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There are over a hundred potential ways hackers can ruin your life by having access to your WiFi network that's also connected to your computers, smartphones, and other smart devices. Whether it's about exploiting operating system and software vulnerabilities or manipulating network traffic, every attack relies on the reachability between an attacker and the targeted devices. In recent years, we have seen how hundreds of widely used smart-but-insecure devices made it easier for remote attackers to sneak into connected networks without breaking WiFi passwords. In the latest research shared with The Hacker News, Check Point experts today revealed a new high-severity vulnerability affecting Philips Hue Smart Light Bulbs that can be exploited over-the-air from over 100 meters away to gain entry into a targeted WiFi network. The underlying high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-6007 , resides in the way Philips implemented the Zigbee communication protocol in it...

A cybersecurity researcher today disclosed technical details of multiple high severity vulnerabilities he discovered in WhatsApp, which, if exploited, could have allowed remote attackers to compromise the security of billions of users in different ways. When combined together, the reported issues could have even enabled hackers to remotely steal files from the Windows or Mac computer of a victim using the WhatsApp desktop app by merely sending a specially crafted message. Discovered by PerimeterX researcher Gal Weizman and tracked as CVE-2019-18426 , the flaws specifically resided in WhatsApp Web, a browser version of the world's most popular messaging application that also powers its Electron-based cross-platform apps for desktop operating systems. In a blog post published today, Weizman revealed that WhatsApp Web was vulnerable to a potentially dangerous open-redirect flaw that led to persistent cross-site scripting attacks, which could have been triggered by sending a s...

Google might have mistakenly shared your private videos saved on the company's servers with other users, the tech giant admitted yesterday in a security notification sent quietly to an undisclosed number of affected users. The latest privacy mishap is the result of a "technical issue" in Google's Takeout , a service that backs up all your Google account data into a single file and then lets you download it straight away. According to a screenshot Jon Oberheide of Duo Security shared on Twitter, the issue reportedly remained active between 21st November and 25th November last year, during which "some videos in Google Photos [service] were incorrectly exported to unrelated user's archives." Vice versa, if you had also requested for your account backup during the same 5-day period, you might have even received unrelated videos from other Google accounts. So, the data leak incident potentially affects only those who used Google Takeout service...

Twitter today issued a warning revealing that attackers abused a legitimate functionality on its platform to unauthorizedly determine phone numbers associated with millions of its users' accounts. According to Twitter, the vulnerability resided in one of the APIs that has been designed to make it easier for users to find people they may already know on Twitter by matching phone numbers saved in their contacts with twitter accounts. To be noted, the feature worked precisely as intended, except someone was not supposed to upload millions of randomly generated phone numbers and abuse Twitter to reveal profiles associated with the contact information users added to Twitter for enabling security features. Though the company is not sure if the bug was exploited by only a single adversary or multiple groups, it has identified several accounts engaged in the attack located in a wide range of countries, primarily from Iran, Israel, and Malaysia. Based on their IP addresses, Twitt...

Joe Vennix of Apple security has found another significant vulnerability in sudo utility that under a specific configuration could allow low privileged users or malicious programs to execute arbitrary commands with administrative ('root') privileges on Linux or macOS systems. Sudo is one of the most important, powerful, and commonly used utilities that comes as a core command pre-installed on macOS and almost every UNIX or Linux-based operating system. Sudo has been designed to let users run apps or commands with the privileges of a different user without switching environments. Sudo Vulnerability (CVE-2019-18634) The newly discovered privilege escalation vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-18634 , in question stems from a stack-based buffer overflow issue that resides in Sudo versions before 1.8.26. According to Vennix, the flaw can only be exploited when the " pwfeedback " option is enabled in the sudoers configuration file, a feature that provides visua...

Remember the recent payment card breach at Wawa convenience stores ? If you're among those millions of customers who shopped at any of 850 Wawa stores last year but haven't yet hotlisted your cards, it's high time to take immediate action. That's because hackers have finally put up payment card details of more than 30 million Wawa breach victims on sale at Joker's Stash, one of the largest dark web marketplaces where cybercriminals buy and sell stolen payment card data. As The Hacker News reported last month, on 10th December Wawa learned that its point-of-sale servers had malware installed since March 2019, which stole payment details of its customers from potentially all Wawa locations. At that time, the company said it's not aware of how many customers may have been affected in the nine-month-long breach or of any unauthorized use of payment card information as a result of the incident. Now it turns out that the Wawa breach marked itself in the ...

Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point today disclosed details of two recently patched potentially dangerous vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure services that, if exploited, could have allowed hackers to target several businesses that run their web and mobile apps on Azure. Azure App Service is a fully-managed integrated service that enables users to create web and mobile apps for any platform or device, and easily integrate them with SaaS solutions, on-premises apps to automate business processes. According to a report researchers shared with The Hacker News, the first security vulnerability ( CVE-2019-1234 ) is a request spoofing issue that affected Azure Stack, a hybrid cloud computing software solution by Microsoft. If exploited, the issue would have enabled a remote hacker to unauthorizedly access screenshots and sensitive information of any virtual machine running on Azure infrastructure—it doesn't matter if they're running on a shared, dedicated or isolated vir...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new critical vulnerability ( CVE-2020-7247 ) in the OpenSMTPD email server that could allow remote attackers to take complete control over BSD and many Linux based servers. OpenSMTPD is an open-source implementation of the server-side SMTP protocol that was initially developed as part of the OpenBSD project but now comes pre-installed on many UNIX-based systems. According to Qualys Research Labs, who discovered this vulnerability, the issue resides in the OpenSMTPD's sender address validation function, called smtp_mailaddr(), which can be exploited to execute arbitrary shell commands with elevated root privileges on a vulnerable server just by sending specially crafted SMTP messages to it. The flaw affects OpenBSD version 6.6 and works against the default configuration for both, the locally enabled interface as well as remotely if the daemon has been enabled to listen on all interfaces and accepts external mail. "Exploit...

Facebook is one of the world's biggest advertising platforms, and that's because it knows a lot about you, me, and everyone. Facebook uses many tools to track people across the Internet, whether they have an account with the social networking site or not, and most of them rely on the online activity data other apps and websites share with Facebook. Everything we do online generates an extensive amount of behavioral data, from buying clothes to looking for hotels, which apps and websites often share with advertising companies, allowing them to build more accurate profiles of your interests and needs. However, after facing worldwide criticism over privacy and data breach controversies, Facebook last summer announced a privacy tool, called Off-Facebook Activity , which gives users more control of their data collected by Facebook. Starting today on Data Privacy Day 2020 , the Off-Facebook Activity feature is now available to every user around the world, which was initiall...

Another month, another speculative execution vulnerability found in Intel processors. If your computer is running any modern Intel CPU built before October 2018, it's likely vulnerable to a newly discovered hardware issue that could allow attackers to leak sensitive data from the OS kernel, co-resident virtual machines, and even from Intel's secured SGX enclave . Dubbed CacheOut a.k.a. L1 Data Eviction Sampling ( L1DES ) and assigned CVE-2020-0549 , the new microarchitectural attack allows an attacker to choose which data to leak from the CPU's L1 Cache, unlike previously demonstrated MDS attacks where attackers need to wait for the targeted data to be available. According to a team of academic researchers, the newly-discovered speculative execution attacks can leak information across multiple security boundaries, including those between hyper-threads, virtual machines, and processes, and between user space and the operating system kernel, and from SGX enclaves. ...

If you use Zoom to host your remote online meetings, you need to read this piece carefully. The massively popular video conferencing software has patched a security loophole that could have allowed anyone to remotely eavesdrop on unprotected active meetings, potentially exposing private audio, video, and documents shared throughout the session. Besides hosting password-protected virtual meetings and webinars, Zoom also allows users to set up a session for non-pre-registered participants who can join an active meeting by entering a unique Meeting ID, without requiring a password or going through the Waiting Rooms. Zoom generates this random meeting ID, comprised of 9, 10, and 11-digit numbers, for each meeting you schedule or create. If leaked beyond an individual or intended group of people, merely knowing Meeting IDs could allow unwelcome guests joining meetings or webinars. This could be bad news for anyone expecting their conversations to be private. To circumvent suc...

