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If you own a Mac computer and run the latest version of Apple's operating system, macOS High Sierra, then you need to be extra careful with your computer. A serious, yet stupid vulnerability has been discovered in macOS High Sierra that allows untrusted users to quickly gain unfettered administrative (or root) control on your Mac without any password or security check, potentially leaving your data at risk. Discovered by developer Lemi Orhan Ergin on Tuesday, the vulnerability only requires anyone with physical access to the target macOS machine to enter "root" into the username field, leave the password blank, and hit the Enter a few times—and Voila! In simple words, the flaw allows an unauthorized user that gets physical access on a target computer to immediately gain the highest level of access to the computer, known as "root," without actually typing any password. Needless to say, this blindingly easy Mac exploit really scary stuff. This vulner...

Someone just DDoSed one of the most critical organs of the Internet anatomy – The Internet's DNS Root Servers . Early last week, a flood of as many as 5 Million queries per second hit many of the Internet's DNS ( Domain Name System ) Root Servers that act as the authoritative reference for mapping domain names to IP addresses and are a total of 13 in numbers. The attack, commonly known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, took place on two separate occasions. The first DDoS attack to the Internet's backbone root servers launched on November 30 that lasted 160 minutes ( almost 3 hours ), and the second one started on December 1 that lasted almost an hour. Massive Attacks Knocked Many of the 13 Root Servers Offline The DDoS attack was able to knock 3 out of the 13 DNS root servers of the Internet offline for a couple of hours. Also Read:  Secure Email Service Paid Hackers $6000 Ransom to Stop DDoS Attacks . The request queries fired...

In a move to protect its users based in Kazakhstan from government surveillance, Google, Apple and Mozilla finally today came forward and blocked Kazakhstan's government-issued root CA certificate within their respective web browsing software. Starting today, Chrome, Safari and Firefox users in Kazakhstan will see an error message stating that the " Qaznet Trust Network " certificate should not be trusted when attempting to access a website that responds with the government-issued certificate. As The Hacker News reported last month , all major Kazakh Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are forcing their customers into installing a government-issued root certificate on their devices in order to regain access to their Internet services. The root certificate in question, labeled as " trusted certificate " or "national security certificate," if installed, allows ISPs to intercept, monitor, and decrypt users' encrypted HTTPS and TLS connections, ...

Attention Linux Users! A new vulnerability has been discovered in Sudo —one of the most important, powerful, and commonly used utilities that comes as a core command installed on almost every UNIX and Linux-based operating system. The vulnerability in question is a sudo security policy bypass issue that could allow a malicious user or a program to execute arbitrary commands as root on a targeted Linux system even when the "sudoers configuration" explicitly disallows the root access. Sudo, stands for "superuser do," is a system command that allows a user to run applications or commands with the privileges of a different user without switching environments—most often, for running commands as the root user. By default on most Linux distributions, the ALL keyword in RunAs specification in /etc/sudoers file, as shown in the screenshot, allows all users in the admin or sudo groups to run any command as any valid user on the system. However, since privilege separ...

