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Watch out Apple users! The default mailing app pre-installed on millions of iPhones and iPads has been found vulnerable to two critical flaws that attackers are exploiting in the wild, at least, from the last two years to spy on high-profile victims. The flaws could eventually let remote hackers secretly take complete control over Apple devices just by sending an email to any targeted individual with his email account logged-in to the vulnerable app. According to cybersecurity researchers at ZecOps, the bugs in question are remote code execution flaws that reside in the MIME library of Apple's mail app—first, due to an out-of-bounds write bug and second, is a heap overflow issue. Though both flaws get triggered while processing the content of an email, the second flaw is more dangerous because it can be exploited with 'zero-click,' where no interaction is required from the targeted recipients. 8-Years-Old Apple Zero-Days Exploited in the Wild According to the...

A Chinese hacking group has been found leveraging a new exploit chain in iOS devices to install a spyware implant targeting the Uyghur Muslim minority in China's autonomous region of Xinjiang. The findings, published by digital forensics firm Volexity , reveal that the exploit — named "Insomnia" — works against iOS versions 12.3, 12.3.1, and 12.3.2 using a flaw in WebKit that was patched by Apple with the release of iOS 12.4 in July 2019. Volexity said the attacks were carried out by a state-sponsored hacking group it calls Evil Eye , the same threat actor that it said was behind a series of attacks against the Uyghurs last September following a bombshell disclosure by Google's Project Zero team . China has long considered Xinjiang a breeding ground for " separatists, terrorists and religious extremists ," with the residents of the region — ethnically Turkic Muslims — thrown into concentration camps , and subjected to persecution and high-tech surv...

Cybersecurity firm Cynet today announced the launch of a first of its kind challenge to enable Incident Response professionals to test their skills with 25 forensic challenges that were built by top researchers and analysts. The challenge is available on https://incident-response-challenge.com/ and is open to anyone willing to test his or her investigation skills, between April 21st and May 15th. What's more interesting is that there's a USD 5000 prize for the first-place winner of the challenge. Forensic investigation is at the core of any IR processes and provides the critical path from the initial stage of suspicion or limited attack view to the concrete and actionable knowledge on the attack's root cause and the impact that is essential for recovery and restore operations. The challenge of the incident responder is to identify and collect the scattered traces the attackers have left them and connect the dots to understand the how, what, and where of the atta...

A cybersecurity researcher today publicly disclosed technical details and PoC for 4 unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities affecting an enterprise security software offered by IBM after the company refused to acknowledge the responsibly submitted disclosure. The affected premium product in question is IBM Data Risk Manager (IDRM) that has been designed to analyze sensitive business information assets of an organization and determine associated risks. According to Pedro Ribeiro from Agile Information Security firm, IBM Data Risk Manager contains three critical severity vulnerabilities and a high impact bug, all listed below, which can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker reachable over the network, and when chained together could also lead to remote code execution as root. Authentication Bypass Command Injection Insecure Default Password Arbitrary File Download Ribeiro successfully tested the flaws against IBM Data Risk Manager version 2.0.1 to 2.0.3, which is not the la...

A newly discovered unpatchable hardware vulnerability in Xilinx programmable logic products could allow an attacker to break bitstream encryption, and clone intellectual property, change the functionality, and even implant hardware Trojans. The details of the attacks against Xilinx 7-Series and Virtex-6 Field Programmable Gate Arrays ( FPGAs ) have been covered in a paper titled " The Unpatchable Silicon: A Full Break of the Bitstream Encryption of Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs " by a group of academics from the Horst Goertz Institute for IT Security and Max Planck Institute for Cyber Security and Privacy. "We exploit a design flaw which piecewise leaks the decrypted bitstream," the researchers said. "In the attack, the FPGA is used as a decryption oracle, while only access to a configuration interface is needed. The attack does not require any sophisticated tools and, depending on the target system, can potentially be launched remotely." The findings wil...

A new malware campaign has been found using coronavirus-themed lures to strike government and energy sectors in Azerbaijan with remote access trojans (RAT) capable of exfiltrating sensitive documents, keystrokes, passwords, and even images from the webcam. The targeted attacks employ Microsoft Word documents as droppers to deploy a previously unknown Python-based RAT dubbed "PoetRAT" due to various references to sonnets by English playwright William Shakespeare. "The RAT has all the standard features of this kind of malware, providing full control of the compromised system to the operation," said Cisco Talos in an analysis published last week. According to the researchers, the malware specifically targets supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in the energy industry, such as wind turbine systems, whose identities are currently not known. The development is the latest in a surge in cyberattacks exploiting the ongoing coronavirus pandemi...

The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) yesterday issued a fresh advisory alerting organizations to change all their Active Directory credentials as a defense against cyberattacks trying to leverage a known remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Pulse Secure VPN servers—even if they have already patched it. The warning comes three months after another CISA alert urging users and administrators to patch Pulse Secure VPN environments to thwart attacks exploiting the vulnerability. "Threat actors who successfully exploited CVE-2019-11510 and stole a victim organization's credentials will still be able to access — and move laterally through — that organization's network after the organization has patched this vulnerability if the organization did not change those stolen credentials," CISA said. CISA has also released a tool to help network administrators look for any indicators of compromise associated with the flaw. ...