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A security feature bypass vulnerability has been uncovered in three signed third-party Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) boot loaders that allow bypass of the UEFI Secure Boot feature. "These vulnerabilities can be exploited by mounting the EFI System Partition and replacing the existing bootloader with the vulnerable one, or modifying a UEFI variable to load the vulnerable loader instead of the existing one," hardware security firm Eclypsium  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The following  vendor-specific boot loaders , which were signed and authenticated by Microsoft, have been found vulnerable to the bypass and have been patched as part of the tech giant's  Patch Tuesday update  released this week - Eurosoft Boot Loader ( CVE-2022-34301 ) New Horizon Data Systems Inc Boot Loader ( CVE-2022-34302 ), and Crypto Pro Boot Loader ( CVE-20220-34303 ) Secure Boot is a  security standard  designed to thwart maliciou...

Security flaws have been identified in Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T and Redmi Note 11 models, which could be exploited to disable the mobile payment mechanism and even forge transactions via a rogue Android app installed on the devices. Check Point said it found the flaws in devices powered by MediaTek chipsets during a security analysis of the Chinese handset maker's Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which is used to perform mobile payment signatures A TEE refers to a  secure enclave  inside the main processor that's used to process and store sensitive information such as cryptographic keys so as to ensure confidentiality and integrity. Specifically, the Israeli cybersecurity firm discovered that a trusted app on a Xiaomi device can be downgraded due to a lack of version control, enabling an attacker to replace a newer, secure version of an app with an older, vulnerable variant. "Therefore, an attacker can bypass security fixes made by Xiaomi or MediaTek in trusted apps ...

The U.S. State Department on Thursday  announced  a $10 million reward for information related to five individuals associated with the Conti ransomware group. The reward offer is also notable for the fact that it marks the first time the face of a Conti associate, known as "Target," has been unmasked. The four other alleged members have been referred to as "Tramp," "Dandis," "Professor," and "Reshaev." The government, besides seeking information about the five operators that could lead to their identification or location, is also calling on people to share details about Conti and its affiliated groups  TrickBot  and  Wizard Spider . Since its rebrand from Ryuk to Conti in 2020, the transnational organized crime group has been linked to hundreds of ransomware incidents over the past two years. As of January 2022, the Russia-based ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation is estimated to have hit over 1,000 entities, with victim payo...

AI agents promise to automate everything from financial reconciliations to incident response. Yet every time an AI agent spins up a workflow, it has to authenticate somewhere; often with a high-privilege API key, OAuth token, or service account that defenders can't easily see. These "invisible" non-human identities (NHIs) now outnumber human accounts in most cloud environments, and they have become one of the ripest targets for attackers. Astrix's Field CTO Jonathan Sander put it bluntly in a recent Hacker News webinar : "One dangerous habit we've had for a long time is trusting application logic to act as the guardrails. That doesn't work when your AI agent is powered by LLMs that don't stop and think when they're about to do something wrong. They just do it." Why AI Agents Redefine Identity Risk Autonomy changes everything: An AI agent can chain multiple API calls and modify data without a human in the loop. If the underlying credential is exposed or overprivileged, each addit...

Social media company Meta said it will begin testing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on its Messenger platform this week for select users as the default option, as the company continues to slowly add security layers to its various chat services. "If you're in the test group, some of your most frequent chats may be automatically end-to-end encrypted, which means you won't have to opt in to the feature," Sara Su, product management director of Messenger Trust,  said . The incremental development comes a year after it  turned on E2EE  for audio and video calls on the messaging service as well as for one-on-one chats in Instagram, and enabled  encrypted chat backups  for WhatsApp on Android and iOS. E2EE is a secure communication mechanism that scrambles data in transit and prevents third-parties from unauthorizedly accessing information sent from one endpoint to another, including Meta. "This is because with end-to-end encryption, your messages are secured with ...

Cisco on Wednesday released patches to contain multiple flaws in its software that could be abused to leak sensitive information on susceptible appliances. The issue, assigned the identifier  CVE-2022-20866  (CVSS score: 7.4), has been described as a "logic error" when handling RSA keys on devices running Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to retrieve the RSA private key by means of a  Lenstra side-channel attack  against the targeted device. "If an attacker obtains the RSA private key, they could use the key to impersonate a device that is running Cisco ASA Software or Cisco FTD Software or to decrypt the device traffic," Cisco warned in an advisory issued on August 10. Cisco noted that the flaw impacts only Cisco ASA Software releases 9.16.1 and later and Cisco FTD Software releases 7.0.0 and later. Affected products are listed below -...

Back when the internet consisted of a handful of computers networked together across a few research institutions, nobody could have imagined that it would one day form the backbone of a new digital way of life. And that probably explains why none of the researchers who thought up its core technologies — things like packet switching and TCP/IP — gave much consideration to the need to secure the data passing through it. But by 1989, hackers like Robert Morris had already spotted the security weaknesses of the fledgling global network and started to exploit them. And that was just the beginning. Today, network administrators and individual internet users spend significant amounts of time and money trying to keep their data safe from prying eyes. The de-facto tool most people use for that purpose is a VPN. It's a software encryption solution that prevents anyone from accessing data traversing the public internet other than its intended recipient. And VPNs make up a data privacy mark...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday  added  two flaws to its  Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog , citing evidence of active exploitation. The two high-severity issues relate to weaknesses in Zimbra Collaboration, both of which could be chained to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution on affected email servers - CVE-2022-27925  (CVSS score: 7.2) - Remote code execution (RCE) through mboximport from authenticated user (fixed in  versions  8.8.15 Patch 31 and 9.0.0 Patch 24 released in March) CVE-2022-37042  - Authentication bypass in MailboxImportServlet (fixed in  versions  8.8.15 Patch 33 and 9.0.0 Patch 26 released in August) "If you are running a Zimbra version that is older than Zimbra 8.8.15 patch 33 or Zimbra 9.0.0 patch 26 you should update to the latest patch as soon as possible," Zimbra  warned  earlier this week. CISA has not shared any information on the attac...