The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site — Index Page

Microsoft today finally released an emergency software update to patch the recently disclosed very dangerous vulnerability in SMBv3 protocol that could let attackers launch wormable malware , which can propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-0796 , in question is a remote code execution flaw that impacts Windows 10 version 1903 and 1909, and Windows Server version 1903 and 1909. Server Message Block (SMB), which runs over TCP port 445, is a network protocol that has been designed to enable file sharing, network browsing, printing services, and interprocess communication over a network. The latest vulnerability, for which a patch update ( KB4551762 ) is now available on the Microsoft website, exists in the way SMBv3 protocol handles requests with compression headers, making it possible for unauthenticated remote attackers to execute malicious code on target servers or clients with SYSTEM privileges. Compre

Cybercriminals will stop at nothing to exploit every chance to prey on internet users. Even the disastrous spread of SARS-COV-II (the virus), which causes COVID-19 (the disease), is becoming an opportunity for them to likewise spread malware or launch cyber attacks. Reason Labs recently released a threat analysis report detailing a new attack that takes advantage of internet users' increased craving for information about the novel coronavirus that is wreaking havoc worldwide. The malware attack specifically aims to target those who are looking for cartographic presentations of the spread of COVID-19 on the Internet, and trickes them to download and run a malicious application that, on its front-end, shows a map loaded from a legit online source but in the background compromises the computer. New Threat With An Old Malware Component The latest threat, designed to steal information from unwitting victims, was first spotted by MalwareHunterTeam last week and has now be

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

Shortly after releasing its monthly batch of security updates , Microsoft late yesterday separately issued an advisory warning billions of its Windows users of a new critical, unpatched, and wormable vulnerability affecting Server Message Block 3.0 ( SMBv3 ) network communication protocol. It appears Microsoft originally planned to fix the flaw as part of its March 2020 Patch Tuesday update only, but, for some reason, it pulled the plug at the last minute, which apparently did not stop a tech company from accidentally leaking the existence of the unpatched flaw. The yet-to-be patched flaw (tracked as CVE-2020-0796 ), if exploited successfully, could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the target SMB Server or SMB Client. The belated acknowledgment from Microsoft led some researchers to call the bug " SMBGhost ." "To exploit the vulnerability against an SMB Server, an unauthenticated attacker could send a specially crafted packet to a targeted SMBv3

Microsoft today released security updates to fix a total of 115 new security vulnerabilities in various versions of its Windows operating system and related software—making March 2020 edition the biggest ever Patch Tuesday in the company's history. Of the 115 bugs spanning its various products — Microsoft Windows, Edge browser, Internet Explorer, Exchange Server, Office, Azure, Windows Defender, and Visual Studio — that received new patches, 26 have been rated as critical, 88 received a severity of important, and one is moderate in severity. However, unlike last month , none of the vulnerabilities the tech giant patched this month are listed as being publicly known or under active attack at the time of release. It's worth highlighting that the patch addresses critical flaws that could be potentially exploited by bad actors to execute malicious code by specially crafted LNK files and word documents. Titled "LNK Remote Code Execution Vulnerability" ( CVE-2020

Cybersecurity has been regarded as a necessity for all computer users, especially today when data breaches and malware attacks have become rampant. However, one of the more overlooked aspects of cybersecurity is the prevention of other forms of cybercrime, such as the spread of harmful content and predatory behavior. Most current discussions on cybersecurity revolve around organizations needing to protect customer data or for individual users to prevent their sensitive data from being intercepted. However, given the prevalence of toxic behavior, it's about time the cybersecurity community also gives internet safety, especially for children and younger users, its due attention. Israel-based startup L1ght aims to curb the spread of bad behavior online. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to detect harmful content, hate speech, bullying, and other predatory behavior in social networks, communication applications, and online video games. The firm

Remember rowhammer vulnerability? A critical issue affecting modern DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips that could allow attackers to obtain higher kernel privileges on a targeted system by repeatedly accessing memory cells and induce bit flips. To mitigate Rowhammer vulnerability on the latest DDR4 DRAM, many memory chip manufacturers added some defenses under the umbrella term Target Row Refresh (TRR) that refreshes adjacent rows when a victim row is accessed more than a threshold. But it turns out 'Target Row Refresh,' promoted as a silver bullet to mitigate rowhammer attacks, is also insufficient and could let attackers execute new hammering patterns and re-enable the bit-flip attacks on the latest hardware as well. TRRespass: The Rowhammer Fuzzing Tool Tracked as CVE-2020-10255 , the newly reported vulnerability was discovered by researchers at VUSec Lab, who today also released ' TRRespass ,' an open source black box many-sided RowHammer fuzzin

Microsoft today announced that it has successfully disrupted the botnet network of the Necurs malware, which has infected more than 9 million computers globally, and also hijacked the majority of its infrastructure. The latest botnet takedown was the result of a coordinated operation involving international police and private tech companies across 35 countries. The operation was conducted successfully after researchers successfully broke the domain generation algorithm (DGA) implemented by the Necurs malware, which helped it remain resilient for a long time. DGA is basically a technique to unpredictably generate new domain names at regular intervals, helping malware authors to continuously switch the location of C&C servers and maintain undisrupted digital communication with the infected machines. "We were then able to accurately predict over six million unique domains that would be created in the next 25 months. Microsoft reported these domains to their respective r

It appears there is no end in sight to the hardware level security vulnerabilities in Intel processors, as well as to the endless 'performance killing' patches that resolve them. Modern Intel CPUs have now been found vulnerable to a new attack that involves reversely exploiting Meltdown-type data leak vulnerabilities to bypass existing defenses, two separate teams of researchers told The Hacker News. Tracked as CVE-2020-0551 , dubbed " Load Value Injection in the Line Fill Buffers" or LVI-LFB for short, the new speculative-execution attack could let a less privileged attacker steal sensitive information—encryption keys or passwords—from the protected memory and subsequently, take significant control over a targeted system. According to experts at Bitdefender and academic researchers from a couple of universities, the new attack is particularly devastating in multi-tenant environments such as enterprise workstations or cloud servers in the datacenter. And