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Although organizations commonly go to great lengths to address security vulnerabilities that may exist within their IT infrastructure, an organization's helpdesk might pose a bigger threat due to social engineering attacks. Social engineering is "the art of manipulating people so they give up confidential information," according to  Webroot . There are many different types of social engineering schemes but one is area of vulnerability is how social engineering might be used against a helpdesk technician to steal a user's credentials. The Process of Gaining Access With Social Engineering The first step in such an attack is usually for the attacker to gather information about the organization that they are targeting. The attacker might start by using information that is freely available on the Internet to figure out who within the organization is most likely to have elevated permissions or access to sensitive information. An attacker can often get this information ...

A cybersecurity researcher at Tenable has discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in Verizon Fios Quantum Gateway Wi-Fi routers that could allow remote attackers to take complete control over the affected routers, exposing every other device connected to it. Currently used by millions of consumers in the United States, Verizon Fios Quantum Gateway Wi-Fi routers have been found vulnerable to three security vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2019-3914, CVE-2019-3915, and CVE-2019-3916. The flaws in question are authenticated command injection (with root privileges), login replay , and password salt disclosure vulnerabilities in the Verizon Fios Quantum Gateway router (G1100), according to technical details Chris Lyne, a senior research engineer at Tenable, shared with The Hacker News. Authenticated Command Injection Flaw (CVE-2019-3914) When reviewing the log file on his router, Chris noticed that the "Access Control" rules in the Firewall settings, availabl...

Is it wrong to hack back in order to counter hacking attack when you have become a victim? — this has been a long time debate. While many countries, including the United States, consider hacking back practices as illegal, many security firms and experts believe it as "a terrible idea" and officially "cautions" victims against it, even if they use it as a part of an active defense strategy. Accessing a system that does not belong to you or distributing code designed to enable unauthorized access to anyone's system is an illegal practice. However, this doesn't mean that this practice is not at all performed. In some cases, retribution is part of current defense offerings, and many security firms do occasionally hack the infrastructure of threat groups to unmask several high-profile malware campaigns. But a new proposed bill intended to amend section 1030 of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that would allow victims of ongoing cyber-attacks to fight ...

A novel attack technique named EchoLeak has been characterized as a "zero-click" artificial intelligence (AI) vulnerability that allows bad actors to exfiltrate sensitive data from Microsoft 365 (M365) Copilot's context sans any user interaction. The critical-rated vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-32711 (CVSS score: 9.3). It requires no customer action and has been already addressed by Microsoft. There is no evidence that the shortcoming was exploited maliciously in the wild. "AI command injection in M365 Copilot allows an unauthorized attacker to disclose information over a network," the company said in an advisory released Wednesday. It has since been added to Microsoft's Patch Tuesday list for June 2025, taking the total number of fixed flaws to 68. Aim Security, which discovered and reported the issue, said it's an instance of a large language model (LLM) Scope Violation that paves the way for indirect prompt injecti...

Cybersecurity researchers have released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that strings together a now-patched critical security flaw impacting Mitel MiCollab with an arbitrary file read zero-day, granting an attacker the ability to access files from susceptible instances. The critical vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-41713 (CVSS score: 9.8), which relates to a case of insufficient input validation in the NuPoint Unified Messaging (NPM) component of Mitel MiCollab that results in a path traversal attack. MiCollab is a software and hardware solution that integrates chat, voice, video, and SMS messaging with Microsoft Teams and other applications. NPM is a server-based voicemail system , which enables users to access their voice messages through various methods, including remotely or through the Microsoft Outlook client. WatchTowr Labs, in a report shared with The Hacker News, said it discovered CVE-2024-41713 as part of its efforts to reproduce CVE-2024-35286 (CVSS score: 9.8...

The eBay owned popular digital payment and money transfer service, PayPal has been found to be vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control over users' PayPal account with just a click , affecting more than 156 millions PayPal users. An Egyptian security researcher, Yasser H. Ali has discovered  three critical vulnerabilities in PayPal website including CSRF , Auth token bypass and Resetting the security question, which could be used by cybercriminals in the targeted attacks. Cross-Site Request Forgery ( CSRF or XSRF) is a method of attacking a website in which an attacker need to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted HTML exploit page that will make a request to the vulnerable website on their behalf. Mr.Yasser demonstrated the vulnerability step-by-step in the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) video using a single exploit that combines all the three vulnerabilities. According to the demo, using ...

