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Google on Friday rolled out an emergency security patch to its Chrome web browser to address a security flaw that's known to have an exploit in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2021-37973 , the vulnerability has been described as  use after free  in  Portals API , a web page navigation system that enables a page to show another page as an inset and "perform a seamless transition to a new state, where the formerly-inset page becomes the top-level document." Clément Lecigne of Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has been credited with reporting the flaw. Additional specifics pertaining to the weakness have not been disclosed in light of active exploitation and to allow a majority of the users to apply the patch, but the internet giant said it's "aware that an exploit for CVE-2021-37973 exists in the wild." The update arrives a day after Apple moved to close an actively exploited security hole in older versions of iOS and macOS ( CVE-2021-30869 ), which the TAG no

Network security company SonicWall has addressed a critical security vulnerability affecting its Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series appliances that can permit remote, unauthenticated attackers to gain administrator access on targeted devices remotely. Tracked as  CVE-2021-20034 , the arbitrary file deletion flaw is rated 9.1 out of a maximum of 10 on the CVSS scoring system, and could allow an adversary to bypass path traversal checks and delete any file, causing the devices to reboot to factory default settings. "The vulnerability is due to an improper limitation of a file path to a restricted directory potentially leading to arbitrary file deletion as 'nobody,'" the San Jose-based firm  noted  in an advisory published Thursday. "There is no evidence that this vulnerability is being exploited in the wild." SonicWall credited Wenxu Yin of Alpha Lab, Qihoo 360, with reporting the security shortcoming, which impacts SMA 100 Series — SMA 200, SMA 210,

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

A new advanced persistent threat (APT) has been behind a string of attacks against hotels across the world, along with governments, international organizations, engineering companies, and law firms. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET codenamed the cyber espionage group  FamousSparrow , which it said has been active since at least August 2019, with victims located across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, spanning several countries such as Burkina Faso, Taiwan, France, Lithuania, the U.K., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Canada, and Guatemala. Attacks mounted by the group involve exploiting known vulnerabilities in server applications such as SharePoint and Oracle Opera, in addition to the  ProxyLogon  remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server that came to light in March 2021, making it the  latest threat actor  to have had access to the exploit before details of the flaw became public. According to ESET, intrusions exploiting the flaws comme

A new as-yet unpatched weakness in Apple's iCloud Private Relay feature could be circumvented to leak users' true IP addresses from iOS devices running the latest version of the operating system. Introduced as a beta with iOS 15, which was officially released this week,  iCloud Private Relay  aims to improve anonymity on the web by employing a dual-hop architecture that effectively shields users' IP address, location, and DNS requests from websites and network service providers. It achieves this by routing users' internet traffic on the Safari browser through two proxies in order to mask who's browsing and where that data is coming from in what could be viewed as a simplified version of Tor.  However, the feature is available only to iCloud+ subscribers running iOS 15 or macOS 12 Monterey and above. "If you read the IP address from an HTTP request received by your server, you'll get the IP address of the egress proxy," FingerprintJS researcher Se

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a novel technique adopted by a threat actor to deliberately evade detection with the help of malformed digital signatures of its malware payloads. "Attackers created malformed code signatures that are treated as valid by Windows but are not able to be decoded or checked by OpenSSL code — which is used in a number of security scanning products," Google Threat Analysis Group's Neel Mehta  said  in a write-up published on Thursday. The new mechanism was observed to be exploited by a notorious family of unwanted software known as  OpenSUpdater  that's used to download and install other suspicious programs on compromised systems. Most targets of the campaign are users located in the U.S. who are prone to downloading cracked versions of games and other grey-area software. The findings come from a set of OpenSUpdater  samples   uploaded  to VirusTotal at least since mid-August. While adversaries in the past have relied on illega

Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems has rolled out patches to address three critical security vulnerabilities in its IOS XE network operating system that remote attackers could potentially abuse to execute arbitrary code with administrative privileges and trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on vulnerable devices. The list of three flaws is as follows - CVE-2021-34770  (CVSS score: 10.0) - Cisco IOS XE Software for Catalyst 9000 Family Wireless Controllers CAPWAP Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-34727  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN Software Buffer Overflow Vulnerability CVE-2021-1619  (CVSS score: 9.8) - Cisco IOS XE Software NETCONF and RESTCONF Authentication Bypass Vulnerability The most severe of the issues is CVE-2021-34770, which Cisco calls a "logic error" that occurs during the processing of  CAPWAP  (Control And Provisioning of Wireless Access Points) packets that enable a central wireless Controller to manage a group of wire

Apple on Thursday released security updates to fix multiple security vulnerabilities in older versions of  iOS  and  macOS  that it says have been detected in exploits in the wild, in addition to expanding patches for a previously plugged security weakness abused by NSO Group's Pegasus surveillance tool to target iPhone users. Chief among them is CVE-2021-30869, a type confusion flaw that resides in the kernel component  XNU  developed by Apple that could cause a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with the highest privileges. The Cupertino-based tech giant said it addressed the bug with improved state handling. Google's Threat Analysis Group, which is credited with reporting the flaw, said it detected the vulnerability being "used in conjunction with a N-day remote code execution targeting WebKit." Two other flaws include  CVE-2021-30858 and CVE-2021-30860 , both of which were resolved by the company earlier this month following disclosure from the