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Mark J Cox, one of the founding members of the Apache Software Foundation and the OpenSSL project, today posted a tweet warning users about a recently discovered important flaw in Apache HTTP Server software. The Apache web server is one of the most popular, widely used open-source web servers in the world that powers almost 40 percent of the whole Internet. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-0211 , was discovered by Charles Fol , a security engineer at Ambionics Security firm, and patched by the Apache developers in the latest version 2.4.39 of its software released today. The flaw affects Apache HTTP Server versions 2.4.17 through 2.4.38 and could allow any less-privileged user to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the targeted server. "In Apache HTTP Server 2.4 releases 2.4.17 to 2.4.38, with MPM event, worker or prefork, code executing in less-privileged child processes or threads (including scripts executed by an in-process scripting interprete...

In today's world, data plays a crucial role in the success of any organization, but if left unprotected, it could be a cybercriminal's dream come true. Poorly protected MongoDB, CouchDB, and Elasticsearch databases recently got a lot more attention from cybersecurity firms and media lately. More than half of the known cases of massive data breaches over the past year originated from unsecured database servers that were accessible to anyone without any password. Since the database of an organization contains its most valuable and easily exploitable data, cybercriminals have also started paying closer attention to find other insecure entry points. Though the problems with unprotected databases are no news and are widely discussed on the Internet, I want cybersecurity community and industry experts to pay some attention to thousands of unsafe Kibana instances that are exposed on the Internet, posing a huge risk to many companies. Kibana is an open-source analytics and visualiz...

Workplaces have become highly connected. Even a small business could have dozens of devices in the form of desktops, mobile devices, routers, and even smart appliances as part of its IT infrastructure. Unfortunately, each of these endpoints can now be a weak link that hackers could exploit. Hackers constantly probe networks for vulnerable endpoints to breach. For example, systems and applications that are configured using recycled user names and passwords can easily be hacked given the availability of leaked credentials online. Password management service LastPass noted that 59% of users use the same password for multiple accounts. Malware and malicious processes may also target workstations. Cybersecurity firm Symantec found a 1,000 percent increase in PowerShell script attacks in 2018. These attacks use cleverly disguised malicious processes that appear legitimate at a cursory glance. This is why IT security career is fast evolving into a huge market. However, because o...

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...

Hackers yesterday stole nearly $19 million worth of cryptocurrency from Bithumb , the South Korea-based popular cryptocurrency exchange admitted today. According to Primitive Ventures' Dovey Wan, who first broke the information on social media, hackers managed to compromise a number of Bithumb's hot EOS and XRP wallets and transferred around 3 million EOS (~ $13 million) and 20 million XRP (~ $6 million) to his newly-created accounts. The hacker then distributedly transferred the stolen digital assets to his different accounts created on other cryptocurrency exchanges, including Huobi, HitBTC, WB, and EXmo, via ChangeNow, a non-custodial crypto swap platform does not require KYC/account. Bithumb has been hacked multiple times in the past. Last time the popular cryptocurrency exchange was hacked in June 2018, when hackers stole $31 million, and in July 2017, when hackers stole $1 million worth of EOS from many wallets belonging to its users. "And this is the se...

Exclusive — A security researcher today publicly disclosed details and proof-of-concept exploits for two 'unpatched' zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft's web browsers after the company allegedly failed to respond to his responsible private disclosure. Both unpatched vulnerabilities—one of which affects the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer and another affects the latest Edge Browser —allow a remote attacker to bypass same-origin policy on victim's web browser. Same Origin Policy (SOP) is a security feature implemented in modern browsers that restricts a web-page or a script loaded from one origin to interact with a resource from another origin, preventing unrelated sites from interfering with each other. In other words, if you visit a website on your web browser, it can only request data from the same origin [domain] the site was loaded from, preventing it from making any unauthorized request on your behalf in order to steal your data, from othe...

FireEye today released Commando VM , which according to the company, is a "first of its kind Windows-based security distribution for penetration testing and red teaming." When it comes to the best-operating systems for hackers, Kali Linux is always the first choice for penetration testers and ethical hackers. However, Kali is a Linux-based distribution, and using Linux without learning some basics is not everyone's cup of tea as like Windows or macOS operating systems. Moreover, if you are wondering why there is no popular Windows-based operating system for hackers? First, because Windows is not open-source and second, manually installing penetration testing tools on Windows is pretty problematic for most users. To help researchers and cyber security enthusiasts, cybersecurity firm FireEye today released  an automated installer called  Commando VM. But don't get confused with its name. Commando VM is not a pre-configured snapshot of a virtual machine ima...

