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A controversial piece of security and maintenance software for Mac OS X computers, known as MacKeeper, has been found to be vulnerable to a critical remote code execution vulnerability. MacKeeper antivirus software for Mac OS X is designed to improve Mac performance and security, but it is infamous for its noisy "clean up your Mac" pop-under ads that stress the need for a system cleanup. If you try to close the ad, the software will prompt you to " Leave Page/Stay on This Page " dialogues. The vulnerability details were disclosed on Friday after the patch release, which allows an attacker to execute remotely malicious commands with root privileges on Mac OS X systems when a victim visits specially crafted Web pages. MacKeeper Versions Earlier to 3.4.1 are Affected The remote code execution flaw, affecting the versions earlier to 3.4.1, caused due to the way MacKeeper malware removal software handles its custom URLs, security researchers at Secure...

Less than 24 hours after Google launched the new Phishing alert extension Password Alert , a security researcher was able to bypass the feature using deadly simple exploits. On Wednesday, the search engine giant launched a new Password Alert Chrome extension to alert its users whenever they accidentally enter their Google password on a carefully crafted phishing website that aimed at hijacking users’ account. However, security expert Paul Moore easily circumvented the technology using just seven lines of simple JavaScript code that kills phishing alerts as soon as they started to appear, defeating Google’s new Password Alert extension. Google shortly fixed the issue and released a new update to Password Alert extension that blocked the Moore’s exploit. However, Moore discovered another way to block the new version of Password Alert, as well. The first proof of concept exploit by Moore relied on a JavaScript that looks for instances of warning screen every five mil...

Security researchers have discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in Western Digital's My Cloud NAS devices that potentially allows an unauthenticated attacker to gain admin-level control to the affected devices. Western Digital's My Cloud (WD My Cloud) is one of the most popular network-attached storage (NAS) devices which is being used by businesses and individuals to host their files, as well as backup and sync them with various cloud and web-based services. The WD My Cloud devices let users not only share files in a home network but its private cloud feature also allows them to access their data from anywhere around the world at any time. However, security researchers at Securify have discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability on the WD My Cloud NAS boxes that could allow unauthenticated attackers with network access to the device to escalate their privileges to admin-level without needing to provide a password. This would eventually allow attack...

Over a month ago we reported about two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in the world's 2nd most popular database management software MySQL: MySQL Remote Root Code Execution (CVE-2016-6662) Privilege Escalation (CVE-2016-6663) At that time, Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers who discovered these vulnerabilities published technical details and proof-of-concept exploit code for the first bug only and promised to release details of the second bug (CVE-2016-6663) later. On Tuesday, Golunski has released proof-of-concept (POC) exploits for two vulnerabilities: One is the previously promised critical privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2016-6663 ), and another is a new root privilege escalation bug ( CVE-2016-6664 ) that could allow an attacker to take full control over the database. Both the vulnerabilities affect MySQL version 5.5.51 and earlier, MySQL version 5.6.32 and earlier, and MySQL version 5.7.14 and earlier, as well as MySQL forks...

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...

After last month's postponement, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is back with a massive release of fixes that includes patches for security vulnerabilities in Windows and associated software disclosed and exploited since January's patch release. Meanwhile, Adobe has also pushed out security updates for its products, releasing patches for at least seven security vulnerabilities in its Flash Player software. Microsoft patched a total of 140 separate security vulnerabilities across 18 security bulletins, nine of them critical as they allow remote code execution on the affected computer. Microsoft Finally Patches Publicly Disclosed Windows Flaws Among the "critical" security updates include a flaw in the SMB (server message block) network file sharing protocol, which had publicly disclosed exploit code since last month. The original patch released last year for this flaw was incomplete. The flaw is a memory corruption issue that could allow remote code execu...

Security researchers have published the details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits of an integer overflow vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could allow an unprivileged user to gain superuser access to the targeted system. The vulnerability, discovered by cloud-based security and compliance solutions provider Qualys, which has been dubbed "Mutagen Astronomy," affects the kernel versions released between July 2007 and July 2017, impacting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian distributions. The Mutagen Astronomy vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-14634, is a type of a local privilege escalation issue—one of the most common issues with operating systems as a whole—and exists in the Linux kernel's create_elf_tables() function that operates the memory tables. To successfully exploit this vulnerability, attackers need to have access to the targeted system and run their exploit that leads to a buffer overflow, thereby resulting in the execution of malici...

Earlier last year, security researchers from Google's Project Zero outlined a way to hijack the computers running Linux by abusing a design flaw in the memory and gaining higher kernel privileges on the system. Now, the same previously found designing weakness has been exploited to gain unfettered "root" access to millions of Android smartphones, allowing potentially anyone to take control of affected devices. Researchers in the VUSec Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have discovered a vulnerability that targets a device's dynamic random access memory (DRAM) using an attack called Rowhammer . Although we are already aware of the Rowhammer attack , this is the very first time when researchers have successfully used this attack to target mobile devices. What is DRAM Rowhammer Attack? The Rowhammer attack against mobile devices is equally dangerous because it potentially puts all critical data on millions of Android phones at risk, at least until a secu...