The Indonesian National Police in a joint press conference with Interpol and cybersecurity firm Group-IB earlier today announced the arrest of three Magecart-style Indonesian hackers who had compromised hundreds of international e-commerce websites and stolen payment card details of their online shoppers. Dubbed ' Operation Night Fury ,' the investigation was led by Interpol's ASEAN Cyber Capability Desk, a joint initiative by law enforcement agencies of Southeast Asian countries to combat cybercrime. According to the press conference, all three accused (23, 26, and 35 years old) were arrested last year in December from Jakarta and Yogyakarta and charged with criminal laws related to the data theft, fraud, and unauthorized access. "The operation is still ongoing in the other five ASEAN countries with which the intelligence was also shared. This case marks the first successful multi-jurisdictional operation against the operators of JavaScript-sniffers in the re...

Image credit: Times of Israel. Aleksei Burkov, a 29-year-old Russian hacker, on Thursday pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges for running two illegal websites that helped cyber criminals commit more than $20 million in credit card fraud. The first website Burkov operated was an online marketplace for buying and selling stolen credit card and debit card numbers—called Cardplanet —which roughly hosted 150,000 payment card details between the years 2009 and 2013. Cardplanet marketplace offered stolen payment card details for anywhere between $2.50 and $10 a card, depending on the card type, country of origin, and the availability of card owner information. The carding website even offered a paid service that allowed buyers to instantly verify if a stolen payment card were still valid. "Many of the cards offered for sale belonged to U.S. citizens. The stolen credit card data from more than 150,000 compromised payment cards was allegedly sold on Burkov's site and ...

If you have ever contacted Microsoft for support in the past 14 years, your technical query, along with some personally identifiable information might have been compromised. Microsoft today admitted a security incident that exposed nearly 250 million "Customer Service and Support" (CSS) records on the Internet due to a misconfigured server containing logs of conversations between its support team and customers. According to Bob Diachenko, a cybersecurity researcher who spotted the unprotected database and reported to Microsoft, the logs contained records spanning from 2005 right through to December 2019. In a blog post, Microsoft confirmed that due to misconfigured security rules added to the server in question on December 5, 2019, enabled exposure of the data, which remained the same until engineers remediated the configuration on December 31, 2019. Microsoft also said that the database was redacted using automated tools to remove the personally identifiable info...

The iPhone of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos , the world's richest man, was reportedly hacked in May 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message from the personal account of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman , the Guardian newspaper revealed today. Citing unnamed sources familiar with digital forensic analysis of the breach, the newspaper claimed that a massive amount of data was exfiltrated from Bezos's phone within hours after he received a malicious video file from the Saudi prince. The mysterious file was sent when crown prince Salman and Bezos were having a friendly WhatsApp conversation, and it's 'highly probable' that it exploited an undisclosed zero-day vulnerability of WhatsApp messenger to install malware on Bezos's iPhone. "The forensic analysis found that within hours of receipt of the MP4 video file from the Crown Prince's account, massive and (for Bezos' phone) unprecedented exfiltration of data from the phone began, increasing da...

What are the key considerations security decision-makers should take into account when designing their 2020 breach protection? To answer this, we polled 1,536 cybersecurity professionals in The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey ( Download the full survey here ) to understand the common practices, prioritization, and preferences of the organization today in protecting themselves from breaches. Security executives face significant challenges when confronting the evolving threat landscape. For example: What type of attacks pose the greatest risk, and what security products would best address them? Is it better to build a strong team in-house, outsource the entire security operation, or search for a sweet spot between the two? What type and level of automation should be introduced into the breach protection workflows? The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey provides insights into these questions and others. Here are a few of the insights the survey unveils: 1)...

Imagine receiving an email from US VP Mike Pence's official email account asking for help because he has been stranded in the Philippines. Actually, you don't have to. This actually happened. Pence's email was hacked when he was still the governor of Indiana, and his account was used to attempt to defraud several people. How did this happen? Is it similar to how the DNC server was hacked? Email hacking is one of the most widespread cyber threats at present. It is estimated that around 8 out of 10 people who use the internet have received some form of phishing attack through their emails. Additionally, according to Avanan's 2019 Global Phish Report , 1 in 99 emails is a phishing attack. BitDam is aware of how critical emails are in modern communication. BitDam published a new study on the email threat detection weaknesses of the leading players in email security, and the findings command attention. The research team discovered how Microsoft's Office365 ...