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Shortly after Microsoft announced support for custom JavaScript functions in Excel, someone demonstrated what could possibly go wrong if this feature is abused for malicious purposes. As promised last year at Microsoft's Ignite 2017 conference, the company has now brought custom JavaScript functions to Excel to extend its capabilities for better work with data. Functions are written in JavaScript for Excel spreadsheets currently runs on various platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Excel Online, allowing developers to create their own powerful formulae. But we saw it coming: Security researcher Charles Dardaman leveraged this feature to show how easy it is to embed the infamous in-browser cryptocurrency mining script from CoinHive inside an MS Excel spreadsheet and run it in the background when opened. "In order to run Coinhive in Excel, I followed Microsoft's official documentation and just added my own function," Dardaman said . Here is an official doc...

When it comes to Android apps, even the simplest app could greatly compromise your privacy and security. Injecting malicious JavaScript into Android applications has drawn an increased attention from the hacking community as its market share spikes. According to security researcher Jeremy S. from Singapore, a critical vulnerability in the Feedly app left millions of android app users vulnerable to the JavaScript infections. Feedly is a very popular app available for iOS and Android devices, also integrated into hundreds of other third party apps, which offers its users to browse the content of their favourite blogs, magazines, websites and more at one place via RSS feed subscriptions. According to Google Play Store, more than 5 Million users have installed Feedly app into their Android devices. In a blogpost , the researcher reported that Feedly is vulnerable to JavaScript injection attack, which is originally referred as 'cross-site scripting' or XSS vulnerability, allows...

It seems like Tor Browser zero-day exploits are in high demand right now—so much so that someone is ready to pay ONE MILLION dollars. Zerodium—a company that specialises in acquiring and reselling zero-day exploits—just announced that it will pay up to USD 1,000,000 for working zero-day exploits for the popular Tor Browser on Tails Linux and Windows operating system. Tor browser users should take this news an early warning, especially who use Tails OS to protect their privacy. Zero-day exploit acquisition platform has also published some rules and payout details on its website, announcing that the payout for Tor exploits with no JavaScript has been kept double than those with JavaScript enabled. The company has also clearly mentioned that the exploit must leverage remote code execution vulnerability, the initial attack vector should be a web page and it should work against the latest version of Tor Browser. Moreover, the zero-day Tor exploit must work without requiring an...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a "large-scale campaign" that has been observed compromising legitimate websites with malicious JavaScript injections. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, these malicious injects are obfuscated using JSFuck , which refers to an "esoteric and educational programming style" that uses only a limited set of characters to write and execute JavaScript code. The cybersecurity company has given the technique an alternate name JSFireTruck owing to the profanity involved. "Multiple websites have been identified with injected malicious JavaScript that uses JSFireTruck obfuscation, which is composed primarily of the symbols [, ], +, $, {, and }," security researchers Hardik Shah, Brad Duncan, and Pranay Kumar Chhaparwal said . "The code's obfuscation hides its true purpose, hindering analysis." Further analysis has determined that the injected code is designed to check the website referrer (...

TOR is the dark side of the Internet, the so-called dark web, which provides a safe haven to privacy advocates but is also where drugs, assassins for hire and other weird and illegal activities can allegedly be traded. A claimed zero-day vulnerability in Firefox 17 was used by the FBI to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network. The FBI did not compromise the TOR network itself and The complex multi-layers of encryption still stand. Instead the FBI compromised the TOR browser only using a zero-day JavaScript exploit and used this to implant a cookie which fingerprinted users through a specific external server. Eric Eoin Marques , 28 year-old man in Ireland believed to be behind Freedom Hosting , the biggest service provider for sites on the encrypted Tor network , is awaiting extradition on p*rno charges. It is understood the FBI had spent a year trying to locate Mr Marques. Marques was arrested on a Maryland warrant that in...

The Parrot traffic direction system (TDS) that came to light earlier this year has had a larger impact than previously thought, according to new research. Sucuri, which has been tracking the same campaign since February 2019 under the name "NDSW/NDSX," said that "the malware was one of the top infections" detected in 2021, accounting for more than 61,000 websites. Parrot TDS was  documented  in April 2022 by Czech cybersecurity company Avast, noting that the PHP script had ensnared web servers hosting more than 16,500 websites to act as a gateway for further attack campaigns. This involves appending a piece of malicious code to all JavaScript files on compromised web servers hosting content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress that are in turn said to be breached by taking advantage of weak login credentials and vulnerable plugins. Besides using different obfuscation tactics to conceal the code, the "injected JavaScript may also be found well indent...

In an effort to mitigate a large class of potential cross-site scripting issues in Firefox, Mozilla has blocked execution of all inline scripts and potentially dangerous eval-like functions for built-in "about: pages" that are the gateway to sensitive preferences, settings, and statics of the browser. Firefox browser has 45 such internal locally-hosted about pages , some of which are listed below that you might have noticed or used at some point: about:config — panel to modify Firefox preferences and critical settings. about:downloads — your recent downloads done within Firefox. about:memory — shows the memory usage of Firefox. about:newtab — the default new tab page. about:plugins — lists all your plugins as well as other useful information. about:privatebrowsing — open a new private window. about:networking — displays networking information. To be noted, these changes do not affect how websites from the Internet work on the Firefox browser, but going forwar...

Google, Apple, Microsoft , and Mozilla have joined hands to create code for use in the future web browsers that promises up to 20 times faster performance. Dubbed WebAssembly (or wasm for short), a project to create a new portable bytecode for the Web that will be more efficient for both desktop as well as mobile web browsers to parse than the complete source code of a Web page or an application. Bytecode is actually a machine-readable instruction set that is faster for web browsers to load than high-level languages. WebAssembly — A New File Format to Compile Code At the moment, browsers use JavaScript to interpret the code and allow functionality on websites such as dynamic content and forms. By default, JavaScript files are downloaded from the server and then compiled by the JavaScript engine in the web browser. However, improvements have been made to load times via Asm.js — the stripped-down JavaScript dialect described as an "assembly language for ...

