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Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed two new vulnerabilities in Linux-based operating systems that, if successfully exploited, could let attackers circumvent mitigations for speculative attacks such as  Spectre  and obtain sensitive information from kernel memory. Discovered by  Piotr Krysiuk  of Symantec's Threat Hunter team, the flaws — tracked as CVE-2020-27170 and CVE-2020-27171 (CVSS scores: 5.5) — impact all Linux kernels prior to 5.11.8. Patches for the security issues were released on March 20, with Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat deploying fixes for the vulnerabilities in their respective Linux distributions. While  CVE-2020-27170  can be abused to reveal content from any location within the kernel memory,  CVE-2020-27171 can be used to retrieve data from a 4GB range of kernel memory. First documented in January 2018,  Spectre and Meltdown  take advantage of flaws in modern processors to  leak data  that are currently processed on the computer, thereby allowing

Email spoofing is a growing problem for an organization's security. Spoofing occurs when a hacker sends an email that appears to have been sent from a trusted source/domain. Email spoofing is not a new concept. Defined as "the forgery of an email address header to make the message appear as if it was sent from a person or location other than the actual sender," it has plagued brands for decades.  When an email is sent, the From address doesn't show which server the email was actually sent from - instead, it shows the domain that was entered when the address was created so as not to arouse suspicion among recipients. With the amount of data flowing through email servers these days, it should come as no surprise that spoofing is a problem for businesses. At the end of 2020, we found that phishing incidents were up a staggering 220% year-over-year at the height of the global pandemic scare. Since not all spoofing attacks are large-scale, the actual number could be muc

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

In yet another instance of a software supply chain attack, unidentified actors hacked the official Git server of the PHP programming language and pushed unauthorized updates to insert a secret backdoor into its source code. The two malicious commits were pushed to the self-hosted "php-src" repository hosted on the git.php.net server, illicitly using the names of Rasmus Lerdorf, the author of the programming language, and Nikita Popov, a software developer at Jetbrains. The changes are said to have been made yesterday on March 28. "We don't yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points towards a compromise of the git.php.net server (rather than a compromise of an individual git account)," Popov  said  in an announcement. The changes, which were committed as " Fix Typo " in an attempt to slip through undetected as a typographical correction, involved provisions for execution of arbitrary PHP code. "This line executes PHP code fro

Researchers have discovered a new information-stealing trojan, which targets Android devices with an onslaught of data-exfiltration capabilities — from collecting browser searches to recording audio and phone calls. While malware on Android has previously taken the guise of copycat apps, which go under names similar to legitimate pieces of software, this sophisticated new malicious app masquerades itself as a System Update application to take control of compromised devices. "The spyware creates a notification if the device's screen is off when it receives a command using the Firebase messaging service," Zimperium researchers  said  in a Friday analysis. "The 'Searching for update..' is not a legitimate notification from the operating system, but the spyware." Once installed, the sophisticated spyware campaign sets about its task by registering the device with a Firebase command-and-control (C2) server with information such as battery percentage, sto

Merely weeks after releasing out-of-band patches for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and watchOS, Apple has issued yet another security update for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch to fix a critical zero-day weakness that it says is being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2021-1879 , the vulnerability relates to a WebKit flaw that could enable adversaries to process maliciously crafted web content that may result in universal cross-site scripting attacks. "This issue was addressed by improved management of object lifetimes," the iPhone maker noted. Apple has credited Clement Lecigne and Billy Leonard of Google's Threat Analysis Group for discovering and reporting the issue. While details of the flaw have not been disclosed, the company said it's aware of reports that CVE-2021-1879 may have been actively exploited. Updates are available for the following devices: iOS 12.5.2  - Phone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, and iPod touch (6t

The maintainers of OpenSSL have released a fix for two high-severity security flaws in its software that could be exploited to carry out denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and bypass certificate verification. Tracked as CVE-2021-3449 and CVE-2021-3450 , both the  vulnerabilities  have been resolved in an update (version OpenSSL 1.1.1k) released on Thursday. While CVE-2021-3449 affects all OpenSSL 1.1.1 versions, CVE-2021-3450 impacts OpenSSL versions 1.1.1h and newer. OpenSSL is a software library consisting of cryptographic functions that implement the Transport Layer Security protocol with the goal of securing communications sent over a computer network. According to an advisory published by OpenSSL, CVE-2021-3449 concerns a potential DoS vulnerability arising due to NULL pointer dereferencing that can cause an OpenSSL TLS server to crash if in the course of renegotiation the client transmits a malicious "ClientHello" message during the  handshake  between the server and

New research into  5G architecture  has uncovered a security flaw in its network slicing and virtualized network functions that could be exploited to allow data access and denial of service attacks between different network slices on a mobile operator's 5G network. AdaptiveMobile shared its findings with the GSM Association (GSMA) on February 4, 2021, following which the weaknesses were collectively designated as CVD-2021-0047. 5G is an evolution of current 4G broadband cellular network technology, and is based on what's called a service-based architecture (SBA) that provides a modular framework to deploy a set of interconnected network functions, allowing consumers to discover and authorize their access to a plethora of services. The network functions are also responsible for registering subscribers, managing sessions and subscriber profiles, storing subscriber data, and connecting the users (UE or user equipment) to the internet via a base station (gNB). What's more,

IT infrastructure management provider SolarWinds on Thursday released a new update to its Orion networking monitoring tool with fixes for four security vulnerabilities, counting two weaknesses that could be exploited by an authenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution (RCE). Chief among them is a JSON deserialization flaw that allows an authenticated user to execute arbitrary code via the  test alert actions  feature available in the Orion Web Console, which lets users simulate network events (e.g., an unresponsive server) that can be configured to trigger an alert during setup. It has been rated critical in severity. A second issue concerns a high-risk vulnerability that could be leveraged by an adversary to achieve RCE in the Orion Job Scheduler. "In order to exploit this, an attacker first needs to know the credentials of an unprivileged local account on the Orion Server," SolarWinds  said  in its release notes. The advisory is light on technical specifics,

More than a week after Microsoft released a  one-click mitigation tool  to mitigate cyberattacks targeting on-premises Exchange servers, the company  disclosed  that patches have been applied to 92% of all internet-facing servers affected by the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities. The development, a 43% improvement from the previous week, caps off a whirlwind of espionage and malware campaigns that hit thousands of companies worldwide, with as many as 10 advanced persistent threat (APT) groups opportunistically moving quickly to exploit the bugs. According to telemetry data from RiskIQ, there are roughly 29,966 instances of Microsoft Exchange servers still exposed to attacks, down from 92,072 on March 10. While Exchange servers were under assault by multiple Chinese-linked state-sponsored hacking groups prior to  Microsoft's patch  on March 2, the release of  public proof-of-concept  exploits fanned a feeding frenzy of infections, opening the door for escalating attacks like ransomwar