The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Developers of Drupal—a popular open-source content management system software that powers millions of websites—have released the latest version of their software to patch a critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to hack your site. The update came two days after the Drupal security team released an advance security notification of the upcoming patches, giving websites administrators early heads-up to fix their websites before hackers abuse the loophole. The vulnerability in question is a critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Drupal Core that could "lead to arbitrary PHP code execution in some cases," the Drupal security team said. While the Drupal team hasn't released any technical details of the vulnerability (CVE-2019-6340), it mentioned that the flaw resides due to the fact that some field types do not properly sanitize data from non-form sources and affects Drupal 7 and 8 Core. It should also be noted that your Drupal-based website ...

Beware Windows users... a new dangerous remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the WinRAR software, affecting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point have disclosed technical details of a critical vulnerability in WinRAR—a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide—that affects all versions of the software released in last 19 years. The flaw resides in the way an old third-party library, called UNACEV2.DLL, used by the software handled the extraction of files compressed in ACE data compression archive file format. However, since WinRAR detects the format by the content of the file and not by the extension, attackers can merely change the .ace extension to .rar extension to make it look normal. According to researchers, they found an "Absolute Path Traversal" bug in the library that could be leveraged to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system attempting to uncompre...

Exclusive — If you have not updated your website to the latest WordPress version 5.0.3, it's a brilliant idea to upgrade the content management software of your site now. From now, I mean immediately. Cybersecurity researchers at RIPS Technologies GmbH today shared their latest research with The Hacker News, revealing the existence of a critical remote code execution vulnerability that affects all previous versions of WordPress content management software released in the past 6 years. The remote code execution attack, discovered and reported to the WordPress security team late last year, can be exploited by a low privileged attacker with at least an "author" account using a combination of two separate vulnerabilities—Path Traversal and Local File Inclusion—that reside in the WordPress core. The requirement of at least an author account reduces the severity of this vulnerability to some extent, which could be exploited by a rogue content contributor or an attacker w...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

How do you know whether an attacker has infiltrated your network? Can you really rely on an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution to be your go-to technology for identifying security breaches? Endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform has been an important technology to detect cybersecurity incidents, but it provides only the view of endpoints, just a portion of the big picture. Since hackers can explore and exploit anything within reach, not just a few monitored endpoints, many security professionals are reaching the realization that the actual attack surface of their organizations is significantly wider than only endpoints. In an ideal and more effective approach to security, a broader set of attack vectors and activity data should be examined to get a more complete view of the attack operation. On top of the endpoint, security solutions must also include cloud, threat intelligence, network data, and logging information, among others. If you haven't already,...

Why would someone bother to hack a so-called "ultra-secure encrypted database that is being protected behind 13 feet high and 5 feet thick walls," when one can simply fetch a copy of the same data from other sources. French security researcher Baptiste Robert, who goes by the pseudonym "Elliot Alderson" on Twitter, with the help of an Indian researcher, who wants to remain anonymous, discovered that the official website of popular state-owned LPG gas company Indane is leaking personal details of its millions of customers, including their Aadhaar numbers. This is not the first time when an unprotected third-party database has leaked Aadhaar details of Indian citizens, which is a unique number assigned to each citizen as part of India's biometric identity programme maintained by the government's Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Earlier this week an anonymous Indian researcher initially discovered a loophole in the Indane's online...

Wohooo! Great news for hackers and penetration testers. Offensive Security has just released Kali Linux 2019.1, the first 2019 version of its Swiss army knife for cybersecurity professionals. The latest version of Kali Linux operating system includes kernel up to version 4.19.13 and patches for numerous bugs, along with many updated software, like Metasploit, theHarvester, DBeaver, and more. Kali Linux 2019.1 comes with the latest version of Metasploit (version 5.0) penetration testing tool, which "includes database and automation APIs, new evasion capabilities, and usability improvements throughout," making it more efficient platform for penetration testers. Metasploit version 5.0 is the software's first major release since version 4.0 which came out in 2011. Talking about ARM images, Kali Linux 2019.1 has now once again added support for Banana Pi and Banana Pro that are on kernel version 4.19. "Veyron has been moved to a 4.19 kernel, and the Raspbe...

