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An independent exploit developer and vulnerability researcher has publicly disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in VirtualBox —a popular open source virtualization software developed by Oracle—that could allow a malicious program to escape virtual machine (guest OS) and execute code on the operating system of the host machine. The vulnerability occurs due to memory corruption issues and affects Intel PRO / 1000 MT Desktop (82540EM) network card (E1000) when the network mode is set to NAT (Network Address Translation). The flaw is independent of the type of operating system being used by the virtual and host machines because it resides in a shared code base. VirtualBox Zero-Day Exploit and Demo Video Released Sergey Zelenyuk published Wednesday a detailed technical explanation of the zero-day flaw on GitHub, which affects all current versions (5.2.20 and prior) of VirtualBox software and is present on the default Virtual Machine (VM) configuration. According to Zelenyuk, t...

Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for this month falls the day before the most romantic day of the year. Yes, it's Valentine's, and the tech giant has released its monthly security update for February 2018, addressing a total of 50 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system, Microsoft Office, web browsers and other products. Fourteen of the security updates are listed as critical, 34 are rated as important, and 2 of them are rated as moderate in severity. The critical update patches serious security flaws in Edge browser and Outlook client, an RCE in Windows' StructuredQuery component, and several memory corruption bugs in the scripting engines used by Edge and Internet Explorer. Critical Microsoft Outlook Vulnerability One of the most severe bugs includes a memory corruption vulnerability ( CVE-2018-0852 ) in Microsoft Outlook, which can be exploited to achieve remote code execution on the targeted machines. In order to trigger the vulnerability...

It's Patch Tuesday once again…time for another round of security updates for the Windows operating system and other Microsoft products. This month Windows users and system administrators need to immediately take care of a total of 63 security vulnerabilities, of which 12 are rated critical, 49 important and one moderate and one low in severity. Two of the vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month are listed as publicly known at the time of release, and one flaw is reported as being actively exploited in the wild by multiple cybercriminal groups. Zero-Day Vulnerability Being Exploited by Cyber Criminals The zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8589 , which is being exploited in the wild by multiple advanced persistent threat groups was first spotted and reported by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs. The flaw resides in the Win32k component (win32k.sys), which if exploited successfully, could allow a malicious program to execute arbitrary code...

Software vulnerabilities are a major threat to organizations today. The cost of these threats is significant, both financially and in terms of reputation. Vulnerability management and patching can easily get out of hand when the number of vulnerabilities in your organization is in the hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities and tracked in inefficient ways, such as using Excel spreadsheets or multiple reports, especially when many teams are involved in the organization. Even when a process for patching is in place, organizations still struggle to effectively patch vulnerabilities in their assets. This is generally because teams look at the severity of vulnerabilities and tend to apply patches to vulnerabilities in the following severity order: critical > high > medium > low > info. The following sections explain why this approach is flawed and how it can be improved. Why is Patching Difficult? While it is well known that vulnerability patching is extremely important, it ...

Security researchers revealed that series of " Watering Hole " has been conducted exploiting a IE8 zero-day vulnerability to target U.S. Government experts working on nuclear weapons research. The news is not surprising but it is very concerning, the principal targets of the attacks are various groups of research such as the components of U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Energy, the news has been confirmed by principal security firms and by Microsoft corporate. The flaw has been used in a series of "watering hole" attacks, let’s remind that "Watering Hole" is a technique of attack realized compromising legitimate websites using a “ drive-by ” exploit. The attackers restrict their audience to a individuals interested to specific content proposed by targeted website, in this way when the victim visits the page a backdoor Trojan is installed on his computer. The website compromised to exploit the IE8 zero-day is the Dep...

Semmle security researcher Man Yue Mo has disclosed a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework that could allow remote attackers to run malicious code on the affected servers. Apache Struts is an open source framework for developing web applications in the Java programming language and is widely used by enterprises globally, including by 65 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, like Vodafone, Lockheed Martin, Virgin Atlantic, and the IRS. The vulnerability ( CVE-2018-11776 ) resides in the core of Apache Struts and originates because of insufficient validation of user-provided untrusted inputs in the core of the Struts framework under certain configurations. The newly found Apache Struts exploit can be triggered just by visiting a specially crafted URL on the affected web server, allowing attackers to execute malicious code and eventually take complete control over the targeted server running the vulnerable applicatio...