OpenSSH 3.5p1 Remote Root Exploit for FreeBSD OpenSSH 3.5p1 Remote Root Exploit for FreeBSD has been shared by kcope on twitter . The Released note is as given below : OpenSSH 3.5p1 Remote Root Exploit for FreeBSD Discovered and Exploited By Kingcope Year 2011 -- The last two days I have been investigating a vulnerability in OpenSSH affecting at least FreeBSD 4.9 and 4.11. These FreeBSD versions run OpenSSH 3.5p1 in the default install. The sshd banner for 4.11-RELEASE is "SSH-1.99-OpenSSH_3.5p1 FreeBSD-20060930". A working Remote Exploit which spawns a root shell remotely and previous to authentication was developed. The bug can be triggered both through ssh version 1 and ssh version 2 using a modified ssh client. During the investigation of the vulnerability it was found that the bug resides in the source code file "auth2-pam-freebsd.c". http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/crypto/openssh/Attic/auth2-pam-freebsd.c This file does not exist in Fre...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws that could be exploited to gain root privileges on machines running major Linux distributions. The vulnerabilities , discovered by Qualys, are listed below - CVE-2025-6018 - LPE from unprivileged to allow_active in SUSE 15's Pluggable Authentication Modules ( PAM ) CVE-2025-6019 - LPE from allow_active to root in libblockdev via the udisks daemon "These modern 'local-to-root' exploits have collapsed the gap between an ordinary logged-in user and a full system takeover," Saeed Abbasi, Senior Manager at Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), said . "By chaining legitimate services such as udisks loop-mounts and PAM/environment quirks, attackers who own any active GUI or SSH session can vault across polkit's allow_active trust zone and emerge as root in seconds." The cybersecurity company said CVE-2025-6018 is present in the PAM configuration of openSUSE Leap ...

Another terrible news for OnePlus users. Just over a month after OnePlus was caught collecting personally identifiable information on its users, the Chinese smartphone company has been found leaving a backdoor on almost all OnePlus handsets. A Twitter user, who goes by the name "Elliot Anderson" ( named after Mr. Robot's main character ), discovered a backdoor (an exploit) in all OnePlus devices running OxygenOS that could allow anyone to obtain root access to the devices. The application in question is " EngineerMode ," a diagnostic testing application made by Qualcomm for device manufacturers to easily test all hardware components of the device. This APK comes pre-installed ( accidentally left behind ) on most OnePlus devices, including OnePlus 2, 3, 3T, and the newly-launched OnePlus 5. We can confirm its existence on the OnePlus 2, 3 and 5. You can also check if this application is installed on your OnePlus device or not. For this, simply go t...

Google Android has been a primary concern of the attackers. Counting from a simple text message that could hack an Android phone remotely to the Stagefright bug making Billion users vulnerable. Now, the latest is the ' Kemoge Malware ' that has made its debut as an Adware on the Android mobile phones, allowing third-party app stores to fetch your device's information and take full control of it. Security researchers from FireEye Labs have discovered that Kemoge malicious adware family is spreading in 20 countries around the globe. Also, the origin of the Adware's attack is suspected from China. What is Kemoge? The name given to the malicious Adware family is because of its command and control (C2) domain: aps.kemoge.net. Kemoge is an Adware in the disguise of popular Apps; it has circulated in such numbers because it takes the name of popular apps and repackages them with the malicious code and make them available to the user. They even use...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is a "critical design flaw" in delegated Managed Service Accounts (dMSAs) introduced in Windows Server 2025. "The flaw can result in high-impact attacks, enabling cross-domain lateral movement and persistent access to all managed service accounts and their resources across Active Directory indefinitely," Semperis said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Put differently, successful exploitation could allow adversaries to sidestep authentication guardrails and generate passwords for all Delegated Managed Service Accounts ( dMSAs ) and group Managed Service Accounts ( gMSAs ) and their associated service accounts. The persistence and privilege escalation method has been codenamed Golden dMSA , with the cybersecurity company deeming it as low complexity owing to the fact that the vulnerability simplifies brute-force password generation. However, in order for bad actors to exploit it, they must already be ...

Waiting for the root access for your AT&T or Verizon Android phone? Then there is really a Great News for you! Geohot (aka George Hotz) - a famed cracker who was responsible for hacking the PlayStation 3 and subsequently being sued by Sony - has built and released a root tool called Towelroot on Sunday night that will let most Android smartphones users to root their Android device with one click only, as long as it has an unpatched version of the Linux kernel. EXPLOITS LINUX KERNEL VULNERABILITY  Towelroot application exploits the same vulnerability (CVE-2014-3153) which was recently disclosed by the hacker Pinkie Pie in the Linux kernel version 3.14.5 and most versions of other Android devices, which could be leveraged by hackers to potentially acquire root access on affected devices. Having root access of your device simply means you make System-level changes to your device such as accessing and modifying any file or program using any mode (single- or mu...

