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Yet another password vulnerability has been uncovered in macOS High Sierra, which unlocks App Store System Preferences with any password (or no password at all). A new password bug has been discovered in the latest version of macOS High Sierra that allows anyone with access to your Mac to unlock App Store menu in System Preferences with any random password or no password at all. The impact of this vulnerability is nowhere as serious as the previously disclosed root login bug in Apple's desktop OS that enabled access to the root superuser account simply by entering a blank password on macOS High Sierra 10.13.1. As reported on Open Radar earlier this week, the vulnerability impacts macOS version 10.13.2 and requires the attacker to be logged in with an administrator-level account for this vulnerability to work. I checked the bug on my fully updated Mac laptop, and it worked by entering a blank password as well as any random password. If you're running latest macOS

A more dramatic revelation of 2018—an outsider can secretly eavesdrop on your private end-to-end encrypted group chats on WhatsApp and Signal messaging apps. Considering protection against three types of attackers—malicious user, network attacker, and malicious server—an end-to-end encryption protocol plays a vital role in securing instant messaging services. The primary purpose of having end-to-end encryption is to stop trusting the intermediate servers in such a way that no one, not even the company or the server that transmits the data, can decrypt your messages or abuse its centralized position to manipulate the service. In order words—assuming the worst-case scenario—a corrupt company employee should not be able to eavesdrop on the end-to-end encrypted communication by any mean. However, so far even the popular end-to-end encrypted messaging services, like WhatsApp, Threema and Signal, have not entirely achieved zero-knowledge system. Researchers from Ruhr-Universität

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

If you think that only CPU updates that address this year's major security flaws— Meltdown and Spectre —are the only ones you are advised to grab immediately, there are a handful of major security flaws that you should pay attention to. Microsoft has issued its first Patch Tuesday for 2018 to address 56 CVE-listed flaws, including a zero-day vulnerability in MS Office related that had been actively exploited by several threat groups in the wild. Sixteen of the security updates are listed as critical, 38 are rated important, one is rated moderate, and one is rated as low in severity. The updates address security flaws in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Edge, ChakraCore, ASP.NET, and the .NET Framework. The zero-day vulnerability ( CVE-2018-0802 ), described by Microsoft as a memory corruption flaw in Office, is already being targeted in the wild by several threat actor groups in the past few months. The vulnerability, discovered by several researchers from Chinese com

The Wi-Fi Alliance has finally announced the long-awaited next generation of the wireless security protocol—Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA3). WPA3 will replace the existing WPA2—the network security protocol that has been around for at least 15 years and widely used by billions of wireless devices every day, including smartphones, laptops and Internet of things. However, WPA2 has long been considered to be insecure due to its common security issue, that is " unencrypted " open Wi-Fi networks, which allows anyone on the same WiFi network to intercept connections on other devices. Most importantly, WPA2 has also recently been found vulnerable to KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack) that makes it possible for attackers to intercept and decrypt Wi-Fi traffic passing between computers and access points. The new standard of Wi-Fi security, which will be available for both personal and enterprise wireless devices later this year, offers improved security and privacy. WPA3

Security researchers have discovered several severe vulnerabilities and a secret hard-coded backdoor in Western Digital's My Cloud NAS devices that could allow remote attackers to gain unrestricted root access to the device. Western Digital's My Cloud (WDMyCloud) is one of the most popular network-attached storage devices which is being used by individuals and businesses to host their files, and automatically backup and sync them with various cloud and web-based services. The device lets users not only share files in a home network, but the private cloud feature also allows them to access their data from anywhere at any time. Since these devices have been designed to be connected over the Internet, the hardcoded backdoor would leave user data open to hackers. GulfTech research and development team has recently published an advisory detailing a hardcoded backdoor and several vulnerabilities it found in WD My Cloud storage devices that could allow remote attackers to

Recently uncovered two huge processor vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre have taken the whole world by storm, while vendors are rushing out to patch the vulnerabilities in its products. The issues apply to all modern processors and affect nearly all operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, FreeBSD, and more), smartphones and other computing devices made in the past 20 years. What are Spectre and Meltdown? We have explained both , Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715), exploitation techniques in our previous article. In short, Spectre and Meltdown are the names of security vulnerabilities found in many processors from Intel, ARM and AMD that could allow attackers to steal your passwords, encryption keys and other private information. Both attacks abuse 'speculative execution' to access privileged memory—including those allocated for the kernel—from a low privileged user process like a malicious app running on a

Security researchers have unearthed multiple vulnerabilities in hundreds of GPS services that could enable attackers to expose a whole host of sensitive data on millions of online location tracking devices managed by vulnerable GPS services. The series of vulnerabilities discovered by two security researchers, Vangelis Stykas and Michael Gruhn, who dubbed the bugs as ' Trackmageddon ' in a report , detailing the key security issues they have encountered in many GPS tracking services. Trackmageddon affects several GPS services that harvest geolocation data of users from a range of smart GPS-enabled devices, including children trackers, car trackers, pet trackers among others, in an effort to enable their owners to keep track of where they are. According to the researchers, the vulnerabilities include easy-to-guess passwords (such as 123456), exposed folders, insecure API endpoints, and insecure direct object reference (IDOR) issues. By exploiting these flaws, an unaut

Unlike the initial reports suggested about Intel chips being vulnerable to some severe 'memory leaking' flaws, full technical details about the vulnerabilities have now been emerged, which revealed that almost every modern processor since 1995 is vulnerable to the issues. Disclosed today by Google Project Zero , the vulnerabilities potentially impact all major CPUs, including those from AMD, ARM, and Intel—threatening almost all PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, regardless of manufacturer or operating system. These hardware vulnerabilities have been categorized into two attacks , named Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715), which could allow attackers to steal sensitive data which is currently processed on the computer. Both attacks take advantage of a feature in chips known as "speculative execution," a technique used by most modern CPUs to optimize performance. "In order to improve performance, many CPUs may choose t

UPDATE: Researchers have finally disclosed complete technical details of two kernel side-channel attacks, Meltdown and Spectre — which affect not only Intel but also systems and devices running AMD, ARM processors —allowing attackers to steal sensitive data from the system memory. ____________ The first week of the new year has not yet been completed, and very soon a massive vulnerability is going to hit hundreds of millions of Windows, Linux, and Mac users worldwide. According to a blog post published yesterday, the core team of Linux kernel development has prepared a critical kernel update without releasing much information about the vulnerability. Multiple researchers on Twitter  confirmed that Intel processors (x86-64) have a severe hardware-level issue that could allow attackers to access protected kernel memory, which primarily includes information like passwords, login keys, and files cached from disk. The security patch implements kernel page-table isolation (KP

A critical security vulnerability has been reported in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL database—which could allow remote attackers to perform dangerous database operations just by tricking administrators into clicking a link. Discovered by an Indian security researcher, Ashutosh Barot , the vulnerability is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack and affects phpMyAdmin versions 4.7.x ( prior to 4.7.7 ). Cross-site request forgery vulnerability, also known as XSRF, is an attack wherein an attacker tricks an authenticated user into executing an unwanted action. According to an advisory released by phpMyAdmin, " by deceiving a user to click on a crafted URL, it is possible to perform harmful database operations such as deleting records, dropping/truncating tables, etc. " phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB and is widely used to manage the database for websites created with WordPress,