Microsoft has released patches to address a total of 143 security flaws as part of its monthly security updates, two of which have come under active exploitation in the wild. Five out of the 143 flaws are rated Critical, 136 are rated Important, and four are rated Moderate in severity. The fixes are in addition to 33 vulnerabilities that have been addressed in the Chromium-based Edge browser over the past month. The two security shortcomings that have come under exploitation are below - CVE-2024-38080 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Hyper-V Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2024-38112 (CVSS score: 7.5) - Windows MSHTML Platform Spoofing Vulnerability "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment," Microsoft said of CVE-2024-38112. "An attacker would have to send the victim a malicious file that the victim would have to execute." Check Point securi...

A sophisticated Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) actor exploited a critical security vulnerability in Sophos' firewall product that came to light earlier this year to infiltrate an unnamed South Asian target as part of a highly-targeted attack. "The attacker implement[ed] an interesting web shell backdoor, create[d] a secondary form of persistence, and ultimately launch[ed] attacks against the customer's staff," Volexity  said  in a report. "These attacks aimed to further breach cloud-hosted web servers hosting the organization's public-facing websites." The zero-day flaw in question is tracked as  CVE-2022-1040  (CVSS score: 9.8), and concerns an authentication bypass vulnerability that can be weaponized to execute arbitrary code remotely. It affects Sophos Firewall versions 18.5 MR3 (18.5.3) and earlier. The cybersecurity firm, which issued a patch for the flaw on March 25, 2022, noted that it was abused to "target a small set of spec...

A recently disclosed security vulnerability in MongoDB has come under active exploitation in the wild, with over 87,000 potentially susceptible instances identified across the world. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-14847 (CVSS score: 8.7), which allows an unauthenticated attacker to remotely leak sensitive data from the MongoDB server memory. It has been codenamed MongoBleed . "A flaw in zlib compression allows attackers to trigger information leakage," OX Security said . "By sending malformed network packets, an attacker can extract fragments of private data." The problem is rooted in MongoDB Server's zlib message decompression implementation ("message_compressor_zlib.cpp"). It affects instances with zlib compression enabled, which is the default configuration. Successful exploitation of the shortcoming could allow an attacker to extract sensitive information from MongoDB servers, including user information, passwords, and API keys. ...

An attacker who had credentials and the use of taxpayer Fedora Fedora server, but the project leaders say the assailants apparently managed to compromise any software or servers. An attacker has attempted to compromise the servers for the Fedora Project, the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but no damage or code servers, according to an e-mail sent to the Fedora mailing list on January 25 . In the statement, "a security incident on Fedora infrastructure" right Fedora Project manager Jared Smith revealed that the login and password Fedora contributor was stolen and used to access systems on January 22. It was a factor against those who had the right to run the code packages for Fedora SCM, build and manage to make updates to the Fedora packages, according to Smith. Donor had no sysadmin or Release Engineering teams, and had only limited rights fedorapeople.org wrote. Fedora Infrastructure team is investigating the incident and was unable to conclude that...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a high-severity security flaw impacting NAKIVO Backup & Replication software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-48248 (CVSS score: 8.6), an absolute path traversal bug that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to read files on the target host, including sensitive ones such as "/etc/shadow" via the endpoint "/c/router." It affects all versions of the software prior to version 10.11.3.86570. "NAKIVO Backup and Replication contains an absolute path traversal vulnerability that enables an attacker to read arbitrary files," CISA said in an advisory. Successful exploitation of the shortcoming could allow an adversary to read sensitive data, including configuration files, backups, and credentials, which could then act as a stepping stone for further compromises. There are cu...

Last month we reported about a widespread crypto-mining malware campaign that hijacked over 200,000 MikroTik routers using a previously disclosed vulnerability revealed in the CIA Vault 7 leaks . Now Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360 Netlab have discovered that out of 370,000 potentially vulnerable MikroTik routers, more than 7,500 devices have been compromised to enable Socks4 proxy maliciously, allowing attackers to actively eavesdrop on the targeted network traffic since mid-July. The vulnerability in question is Winbox Any Directory File Read (CVE-2018-14847) in MikroTik routers that was found exploited by the CIA Vault 7 hacking tool called Chimay Red , along with another MikroTik's Webfig remote code execution vulnerability. Both Winbox and Webfig are RouterOS management components with their corresponding communication ports as TCP/8291, TCP/80, and TCP/8080. Winbox is designed for Windows users to easily configure the routers that download some DLL files ...