Multiple decade-old security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the needrestart package installed by default in Ubuntu Server (since version 21.04) that could allow a local attacker to gain root privileges without requiring user interaction. The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), which identified and reported the flaws early last month, said they are trivial to exploit, necessitating that users move quickly to apply the fixes. The vulnerabilities are believed to have existed since the introduction of interpreter support in needrestart 0.8 , which was released on April 27, 2014. "These needrestart exploits allow Local Privilege Escalation (LPE) which means that a local attacker is able to gain root privileges," Ubuntu said in an advisory, noting they have been addressed in version 3.8. "The vulnerabilities affect Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions." Needrestart is a utility that scans a system to determine the services that need to be restarted a...

If you are in Kazakhstan and unable to access the Internet service without installing a certificate, you're not alone. The Kazakhstan government has once again issued an advisory to all major local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) asking them to make it mandatory for all their customers to install government-issued root certificates on their devices in order to regain access to the Internet services. The root certificate in question, labeled as " trusted certificate " or " national security certificate ," if installed, allows ISPs to intercept and monitor users' encrypted HTTPS and TLS connections, helping the government spy on its citizens and censor content. In other words, the government is essentially launching a "man in the middle" attack on every resident of the country. But how installing a "root certificate" allow ISPs to decrypt HTTPS connection? For those unaware, your device and web browsers automatically trust digi...

Why Hackers Can't take down DNS root servers ? Interpol Chief Ronald Noble on Friday warned that a group of hackers might try to shut down internet service tomorrow. The hacking group, Anonymous, is protesting against several reasons including the crash of Wall Street and irresponsible leaders. There are 13 DNS servers that host the core databases for translating IP addresses. Anonymous hackers have announced " Operation Global Blackout ", promising to cause an Internet-wide blackout by disabling the core DNS servers. Anonymous  Hackers wants to bombard those 13 servers with traffic using a distributed denial of service attack. If the servers get too overloaded, they’ll crash and therefore be unable to fulfil DNS lookups rendering all domain names useless. But there are lots of Limitations in this type of attack : There are 13 Root Servers out there, It it not possible to shut down every of them. Even every root server is under control of various companies and they h...

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...

Yes, Now it is possible to unlock a Windows Lumia Phone for Root Access and run custom ROMs. Both Microsoft as well as Nokia have made Windows Lumia smartphones difficult to break into at a low-level by locking down their bootloaders, but a software hacker, who go by the name HeathCliff , has just proven that it is not impossible. HeathCliff has released an excellent tool called " Windows Phone Internals " that allows Windows phone owners to unlock their smartphone's bootloaders, gain root access and even create and run custom ROMs. What’s more interesting is the tool supports " most versions of Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile ". HeathCliff is very well known XDA Developer and one of the Windows Phone legends. On Windows Phone part, HeathCliff is loved mostly for the WP7 Root Tools. Windows Phone Internals or WP Internals is completely free to download though HeathCliff welcomes donations by those who have found the tool useful....

A high-severity vulnerability has been reported in Linux that could be exploited by a low privilege attacker to gain full root access on an affected system. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-1000367, was discovered by researchers at Qualys Security in Sudo's "get_process_ttyname()" function for Linux that could allow a user with Sudo privileges to run commands as root or elevate privileges to root. Sudo, stands for "superuser do!," is a program for Linux and UNIX operating systems that lets standard users run specific commands as a superuser (aka root user), such as adding users or performing system updates. The flaw actually resides in the way Sudo parsed "tty" information from the process status file in the proc filesystem. On Linux machines, sudo parses the /proc/[pid]/stat file in order to determine the device number of the process's tty from field 7 (tty_nr), Qualys Security explains in its advisory . Although the fields in t...