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

As many as five vulnerabilities have been uncovered in Ovarro's TBox remote terminal units (RTUs) that, if left unpatched, could open the door for escalating attacks against critical infrastructures, like remote code execution and denial-of-service. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could result in remote code execution, which may cause a denial-of-service condition," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  said  in an advisory published on March 23. TBox is an "all-in-one" solution for automation and control systems for supervisory control and data acquisition ( SCADA ) applications, with its telemetry software used for remote control and monitoring of assets in a number of critical infrastructure sectors, such as water, power, oil and gas, transportation, and process industries. TBox devices can be programmed using a software suite called TWinSoft, which allows for the creation of interactive web pages, where users ...

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed two new vulnerabilities in Linux-based operating systems that, if successfully exploited, could let attackers circumvent mitigations for speculative attacks such as  Spectre  and obtain sensitive information from kernel memory. Discovered by  Piotr Krysiuk  of Symantec's Threat Hunter team, the flaws — tracked as CVE-2020-27170 and CVE-2020-27171 (CVSS scores: 5.5) — impact all Linux kernels prior to 5.11.8. Patches for the security issues were released on March 20, with Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat deploying fixes for the vulnerabilities in their respective Linux distributions. While  CVE-2020-27170  can be abused to reveal content from any location within the kernel memory,  CVE-2020-27171 can be used to retrieve data from a 4GB range of kernel memory. First documented in January 2018,  Spectre and Meltdown  take advantage of flaws in modern processors to  leak data  that are curr...

Email spoofing is a growing problem for an organization's security. Spoofing occurs when a hacker sends an email that appears to have been sent from a trusted source/domain. Email spoofing is not a new concept. Defined as "the forgery of an email address header to make the message appear as if it was sent from a person or location other than the actual sender," it has plagued brands for decades.  When an email is sent, the From address doesn't show which server the email was actually sent from - instead, it shows the domain that was entered when the address was created so as not to arouse suspicion among recipients. With the amount of data flowing through email servers these days, it should come as no surprise that spoofing is a problem for businesses. At the end of 2020, we found that phishing incidents were up a staggering 220% year-over-year at the height of the global pandemic scare. Since not all spoofing attacks are large-scale, the actual number could be muc...

In yet another instance of a software supply chain attack, unidentified actors hacked the official Git server of the PHP programming language and pushed unauthorized updates to insert a secret backdoor into its source code. The two malicious commits were pushed to the self-hosted "php-src" repository hosted on the git.php.net server, illicitly using the names of Rasmus Lerdorf, the author of the programming language, and Nikita Popov, a software developer at Jetbrains. The changes are said to have been made yesterday on March 28. "We don't yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points towards a compromise of the git.php.net server (rather than a compromise of an individual git account)," Popov  said  in an announcement. The changes, which were committed as " Fix Typo " in an attempt to slip through undetected as a typographical correction, involved provisions for execution of arbitrary PHP code. "This line executes PHP code fro...

Researchers have discovered a new information-stealing trojan, which targets Android devices with an onslaught of data-exfiltration capabilities — from collecting browser searches to recording audio and phone calls. While malware on Android has previously taken the guise of copycat apps, which go under names similar to legitimate pieces of software, this sophisticated new malicious app masquerades itself as a System Update application to take control of compromised devices. "The spyware creates a notification if the device's screen is off when it receives a command using the Firebase messaging service," Zimperium researchers  said  in a Friday analysis. "The 'Searching for update..' is not a legitimate notification from the operating system, but the spyware." Once installed, the sophisticated spyware campaign sets about its task by registering the device with a Firebase command-and-control (C2) server with information such as battery percentage, sto...