Less than 24 hours after publicly disclosing an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in Windows 10 , the anonymous hacker going by online alias "SandboxEscaper" has now dropped new exploits for two more unpatched Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities. The two new zero-day vulnerabilities affect Microsoft's Windows Error Reporting service and Internet Explorer 11. Just yesterday, while releasing a Windows 10 zero-day exploit for a local privilege escalation bug in Task Scheduler utility, SandboxEscaper claimed to have discovered four more zero-day bugs, exploits for two has now been publicly released. AngryPolarBearBug2 Windows Bug One of the latest Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities resides in the Windows Error Reporting service that can be exploited using a discretionary access control list (DACL) operation—a mechanism that identifies users and groups that are assigned or denied access permissions to a securable object. Upon successful exploitation, an attacker can del...

A new exploit for IE9 bypasses all security measures in even the latest fully patched version of Windows 7, according to a French security company Vupen. The exploit uses an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 9 and bypasses all the extra security measures of Windows 7. The latest version of Microsoft's operating system, fully up-to-date with service pack 1 (SP1), is vulnerable. The security hole was reported by the French security company Vupen, that previously discovered an IE8 vulnerability in December of last year. Vupen classifies the exploit for IE9 as reliable, which means it's an effective way for cyber attackers to run malicious code of their choosing on Windows 7 PCs. The exploit manages to break through Windows' additional security layers, such as ASLR, DEP and the sandbox (Protected Mode) in IE9. "The exploit uses two distinct vulnerabilities. The first one allows execution of arbitrary code within the IE9 sandbox. The second one allo...

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in PHPMailer , which is one of the most popular open source PHP libraries to send emails used by more than 9 Million users worldwide. Millions of PHP websites and popular open source web applications, including WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, and Joomla comes with PHPMailer library for sending emails using a variety of methods, including SMTP to their users. Discovered by Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers , the critical vulnerability ( CVE-2016-10033 ) allows an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code in the context of the web server and compromise the target web application. "To exploit the vulnerability an attacker could target common website components such as contact/feedback forms, registration forms, password email resets and others that send out emails with the help of a vulnerable version of the PHPMailer class," Golunski writes in the advisory published today. Golunski respo...

Another day, another revelation of a critical unpatched zero-day vulnerability, this time in the world's most widely used mobile operating system, Android. What's more? The Android zero-day vulnerability has also been found to be exploited in the wild by the Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group—infamous for selling zero-day exploits to governments—or one of its customers, to gain control of their targets' Android devices. Discovered by Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone, the details and a proof-of-concept exploit for the high-severity security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2215, has been made public today—just seven days after reporting it to the Android security team. The zero-day is a use-after-free vulnerability in the Android kernel's binder driver that can allow a local privileged attacker or an app to escalate their privileges to gain root access to a vulnerable device and potentially take full remote control of the device. Vulnerable Android D...

Many businesses rely on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to assess the severity of vulnerabilities for prioritization. While these scores provide some insight into the potential impact of a vulnerability, they don’t factor in real-world threat data, such as the likelihood of exploitation. With new vulnerabilities discovered daily, teams don’t have the time - or the budget - to waste on fixing vulnerabilities that won’t actually reduce risk. Read on to learn more about how CVSS and EPSS compare and why using EPSS is a game changer for your vulnerability prioritization process.  What is vulnerability prioritization? Vulnerability prioritization is the process of evaluating and ranking vulnerabilities based on the potential impact they could have on an organization. The goal is to help security teams determine which vulnerabilities should be addressed, in what timeframe, or if they need to be fixed at all. This process ensures that the most critical risks are mitigat...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Software is at the heart of many enterprising supporting human resources, accounting, shipping, and manufacturing. These systems can become very complex and difficult to maintain. They are often highly customized, which can make patching difficult. However, critical vulnerabilities keep affecting these systems and put critical business data at risk.  The SANS Internet Storm Center published a report showing how the open-source ERP framework OFBiz is currently the target of new varieties of the Mirai botnet. As part of its extensive project portfolio, the Apache Foundation supports OFBiz , a Java-based framework for creating ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications. OFBiz appears to be far less prevalent than commercial alternatives. However, just as with any other ERP system, organizations rely on it for sensitive business data, and the security of these ERP systems is critical. In May this year, a critical security update was releas...

Hackers have started exploiting a recently disclosed critical vulnerability in Drupal shortly after the public release of working exploit code. Two weeks ago, Drupal security team discovered a highly critical remote code execution vulnerability, dubbed Drupalgeddon2 , in its content management system software that could allow attackers to completely take over vulnerable websites. To address this vulnerability the company immediately released updated versions of Drupal CMS without releasing any technical details of the vulnerability, giving more than a million sites enough time to patch the issue. Two days ago, security researchers at Check Point and Dofinity published complete technical details about this vulnerability (CVE-2018-7600), using which, a Russian security researcher published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for Drupalgeddon2 on GitHub. The Drupalgeddon2 vulnerability that affects all versions of Drupal from 6 to 8 allows an unauthenticated, remote attack...