It's not at all surprising that downloading movies and software from the torrent network could infect your computer with malware, but it's more heartbreaking when a popular, trusted file uploader goes rogue. Popular software cracks/keygens uploader "CracksNow," who had trusted status from many torrent sites, has now been banned from several torrent sites after he was repeatedly found distributing the malware bundled with his uploads. In recent months, according to TorrentFreak , many downloaders complained that the files they downloaded, shared by CracksNow on torrents, found containing GandCrab ransomware and other malware that can do severe damage to computers. Discovered earlier last year, GandCrab is a widespread ransomware threat, like every other ransomware in the market, that encrypts all files on an infected system and blackmails victims to pay a ransom in digital currency to unlock them. GandCrab ransomware was being distributed late last month via a...

It's 2019, and just clicking on a specially crafted URL would have allowed an attacker to hack your Facebook account without any further interaction. A security researcher discovered a critical cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the most popular social media platform that could have been allowed attackers to hijack Facebook accounts by simply tricking the targeted users into clicking on a link. The researcher, who goes by the online alias "Samm0uda," discovered the vulnerability after he spotted a flawed endpoint (facebook.com/comet/dialog_DONOTUSE/) that could have been exploited to bypass CSRF protections and takeover victim's account. "This is possible because of a vulnerable endpoint which takes another given Facebook endpoint selected by the attacker along with the parameters and makes a POST request to that endpoint after adding the fb_dtsg parameter," the researcher says on his blog . "Also this endpoint is located under t...

All these numbers…. "More than 5 billion records from 6,500 data breaches were exposed in 2018" — a report from Risk Based Security says. "More than 59,000 data breaches have been reported across the European since the GDPR came into force in 2018" — a report from DLA Piper says. …came from data breaches that were reported to the public, but in reality, more than half of all data breaches actually go unreported. Just last week, we disclosed the existence of some massive unreported data breaches in two rounds, which a hacker has now started monetizing by selling stolen user databases publicly. Now, a new set of databases containing millions of hacked accounts from several websites has been made available for sale on the dark web marketplace by the same hacker who goes by online alias Gnosticplayers. Gnosticplayers last week made two rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on the popular dark web marketplace called Dream Market , posting details of near...

How do you check if a website asking for your credentials is fake or legit to log in? By checking if the URL is correct? By checking if the website address is not a homograph? By checking if the site is using HTTPS? Or using software or browser extensions that detect phishing domains? Well, if you, like most Internet users, are also relying on above basic security practices to spot if that " Facebook.com " or " Google.com " you have been served with is fake or not, you may still fall victim to a newly discovered creative phishing attack and end up in giving away your passwords to hackers. Antoine Vincent Jebara , co-founder and CEO of password managing software Myki , told The Hacker News that his team recently spotted a new phishing attack campaign "that even the most vigilant users could fall for." Vincent found that cybercriminals are distributing links to blogs and services that prompt visitors to first " login using Facebook acco...

A hacker who was selling details of nearly 620 million online accounts stolen from 16 popular websites has now put up a second batch of 127 million records originating from 8 other sites for sale on the dark web. Last week, The Hacker News received an email from a Pakistani hacker who claims to have hacked dozens of popular websites (listed below) and selling their stolen databases online. During an interview with The Hacker News, the hacker also claimed that many targeted companies have probably no idea that they have been compromised and that their customers' data have already been sold to multiple cyber criminal groups and individuals. Package 1: Databases From 16 Compromised Websites On Sale In the first round, the hacker who goes by online alias "gnosticplayers" was selling details of 617 million accounts belonging to the following 16 compromised websites for less than $20,000 in Bitcoin on dark web marketplace Dream Market : Dubsmash — 162 million acco...

The United States Department of Justice has announced espionage charges against a former US Air Force intelligence officer with the highest level of top-secret clearance for providing the Iranian government classified defense information after she defected to Iran in 2013. Monica Elfriede Witt , 39, was a former U.S. Air Force Intelligence Specialist and Special Agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, who served the Air Force between 1997 and 2008 and Department of Defense (DOD) as a contractor until 2010. The indictment states that Witt once held the highest level of Top Secret security clearance and had access to details of highly classified counterintelligence operations, real names of sources, and the identities of U.S. intelligence officers. In February 2012, Witt allegedly traveled to Iran to attend an all-expenses-paid "Hollywoodism" conference held by the Iranian New Horizon Organization, which DoJ describes as focused on promoting anti-U.S....

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...

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...