The White House cybersecurity meeting, which brought together executives from the education, energy, finance, insurance, and tech sectors, included companies like ADP, Amazon, Apple, Bank of America, Code.org, Girls Who Code, Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Vantage Group, among others. To that end, the U.S. government on Wednesday announced a collaboration between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and industry partners to develop a new framework to improve the security and integrity of the technology supply chain, alongside plans to exp...

U.S. technology firm Kaseya has  released  security patches to address two zero-day vulnerabilities affecting its Unitrends enterprise backup and continuity solution that could result in privilege escalation and authenticated remote code execution. The two weaknesses are part of a  trio of vulnerabilities  discovered and reported by researchers at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) on July 3, 2021. The IT infrastructure management solution provider has addressed the issues in server software version 10.5.5-2 released on August 12, DIVD said. An as-yet-undisclosed client-side vulnerability in Kaseya Unitrends remains unpatched, but the company has published  firewall rules  that can be applied to filter traffic to and from the client and mitigate any risk associated with the flaw. As an additional precaution, it's  recommended  not to leave the servers accessible over the internet. Although specifics related to the vulnera...

Cloud infrastructure security company Wiz on Thursday revealed details of a now-fixed Azure Cosmos database vulnerability that could have been potentially exploited to grant any Azure user full admin access to other customers' database instances without any authorization. The flaw, which grants read, write, and delete privileges, has been dubbed " ChaosDB ," with Wiz researchers noting that "the vulnerability has a trivial exploit that doesn't require any previous access to the target environment, and impacts thousands of organizations, including numerous Fortune 500 companies." Cosmos DB is Microsoft's proprietary  NoSQL database  that's advertised as "a fully managed service" that "takes database administration off your hands with automatic management, updates and patching." The Wiz Research Team reported the issue to Microsoft on August 12, after which the Windows maker took steps to mitigate the issue within 48 hours of r...

Today I discuss an attack vector conducive to cross-organizational spread, in-home local propagation. Though often overlooked, this vector is especially relevant today, as many corporate employees remain working from home. In this post, I contrast in-home local propagation with traditional vectors through which a threat (ransomware in particular) spreads throughout an organization. I discuss the reasons this type of spread is problematic for employees and corporations alike. Finally, I offer simple solutions to mitigate the risk of such tactics.  Why Should IT and Security Stakeholders Care? Today's long cycle attacks are often reconnoitering the victim environment for weeks, if not months. In this time, the attacker gains a tremendous amount of knowledge about systems in the victim's footprint. This additional loiter time in the victim's environment, coupled with ad-hoc maintained work-from-home environments, presents both an  ingress avenue  for attacks into their n...