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A new academic study has highlighted a number of privacy and security pitfalls associated with recycling mobile phone numbers that could be abused to stage a variety of exploits, including account takeovers, conduct phishing and spam attacks, and even prevent victims from signing up for online services. Nearly 66% of the recycled numbers that were sampled were found to be tied to previous owners' online accounts at popular websites, potentially enabling account hijacks by simply recovering the accounts tied to those numbers. "An attacker can cycle through the available numbers shown on online number change interfaces and check if any of them are associated with online accounts of previous owners," the researchers  said . If so, the attacker can then obtain these numbers and reset the password on the accounts, and receive and correctly enter the OTP sent via SMS upon login." The findings are part of an analysis of a sample of 259 phone numbers available to new su...

PC maker Dell has issued an update to fix multiple critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities that went undetected since 2009, potentially allowing attackers to gain kernel-mode privileges and cause a denial-of-service condition. The issues, reported to Dell by researchers from SentinelOne on Dec. 1, 2020, reside in a firmware update driver named "dbutil_2_3.sys" that comes pre-installed on its devices. Hundreds of millions of desktops, laptops, notebooks, and tablets manufactured by the company are said to be vulnerable. "Dell dbutil_2_3.sys driver contains an insufficient access control vulnerability which may lead to escalation of privileges, denial-of-service, or information disclosure. Local authenticated user access is required," Dell  said  in an advisory. All five separate flaws have been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2021-21551 with a CVSS score of 8.8. A breakdown of the shortcomings is as follows -  CVE-2021-21551: Local Elevation Of Privilege...

The maintainers of Exim have  released patches  to remediate as many as 21 security vulnerabilities in its software that could enable unauthenticated attackers to achieve complete remote code execution and gain root privileges. Collectively named  '21Nails ,' the flaws include 11 vulnerabilities that require local access to the server and 10 other weaknesses that could be exploited remotely. The issues were discovered by Qualys and reported to Exim on Oct. 20, 2020. "Some of the vulnerabilities can be chained together to obtain a full remote unauthenticated code execution and gain root privileges on the Exim Server," Bharat Jogi, senior manager at Qualys, said in a public disclosure. "Most of the vulnerabilities discovered by the Qualys Research Team for e.g. CVE-2020-28017 affects all versions of Exim going back all the way to 2004." Exim is a popular mail transfer agent (MTA) used on Unix-like operating systems, with over 60% of the publicly reachable...

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...

Researchers on Tuesday disclosed a novel malware that uses a variety of tricks to stay under the radar and evade detection, while stealthily capable of executing arbitrary commands on infected systems. Called 'Pingback,' the Windows malware leverages Internet Control Message Protocol ( ICMP ) tunneling for covert bot communications, allowing the adversary to utilize ICMP packets to piggyback attack code, according to an analysis published today by Trustwave. Pingback (" oci.dll ") achieves this by getting loaded through a legitimate service called  MSDTC  (Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator) — a component responsible for handling database operations that are distributed over multiple machines — by taking advantage of a method called  DLL search order hijacking , which involves using a genuine application to preload a malicious DLL file. Naming the malware as one of the plugins required for supporting  Oracle ODBC  interface in MSDTC is key to th...

Ask the average helpdesk technician what they do all day, and they will probably answer by saying that they reset passwords. Sure, helpdesk technicians do plenty of other things too, but in many organizations, a disproportionate number of helpdesk calls are tied to password resets. On the surface, having a  helpdesk technician reset a user's password  probably doesn't seem like a big deal. After all, the technician simply opens Active Directory Users and Computers, right-clicks on the user account, and chooses the Reset Password command from the shortcut menu. Resetting a password in this way is an easy process. Organizations can even opt to use an alternative tool such as the Windows Admin Center or even PowerShell if they prefer. One thing that most people probably don't stop and think about, however, is that even though the steps involved in the password reset process are simple enough, the  process as a whole constitutes a major security risk . Security and the se...

Ivanti, the company behind Pulse Secure VPN appliances, has released a security patch to remediate a critical security vulnerability that was found being actively exploited in the wild by at least two different threat actors. Tracked as  CVE-2021-22893  (CVSS score 10), the flaw concerns "multiple use after free" issues in Pulse Connect Secure that could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code and take control of the affected system. All Pulse Connect Secure versions prior to 9.1R11.4 are impacted. The flaw came to light on April 20 after FireEye  disclosed  a series of intrusions targeting defense, government, and financial organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere by leveraging critical vulnerabilities in the remote access solution to bypass multi-factor authentication protections and breach enterprise networks. The development promoted the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue an  Emergency Directiv...

Apple on Monday released security updates for  iOS ,  macOS , and  watchOS  to address three zero-day flaws and expand patches for a fourth vulnerability that the company said might have been exploited in the wild. The weaknesses all concern WebKit, the browser engine which powers Safari and other third-party web browsers in iOS, allowing an adversary to execute arbitrary code on target devices. A summary of the three security bugs are as follows - CVE-2021-30663:  An integer overflow vulnerability that could be exploited to craft malicious web content, which may lead to code execution. The flaw was addressed with improved input validation. CVE-2021-30665:  A memory corruption issue that could be exploited to craft malicious web content, which may lead to code execution. The flaw was addressed with improved state management. CVE-2021-30666:  A buffer overflow vulnerability that could be exploited to craft malicious web content, which may lead to...

Most mobile app users tend to blindly trust that the apps they download from app stores are safe and secure. But that isn't always the case. To demonstrate the pitfalls and identify vulnerabilities on a large scale, cybersecurity and machine intelligence company CloudSEK recently provided a platform called  BeVigil  where individuals can search and check app security ratings and other security issues before installing an app. A latest  report  shared with The Hacker News detailed how the BeVigil search engine identified over 40 apps - with more than a cumulative 100 million downloads - that had hardcoded private Amazon Web Services (AWS) keys embedded within them, putting their internal networks and their users' data at risk of cyberattacks. BeVigil finds popular apps leaking AWS keys The AWS key leakage was spotted in some of the major apps such as Adobe Photoshop Fix, Adobe Comp, Hootsuite, IBM's Weather Channel, and online shopping services Club Factory and W...

Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed a new malspam campaign distributing a fresh variant of a malware loader called "Buer" written in Rust, illustrating how adversaries are constantly honing their malware toolsets to evade analysis. Dubbed "RustyBuer," the malware is propagated via emails masquerading as shipping notices from DHL Support, and is said to have affected no fewer than 200 organizations across more than 50 verticals since early April. "The new Buer variant is written in Rust, an efficient and easy-to-use programming language that is becoming increasingly popular," Proofpoint researchers  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Rewriting the malware in Rust enables the threat actor to better evade existing Buer detection capabilities." First introduced in August of 2019,  Buer  is a modular malware-as-a-service offering that's sold on underground forums and used as a first-stage downloader to deliver additiona...