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...

This month has yet been kind of interesting for cyber security researchers, with Google successfully cracked SHA1 and the discovery of Cloudbleed bug in Cloudflare that caused the leakage of sensitive information across sites hosted behind Cloudflare. Besides this, Google last week disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) library, which affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10. While the Windows vulnerability has yet to be patched by the company, Google today released the details of another unpatched Windows security flaw in its browser, as Microsoft did not act within its 90-day disclosure deadline. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-0037), discovered and disclosed by Google Project Zero team's researcher Ivan Fratric, is a so-called " type confusion flaw " in a module in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer that potentially leads to arbitrary code exec...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Wednesday issued a joint advisory warning of active exploitation of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange on-premises products by nation-state actors and cybercriminals. "CISA and FBI assess that adversaries could exploit these vulnerabilities to compromise networks, steal information, encrypt data for ransom, or even execute a destructive attack," the agencies  said . "Adversaries may also sell access to compromised networks on the dark web." The attacks have primarily targeted local governments, academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, and business entities in various industry sectors, including agriculture, biotechnology, aerospace, defense, legal services, power utilities, and pharmaceutical, which the agencies say are in line with previous activity conducted by Chinese cyber actors. Tens of thousands of entities, including the  Eur...

There is a bad news for all OnePlus lovers. A security researcher has discovered four vulnerabilities that affect all OnePlus handsets, including One, X, 2, 3 and 3T, running the latest versions of OxygenOS 4.1.3 (worldwide) and below, as well as HydrogenOS 3.0 and below (for Chinese users). Damn, I am feeling bad, I myself use OnePlus. One of the unpatched vulnerabilities allows Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack against OnePlus device users, allowing a remote attacker to downgrade the device’s operating system to an older version, which could then expand the attack surface for exploitation of previously disclosed now-patched vulnerabilities. What's even worse? The other two vulnerabilities also allow an MitM attacker to replace any version of OxygenOS with HydrogenOS (or vice versa), as well as to replace the operating system with a completely different malicious ROM loaded with spying apps. The vulnerabilities have been discovered by Roee Hay of Aleph Research, HCL ...

A security researcher with Twitter alias SandboxEscaper—who two months ago publicly dropped a zero-day exploit for Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler—has yesterday released another proof-of-concept exploit for a new Windows zero-day vulnerability. SandboxEscaper posted a link to a Github page hosting a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the vulnerability that appears to be a privilege escalation flaw residing in Microsoft Data Sharing (dssvc.dll). The Data Sharing Service is a local service that runs as LocalSystem account with extensive privileges and provides data brokering between applications. The flaw could allow a low-privileged attacker to elevate their privileges on a target system, though the PoC exploit code (deletebug.exe) released by the researcher only allows a low privileged user to delete critical system files—that otherwise would only be possible via admin level privileges. "Not the same bug I posted a while back, this doesn't write garbage to files...

An anonymous hacker today publicly revealed details and proof-of-concept exploit code for an unpatched, critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in vBulletin—one of the widely used internet forum software, The Hacker News has learned. One of the reasons why the vulnerability should be viewed as a severe issue is not just because it is remotely exploitable, but also doesn't require authentication. Written in PHP, vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package that powers more than 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. According to details published on the Full Disclosure mailing list, the hacker claims to have found a remote code execution vulnerability that appears to affect vBulletin versions 5.0.0 till the latest 5.5.4. The Hacker News has independently verified that the flaw works, as described, and affects the latest version of vBulletin software, which even...

A pair of new security vulnerabilities has been discovered in the framework used by a wide variety of Mac apps leaves them open to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks. The framework in question is Sparkle that a large number of third-party OS X apps, including Camtasia, uTorrent, Duet Display and Sketch, use to facilitate automatic updates in the background. Sparkle is an open source software available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license by the Sparkle Project with the help of numerous of valuable contributors. The framework supports Mac OS X versions 10.7 through 10.11 and Xcode 5.0 through 7.0. The Sparkle vulnerabilities, discovered by Radek, a security researcher, in late January and reported by Ars reporter, affect Apple Mac apps that use: An outdated and vulnerable version of the Sparkle updater framework. An unencrypted HTTP channel to receive info from update servers. What's the Issue? The first loophole is due to the improper implemen...

Security researchers have discovered two high-severity vulnerabilities in the SHAREit Android app that could allow attackers to bypass device authentication mechanism and steal files containing sensitive from a victim's device. With over 1.5 billion users worldwide, SHAREit is a popular file sharing application for Android, iOS, Windows and Mac that has been designed to help people share video, music, files, and apps across various devices. With more than 500 million users, the SHAREit Android app was found vulnerable to a file transfer application's authentication bypass flaw and an arbitrary file download vulnerability, according to a blog post RedForce researchers shared with The Hacker News. The vulnerabilities were initially discovered over a year back in December 2017 and fixed in March 2018, but the researchers decided not to disclose their details until Monday "given the impact of the vulnerability, its big attack surface and ease of exploitation." ...