EXCLUSIVE — While revealing details of a massive supply chain cyber attack against ASUS customers, Russian security firm Kaspersky last week didn't release the full list all MAC addresses that hackers hardcoded into their malware to surgically target a specific pool of users. Instead, Kaspersky released a dedicated offline tool and launched an online web page where ASUS PC users can search for their MAC addresses to check whether they were in the hit list. However, many believe it is not a convenient way for large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of systems to know if they were targeted or not. List of MAC Addresses Targeted in ASUS Supply Chain Attack To solve this and help other cybersecurity experts continue their hunt for related hacking campaigns, Australian security firm Skylight's CTO Shahar Zini contacted The Hacker News and provided the full list of nearly 583 MAC addresses targeted in the ASUS breach. "If information regarding targets exi...

If your online e-commerce business is running over the Magento platform, you must pay attention to this information. Magento yesterday released new versions of its content management software to address a total of 37 newly-discovered security vulnerabilities. Owned by Adobe since mid-2018, Magento is one of the most popular content management system (CMS) platform that powers 28% of websites across the Internet with more than 250,000 merchants using the open source e-commerce platform. Though most of the reported issues could only be exploited by authenticated users, one of the most severe flaws in Magento is an SQL Injection vulnerability which can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers. The flaw, which does not have a CVE ID but internally labeled "PRODSECBUG-2198," could allow remote hackers to steal sensitive information from the databases of vulnerable e-commerce websites, including admin sessions or password hashes that could grant hackers access...

A former National Security Agency contractor—who stole an enormous amount of sensitive information from the agency and then stored it at his home and car for over two decades—today changed his plea to guilty. The theft was labeled as the largest heist of classified government material in America's history. Harold Thomas Martin III, a 54-year-old Navy veteran from Glen Burnie, abused his top-secret security clearances to stole at least 50 terabytes of classified national defense data from government computers over two decades while working for a number of NSA departments between 1996 and 2016. In August 2016, the FBI arrested Martin at his Maryland home and found "six full bankers' boxes" worth of documents, many of which were marked "Secret" and "Top Secret," in his home and car. At the time of his arrest in August 2016, Martin also worked for Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp, the same company that previously employed  Edward Snowden  ...

Doing business in today's connected world means dealing with a continually evolving threat landscape. With potential losses due to downtime following a breach, plus valuable client and proprietary information at risk, most organizations realize they cannot afford to be complacent. This puts extra onus on security IT teams, who are continuously left scrambling, looking for the best way to protect their organizations against the threats that bypass AV and firewall. Added to this is another challenge in that most organizations are limited in the resources they can invest in security. Many are left reliant on a single product on top of their security stack. Common practice in organizational security circles as they attempt to remain secure is to upgrade endpoint protection with EPP\EDR or a Network Analytic tool. But as we all know, what's common is not necessarily what's best. How can an organization ensure it remains secure, especially with all that is at stake? ...

An Iran-linked cyber-espionage group that has been found targeting critical infrastructure , energy and military sectors in Saudi Arabia and the United States two years ago continues targeting organizations in the two nations, Symantec reported on Wednesday. Widely known as APT33 , which Symantec calls Elfin , the cyber-espionage group has been active since as early as late 2015 and targeted a wide range of organizations, including government, research, chemical, engineering, manufacturing, consulting, finance, and telecommunications in the Middle East and other parts of the world. Symantec started monitoring Elfin's attacks since the beginning of 2016 and found that the group has launched a heavily targeted campaign against multiple organizations with 42% most recent attacks observed against Saudi Arabia and 34% against the United States. Elfin targeted a total of 18 American organizations in the engineering, chemical, research, energy consultancy, finance, IT and healthcar...

Facebook has introduced a new feature in its platform that has been designed to make it easier for bug bounty hunters to find security flaws in Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram Android applications. Since almost all Facebook-owned apps by default use security mechanisms such as Certificate Pinning to ensure integrity and confidentiality of the traffic, it makes it harder for white hat hackers and security researchers to intercept and analyze network traffic to find server-side security vulnerabilities. For those unaware, Certificate Pinning is a security mechanism designed to prevent users of an application from being a victim of network-based attacks by automatically rejecting the whole connection from sites that offer bogus SSL certificates. Dubbed " Whitehat Settings ," the new option now lets researchers easily bypass Certificate Pinning on the Facebook-owned mobile apps by: Disabling Facebook's TLS 1.3 support Enabling proxy for Platform API requests ...

Beware! If you are using UC Browser on your smartphones, you should consider uninstalling it immediately. Why? Because the China-made UC Browser contains a "questionable" ability that could be exploited by remote attackers to automatically download and execute code on your Android devices. Developed by Alibaba-owned UCWeb, UC Browser is one of the most popular mobile browsers, specifically in China and India, with a massive user base of more than 500 million users worldwide. According to a new report published today by Dr. Web firm, since at least 2016, UC Browser for Android has a "hidden" feature that allows the company to anytime download new libraries and modules from its servers and install them on users' mobile devices. Pushing Malicious UC Browser Plug-ins Using MiTM Attack What's worrisome? It turns out that the reported feature downloads new plugins from the company server over insecure HTTP protocol instead of encrypted HTTPS proto...

