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The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is calling on manufacturers of smart devices to comply with new legislation that prohibits them from using default passwords, effective April 29, 2024. "The law, known as the  Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure act  (or PSTI act), will help consumers to choose smart devices that have been designed to provide ongoing protection against cyber attacks," the NCSC  said . To that end, manufacturers are required to not supply devices that use guessable default passwords, provide a point of contact to report security issues, and state the duration for which their devices are expected to receive important security updates. Default passwords can not only be easily found online, they also act as a vector for threat actors to log in to devices for follow-on exploitation. That said, a unique default password is permissible under t...

Google on Monday revealed that almost 200,000 app submissions to its Play Store for Android were either rejected or remediated to address issues with access to sensitive data such as location or SMS messages over the past year. The tech giant also said it blocked 333,000 bad accounts from the app storefront in 2023 for attempting to distribute malware or for repeated policy violations. "In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play in part thanks to our investment in new and improved security features, policy updates, and advanced machine learning and app review processes," Google's Steve Kafka, Khawaja Shams, and Mohet Saxena said . "To help safeguard user privacy at scale, we partnered with SDK providers to limit sensitive data access and sharing, enhancing the privacy posture for over 31 SDKs impacting 790K+ apps." In comparison, Google  fended off 1.43 million bad apps  from being published to the Play Sto...

A previously undocumented cyber threat dubbed  Muddling Meerkat  has been observed undertaking sophisticated domain name system (DNS) activities in a likely effort to evade security measures and conduct reconnaissance of networks across the world since October 2019. Cloud security firm Infoblox described the threat actor as likely affiliated with the People's Republic of China (PRC) with the ability to control the Great Firewall ( GFW ), which censors access to foreign websites and manipulates internet traffic to and from the country. The moniker is reference to the "bewildering" nature of their operations and the actor's abuse of DNS open resolvers – which are DNS servers that accept recursive queries from all IP addresses – to send queries from the Chinese IP space. "Muddling Meerkat demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of DNS that is uncommon among threat actors today – clearly pointing out...

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I’ll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Mana...

A security vulnerability has been discovered in the R programming language that could be exploited by a threat actor to create a malicious RDS (R Data Serialization) file such that it results in code execution when loaded and referenced. The flaw, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-27322 (CVSS score: 8.8), "involves the use of promise objects and lazy evaluation in R," AI application security company HiddenLayer said in a report shared with The Hacker News. RDS,  like pickle in Python , is a format used to serialize and save the state of data structures or objects in R, an open-source programming language used in statistical computing, data visualization, and machine learning. This process of serialization – serialize() or saveRDS() – and deserialization – unserialize() and readRDS() – is also leveraged when saving and loading R packages. The root cause behind CVE-2024-27322 lies in the fact that it could lead to arbitrary code execution when deseriali...

Multiple critical security flaws have been disclosed in the Judge0 open-source online code execution system that could be exploited to obtain code execution on the target system. The three flaws, all critical in nature, allow an "adversary with sufficient access to perform a sandbox escape and obtain root permissions on the host machine," Australian cybersecurity firm Tanto Security said in a report published today. Judge0 (pronounced "judge zero") is  described  by its maintainers as a "robust, scalable, and open-source online code execution system" that can be used to build applications that require online code execution features such as candidate assessment, e-learning, and online code editors and IDEs. According to its website, the service is used by 23 customers like AlgoDaily, CodeChum, and PYnative, among others. The project has been  forked 412 times on GitHub  to date. The flaw...