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Facebook's  newly-rebranded  parent company Meta on Tuesday announced plans to discontinue its decade-old "Face Recognition" system and delete a massive trove of more than a billion users' facial recognition templates as part of a wider initiative to limit the use of the technology across its products. The Menlo Park tech giant  described  the about-face as "one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology's history." The shutdown, which is expected to take place over the coming weeks, will mean users who have previously opted into the setting will no longer be automatically recognized in Memories, photos and videos or see suggested tags with their name in photos and videos they may appear in. Furthermore, the company's Automatic Alt Text (AAT) tool, which creates image descriptions for visually impaired people, will no longer include the names of people identified in photos. Facebook's discontinuing of the program com...

Google has rolled out its monthly security patches for Android with fixes for 39 flaws, including a zero-day vulnerability that it said is being actively exploited in the wild in limited, targeted attacks. Tracked as CVE-2021-1048 , the zero-day bug is described as a  use-after-free vulnerability  in the kernel that can be exploited for local privilege escalation. Use-after-free issues are dangerous as it could enable a threat actor to access or referencing memory after it has been freed, leading to a " write-what-where " condition that results in the execution of arbitrary code to gain control over a victim's system. "There are indications that CVE-2021-1048 may be under limited, targeted exploitation," the company  noted  in its November advisory without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the nature of the intrusions, and the identities of the attackers that may have abused the flaw. Also remediated in the security patch are two critical re...

A now-patched critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in GitLab's web interface has been detected as actively exploited in the wild, cybersecurity researchers warn, rendering a large number of internet-facing GitLab instances susceptible to attacks. Tracked as  CVE-2021-22205 , the issue relates to an improper validation of user-provided images that results in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability, which affects all versions starting from 11.9, has since been  addressed  by GitLab on April 14, 2021 in versions 13.8.8, 13.9.6, and 13.10.3. In one of the real-world attacks  detailed  by HN Security last month, two user accounts with admin privileges were registered on a publicly-accessible GitLab server belonging to an unnamed customer by exploiting the aforementioned flaw to upload a malicious payload "image," leading to remote execution of commands that granted the rogue accounts elevated permissions. Attacks exploiting the vulnerability ar...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Google on Monday announced that it will pay security researchers to find exploits using vulnerabilities, previously remediated or otherwise, over the next three months as part of a new bug bounty program to improve the security of the Linux kernel. To that end, the company is expected to issue rewards worth $31,337 (a reference to Leet ) for exploiting privilege escalation in a lab environment for each patched vulnerability, an amount that can climb up to $50,337 for working exploits that take advantage of zero-day flaws in the kernel and other undocumented attack techniques. Specifically, the program aims to uncover attacks that could be launched against Kubernetes-based infrastructure to defeat process isolation barriers (via NSJail) and break out of the sandbox to leak secret information. The program is expected to last until January 31, 2022. "It is important to note, that the easiest exploitation primitives are not available in our lab environment due to the hardening ...

Multiple vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Hitachi Vantara's Pentaho Business Analytics software that could be abused by malicious actors to upload arbitrary data files and even execute arbitrary code on the underlying host system of the application. The security weaknesses were  reported  by researchers Alberto Favero from German cybersecurity firm Hawsec and Altion Malka from Census Labs earlier this year, prompting the company to  issue  necessary patches to address the issues. Pentaho is a Java-based business intelligence platform that offers data integration, analytics, online analytical processing (OLAP), and mining capabilities, and  counts  major  companies and organizations  like Bell, CERN, Cipal, Logitech, Nasdaq, Telefonica, Teradata, and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum among its customers. The list of flaws, which affect Pentaho Business Analytics versions 9.1 and lower, is as follows - CVE-2021-31599 ...

There is often confusion between Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) and SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) solutions, as both are designed to address security issues within SaaS applications. CASBs protect sensitive data by implementing multiple security policy enforcements to safeguard critical data. For identifying and classifying sensitive information, like Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Intellectual Property (IP), and business records, CASBs definitely help.  However, as the number of SaaS apps increase, the amount of misconfigurations and possible exposure widens and cannot be mitigated by CASBs. These solutions act as a link between users and cloud service providers and can identify issues across various cloud environments. Where CASBs fall short is that they identify breaches  after  they happen. When it comes to getting full visibility and control over the organization's SaaS apps, an SSPM solution would be the better choice, as the security ...

A novel class of vulnerabilities could be leveraged by threat actors to inject visually deceptive malware in a way that's semantically permissible but alters the logic defined by the source code, effectively opening the door to more first-party and supply chain risks. Dubbed " Trojan Source attacks ," the technique "exploits subtleties in text-encoding standards such as  Unicode  to produce source code whose tokens are logically encoded in a different order from the one in which they are displayed, leading to vulnerabilities that cannot be perceived directly by human code reviewers," Cambridge University researchers Nicholas Boucher and Ross Anderson said in a newly published paper. The  vulnerabilities  — tracked as CVE-2021-42574 and CVE-2021-42694 — affect compilers of all popular programming languages such as C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Java, Rust, Go, and Python. Compilers are programs that translate high-level human-readable source code into their lower-l...