Apple on Monday released iOS 12.2 to patch a total of 51 security vulnerabilities in its mobile operating system that affects iPhone 5s and later, iPad Air and later, and iPod touch 6th generation. A majority of vulnerabilities Apple patched this month reside in its web rendering engine WebKit, which is used by many apps and web browsers running on the Apple's operating system. According to the advisory , just opening a maliciously crafted web content using any vulnerable WebKit-based application could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code, disclose sensitive user information, bypass sandbox restrictions, or launch universal cross-site scripting attacks on the device. Among the WebKit vulnerabilities include a consistency issue (CVE-2019-6222) that allows malicious websites to potentially access an iOS device microphone without the "microphone-in-use" indicator being shown. A similar vulnerability (CVE-2019-8566) has been patched in Apple's Replay...

Remember the CCleaner hack ? CCleaner hack was one of the largest supply chain attacks that infected more than 2.3 million users with a backdoored version of the software in September 2017. Security researchers today revealed another massive supply chain attack that compromised over 1 million computers manufactured by Taiwan-based tech giant ASUS. A group of state-sponsored hackers last year managed to hijack ASUS Live automatic software update server between June and November 2018 and pushed malicious updates to install backdoors on over one million Windows computers worldwide. According to cybersecurity researchers from Russian firm Kaspersky Lab , who discovered the attack and dubbed it Operation ShadowHammer , Asus was informed about the ongoing supply chain attack on Jan 31, 2019. After analyzing over 200 samples of the malicious updates, researchers learned that hackers did not want to target all users, instead only a specific list of users identified by their uniq...

Major data breaches and cyber attacks are occurring at an alarming rate, and if you are still not using a VPN and password manager app, you are seriously out of excuses. Not just VPN software and a password manager, cybersecurity experts also recommend using antivirus and backup solutions to protect your computers and precious data stored on them. Unfortunately, to cover these bases, one would typically have to spend at least $30 per month. However, here we have great news for millions of The Hacker News readers. Cybersecurity companies partnered with THN Deal Store have exclusively launched a new subscription package called — The Vault — that slashes the price for top security apps everyone needs to use. At just $9.99 monthly subscription, you can now get licenses for four award-winning cybersecurity apps: Dashlane Password Manager Panda Antivirus Software Degoo Online Backup — 2TB of Secure Cloud Storage NordVPN — One of the best VPN service providers in 2019 ...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Thursday issued an advisory warning people of severe vulnerabilities in over a dozen heart defibrillators that could allow attackers to fully hijack them remotely, potentially putting lives of millions of patients at risk. Cardioverter Defibrillator is a small surgically implanted device (in patients' chests) that gives a patient's heart an electric shock (often called a countershock) to re-establish a normal heartbeat. While the device has been designed to prevent sudden death, several implanted cardiac defibrillators made by one of the world's largest medical device companies Medtronic have been found vulnerable to two serious vulnerabilities. Discovered by researchers from security firm Clever Security, the vulnerabilities could allow threat actors with knowledge of medical devices to intercept and potentially impact the functionality of these life-saving devices. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities ...

Brace yourself guys. Microsoft is going to release its Windows Defender ATP antivirus software for Mac computers. Sounds crazy, right? But it's true. Microsoft Thursday announced that the company is bringing its anti-malware software to Apple's macOS operating system as well—and to more platforms soon, like Linux. As a result, the technology giant renamed its Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) in an attempt to minimize name-confusion and reflect the cross-platform nature of the software suite. But wait, does your Macbook need antivirus protection? Of course! For all those wondering if Mac even gets viruses—macOS is generally more secure than Windows, but in recent years cybercriminals have started paying attention to the Mac platform, making it a new target for viruses, Trojans, spyware, adware, ransomware, backdoors, and other nefarious applications. Moreover, hackers have been successful many ti...

Holy moly, Facebook is again at the center of a new privacy controversy after revealing today that its platform mistakenly kept a copy of passwords for "hundreds of millions" users in plaintext. What's more? Not just Facebook, Instagram users are also affected by the latest security incident. So, if you are one of the affected users, your Facebook or Instagram password was readable to some of the Facebook engineers who have internal access to the servers and the database. Though the social media company did not mention exactly what component or application on its website had the programmatic error that caused the issue, it did reveal that the company discovered the security blunder in January this year during a routine security check. In a blog post published today, Facebook's vice president of engineering Pedro Canahuati said an internal investigation of the incident found no evidence of any Facebook employee abusing those passwords. "To be clear, t...