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Microsoft has issued an emergency out-of-band software update for Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2 systems to patch two new recently disclosed security vulnerabilities. Tracked as CVE-2020-1530 and CVE-2020-1537 , both flaws reside in the Remote Access Service (RAS) in a way it manages memory and file operations and could let remote attackers gain elevated privileges after successful exploitation. In brief, the Remote Access Service functionality of the Windows operating system allows remote clients to connect to the server and access internal resources from anywhere via the Internet. A patch for both vulnerabilities was first released on August 11 with the batch of August Patch Tuesday updates, but it was for Windows 10, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008, 2012, 2016, 2019, and Windows Server versions 1903, 1909, and 2004 systems. A week later, yesterday, on August 19, the company announced that Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 systems are vulner...

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of a memory vulnerability in IBM's Db2 family of data management products that could potentially allow a local attacker to access sensitive data and even cause a denial of service attacks. The flaw ( CVE-2020-4414 ), which impacts IBM Db2 V9.7, V10.1, V10.5, V11.1, and V11.5 editions on all platforms , is caused by improper usage shared memory, thereby granting a bad actor to perform unauthorized actions on the system. By sending a specially crafted request, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information or cause a denial of service, according to Trustwave SpiderLabs security and research team, which discovered the issue. "Developers forgot to put explicit memory protections around the shared memory used by the Db2 trace facility," SpiderLabs's Martin Rakhmanov said. "This allows any local users read and write access to that memory area. In turn, this allows accessing critic...

One new security technology we keep hearing about is Extended Detection and Response (XDR). This new technology merges multiple prevention and detection technologies on a single platform to better understand threat signals so that you don't need to purchase, integrate, and manage various control and integration technologies. Think of XDR as prepackaged EDR, NTA, UEBA (and perhaps other prevention and detection) technologies all tightly integrated on a SOAR-like platform. Of course, you don't need SOAR technology with XDR as the entire platform is integrated and orchestrated out of the box. In Gartner's recently published Top 9 Security and Risk Trends for 2020 , XDR was listed first. Cybersecurity company Cynet just released an interesting XDR eBook [ Download it here ] that provides an excellent primer on this promising new technology. According to Cynet, the expense and issues involved with combining multiple siloed control technologies usually make an effort n...

A newly released report by cybersecurity firm CTM360 reveals a large-scale scam operation utilizing fake news websites—known as Baiting News Sites (BNS)—to deceive users into online investment fraud across 50 countries. These BNS pages are made to look like real news outlets: CNN, BBC, CNBC, or regional media. They publish fake stories that feature public figures, central banks, or financial brands, all claiming to back new ways to earn passive income. The goal? Build trust quickly and steer readers toward professional-looking scam platforms like Trap10, Solara Vynex, or Eclipse Earn. Scammers use sponsored ads on Google, Meta, and blog networks to push traffic to these sites. Ads often carry clickbait headlines—"You won't believe what a prominent public figure just revealed"—paired with official photos or national flags to make them feel legit. Clicking the ad directs users to a fake article, which then redirects them to a fraudulent trading platform. Many of these scams follow a...

Cybersecurity researchers today took the wraps off a sophisticated, multi-functional peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet written in Golang that has been actively targeting SSH servers since January 2020. Called " FritzFrog ," the modular, multi-threaded and file-less botnet has breached more than 500 servers to date, infecting well-known universities in the US and Europe, and a railway company, according to a report released by Guardicore Labs today. "With its decentralized infrastructure, it distributes control among all its nodes," Guardicore 's Ophir Harpaz said. "In this network with no single point-of-failure, peers constantly communicate with each other to keep the network alive, resilient and up-to-date." In addition to implementing a proprietary P2P protocol that's been written from scratch, the communications are done over an encrypted channel, with the malware capable of creating a backdoor on victim systems that grants continued access fo...

Jenkins—a popular open-source automation server software—published an advisory on Monday concerning a critical vulnerability in the Jetty web server that could result in memory corruption and cause confidential information to be disclosed. Tracked as CVE-2019-17638 , the flaw has a CVSS rating of 9.4 and impacts Eclipse Jetty versions 9.4.27.v20200227 to 9.4.29.v20200521—a full-featured tool that provides a Java HTTP server and web container for use in software frameworks. "Jenkins bundles Winstone-Jetty, a wrapper around Jetty, to act as HTTP and servlet server when started using java -jar jenkins.war. This is how Jenkins is run when using any of the installers or packages, but not when run using servlet containers such as Tomcat," read the advisory. "The vulnerability may allow unauthenticated attackers to obtain HTTP response headers that may include sensitive data intended for another user." The flaw , which impacts Jetty and Jenkins Core, appears to...

Emotet, a notorious email-based malware behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks, contained a flaw that allowed cybersecurity researchers to activate a kill-switch and prevent the malware from infecting systems for six months. "Most of the vulnerabilities and exploits that you read about are good news for attackers and bad news for the rest of us," Binary Defense's James Quinn said. "However, it's important to keep in mind that malware is software that can also have flaws. Just as attackers can exploit flaws in legitimate software to cause harm, defenders can also reverse-engineer malware to discover its vulnerabilities and then exploit those to defeat the malware." The kill-switch was alive between February 6, 2020, to August 6, 2020, for 182 days, before the malware authors patched their malware and closed the vulnerability. Since its first identification in 2014, Emotet has evolved from its initial roots as a banking ...

Web applications suffer continuously evolving attacks, where a web application firewall (WAF) is the first line of defense and a necessary part of organizations' cybersecurity strategies. WAFs are getting more sophisticated all the time, but as its core protection starts with efficient pattern matching, typically using Regular Expressions, and classifying malicious traffic to block cyber attacks. Evading pattern matching However, unfortunately, this technique is no silver bullet against determined attackers. Once it's known that there is a protection layer enabled, malicious actors find ways to bypass it, and most of the time, they even succeed. It usually can be achieved when the same attacking payload, blocked by WAF , can be disguised to make it 'invisible' to the pattern matching mechanism to evade security. Context-Specific Obfuscation The web uses many technologies, and they all have different rules for what comprises valid syntax in their grammar...