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Well, that did not take long. Within just 10 days of the disclosure of two critical vulnerabilities in GPON router at least 5 botnet families have been found exploiting the flaws to build an army of million devices. Security researchers from Chinese-based cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 Netlab have spotted 5 botnet families, including Mettle, Muhstik, Mirai, Hajime, and Satori, making use of the GPON exploit in the wild. As detailed in our previous post, Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers manufacturer by South Korea-based DASAN Zhone Solutions have been found vulnerable to an authentication bypass ( CVE-2018-10561 ) and a root-RCE ( CVE-2018-10562 ) flaws that eventually allow remote attackers to take full control of the device. Shortly after the details of the vulnerabilities went public, 360 Netlab researchers warned of threat actors exploiting both the flaws to hijack and add the vulnerable routers into their botnet malware networks. Now, the researche...

It turns out that macOS client for the popular end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal fails to properly delete disappearing (self-destructing) messages  from the recipient's system, leaving the content of your sensitive messages at risk of getting exposed. For those unaware, the disappearing messages in Signal self-destruct after a particular duration set by the sender, leaving no trace of it on the receiver's device or Signal servers. However, security researcher Alec Muffett noticed that the messages that are supposed to be "disappearing" can still be seen—even if they are deleted from the app. Another security researcher Patrick Wardle reproduced the issue and explained that macOS makes a copy (partial for long messages) of disappearing messages in a user-readable database of macOS's Notification Center, from where they can be recovered anytime later. If you want to keep an on your incoming messages without having to check your inbox obsessively...

Shortly after Microsoft announced support for custom JavaScript functions in Excel, someone demonstrated what could possibly go wrong if this feature is abused for malicious purposes. As promised last year at Microsoft's Ignite 2017 conference, the company has now brought custom JavaScript functions to Excel to extend its capabilities for better work with data. Functions are written in JavaScript for Excel spreadsheets currently runs on various platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Excel Online, allowing developers to create their own powerful formulae. But we saw it coming: Security researcher Charles Dardaman leveraged this feature to show how easy it is to embed the infamous in-browser cryptocurrency mining script from CoinHive inside an MS Excel spreadsheet and run it in the background when opened. "In order to run Coinhive in Excel, I followed Microsoft's official documentation and just added my own function," Dardaman said . Here is an official doc...

It's time to gear up for the latest May 2018 Patch Tuesday. Microsoft has today released security patches for a total of 67 vulnerabilities, including two zero-days that have actively been exploited in the wild by cybercriminals, and two publicly disclosed bugs. In brief, Microsoft is addressing 21 vulnerabilities that are rated as critical, 42 rated important, and 4 rated as low severity. These patch updates address security flaws in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Exchange Server, Outlook, .NET Framework, Microsoft Hyper-V, ChakraCore, Azure IoT SDK, and more. 1) Double Kill IE 0-day Vulnerability The first zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2018-8174 ) under active attack is a critical remote code execution vulnerability that was revealed by Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 last month and affected all supported versions of Windows operating systems. Dubbed " Double Kill " by the researchers, the vulnera...

Security researchers revealed a way around that some hacking groups have been found using in the wild to bypass a security feature of Microsoft Office 365, which is originally designed to protect users from malware and phishing attacks. Dubbed Safe Links, the feature has been included in Office 365 software as part of Microsoft's Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) solution that works by replacing all URLs in an incoming email with Microsoft-owned secure URLs. So, every time a user clicks on a link provided in an email, it first sends the user to a Microsoft owned domain, where the company immediately checks the original URL for anything suspicious. If Microsoft's scanners detect any malicious element, it then warns users about it, and if not, it redirects the user to the original link. However, researchers at cloud security company Avanan have revealed how attackers have been bypassing the Safe Links feature by using a technique called, " baseStriker attack ." ...

Since hackers have started exploiting two recently disclosed unpatched critical vulnerabilities found in GPON home routers, security researchers have now released an unofficial patch to help millions of affected users left vulnerable by their device manufacturer. Last week, researchers at vpnMentor disclosed details of—an authentication bypass (CVE-2018-10561) and a root-remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2018-10562)—in many models of Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers manufacturer by South Korea-based DASAN Zhone Solutions. If exploited, the first vulnerability lets an attacker easily bypass the login authentication page just by appending ?images/ to the URL in the browser's address bar. However, when coupled with the second flaw that allows command injection, unauthenticated attackers can remotely execute malicious commands on the affected device and modified DNS settings, eventually allowing them to take full control of the device remotely. ...