Security researchers have discovered a chip flaw that could nullify hacking protections for millions of devices regardless of their operating system or application running on them, and the worse — the flaw can not be entirely fixed with any mere software update. The vulnerability resides in the way the memory management unit (MMU), a component of many CPUs, works and leads to bypass the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) protection. ASLR is a crucial security defense deployed by all modern operating systems from Windows and Linux to macOS, Android, and the BSDs. In general, ASLR is a memory protection mechanism which randomizes the location where programs run in a device's memory. This, in turn, makes it difficult for attackers to execute malicious payloads in specific spots in memory when exploiting buffer overflows or similar bugs. In short, for attackers, it's like an attempt to burglarize a house blindfolded. But now a group of researchers, known as VUSe...

Researchers have discovered a new side-channel that they say can be reliably exploited to leak information from web browsers that could then be leveraged to track users even when JavaScript is completely disabled. "This is a side-channel attack which doesn't require any JavaScript to run," the researchers said. "This means script blockers cannot stop it. The attacks work even if you strip out all of the fun parts of the web browsing experience. This makes it very difficult to prevent without modifying deep parts of the operating system." In avoiding JavaScript, the side-channel attacks are also architecturally agnostic, resulting in microarchitectural website fingerprinting attacks that work across hardware platforms, including Intel Core, AMD Ryzen, Samsung Exynos 2100, and Apple M1 CPUs — making it the first known side-channel attack on the iPhone maker's new ARM-based chipsets. The  findings , which come from a group of academics from the Ben-Gurion U...

Over 1,000 websites powered by WordPress have been infected with a third-party JavaScript code that injects four separate backdoors. "Creating four backdoors facilitates the attackers having multiple points of re-entry should one be detected and removed," c/side researcher Himanshu Anand said in a Wednesday analysis. The malicious JavaScript code has been found to be served via cdn.csyndication[.]com. As of writing, as many as 908 websites contain references to the domain in question. The functions of the four backdoors are explained below - Backdoor 1, which uploads and installs a fake plugin named "Ultra SEO Processor," which is then used to execute attacker-issued commands Backdoor 2, which injects malicious JavaScript into wp-config.php Backdoor 3, which adds an attacker-controlled SSH key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file so as to allow persistent remote access to the machine Backdoor 4, which is designed to execute remote commands and fetches anot...

Russian-speaking users have become the target of a new phishing campaign that leverages an open-source phishing toolkit called Gophish to deliver DarkCrystal RAT (aka DCRat) and a previously undocumented remote access trojan dubbed PowerRAT. "The campaign involves modular infection chains that are either Maldoc or HTML-based infections and require the victim's intervention to trigger the infection chain," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in a Tuesday analysis. The targeting of Russian-speaking users is an assessment derived from the language used in the phishing emails, the lure content in the malicious documents, links masquerade as Yandex Disk ("disk-yandex[.]ru"), and HTML web pages disguised as VK, a social network predominantly used in the country. Gophish refers to an open-source phishing framework that allows organizations to test their phishing defenses by leveraging easy-to-use templates and launch email-based campaigns that can the...

Threat actors behind web skimming campaigns are leveraging malicious JavaScript code that mimics Google Analytics and Meta Pixel scripts in an attempt to sidestep detection. "It's a shift from earlier tactics where attackers conspicuously injected malicious scripts into e-commerce platforms and content management systems (CMSs) via vulnerability exploitation, making this threat highly evasive to traditional security solutions," Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in a new report. Skimming attacks, such as those by Magecart, are carried out with the goal of harvesting and exporting users' payment information, such as credit card details, that are entered into online payment forms in e-commerce platforms, typically during the checkout process. This is achieved by taking advantage of security vulnerabilities in third-party plugins and other tools to inject rogue JavaScript code into the online portals without the owners' knowledge. As skimming attacks h...

Financial organizations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are being targeted by a new version of an "evolving threat" called  JSOutProx . "JSOutProx is a sophisticated attack framework utilizing both JavaScript and .NET," Resecurity  said  in a technical report published this week. "It employs the .NET (de)serialization feature to interact with a core JavaScript module running on the victim's machine. Once executed, the malware enables the framework to load various plugins, which conduct additional malicious activities on the target." First  identified  in December 2019 by Yoroi, early attacks distributing JSOutProx have been attributed to a threat actor tracked as  Solar Spider . The cyber crime actors behind the malware have a track record of striking banks and other big companies in Asia and Europe. In late 2021, Quick Heal Security Labs  detailed  attacks leveraging the remote access trojan (RAT) to single...

Security researchers have been warning about a new malicious campaign that leverages an alternative scheme to mine cryptocurrencies without directly injecting the infamous CoinHive JavaScript into thousands of hacked websites. Coinhive is a popular browser-based service that offers website owners to embed JavaScript code that utilizes their website visitors' CPUs power in order to mine the Monero cryptocurrency for monetization. However, since its inception, mid-2017, cybercriminals have been abusing the service to illegally make money by injecting their own version of CoinHive JavaScript code to a large number of hacked websites, eventually tricking their millions of visitors into unknowingly mine Monero coins. Since a lot of web application security firms and antivirus companies have now updated their products to detect unauthorized injection of CoinHive JavaScript, cybercriminals have now started abusing a different service from CoinHive to achieve the same. Hackers ...