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Multiple versions of a WordPress plugin by the name of "School Management Pro" harbored a backdoor that could grant an adversary complete control over vulnerable websites. The issue, spotted in premium versions before 9.9.7, has been assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2022-1609  and is rated 10 out of 10 for severity. The backdoor, which is believed to have existed since version 8.9, enables "an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code on sites with the plugin installed," Jetpack's Harald Eilertsen  said  in a Friday write-up. School Management, developed by an India-based company called  Weblizar , is billed as a Wordpress add-on to "manage complete school operation." It also claims more than 340,000 customers of its premium and free WordPress themes and plugins. The WordPress security company noted that it uncovered the implant on May 4 after it was alerted to the presence of heavily obfuscated code in the license-checking code of t

Cisco on Friday rolled out fixes for a medium-severity vulnerability affecting IOS XR Software that it said has been exploited in real-world attacks. Tracked as CVE-2022-20821 (CVSS score: 6.5), the issue relates to an open port vulnerability that could be abused by an unauthenticated, remote attacker to connect to a Redis instance and achieve code execution. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to write to the Redis in-memory database, write arbitrary files to the container filesystem, and retrieve information about the Redis database," Cisco  said  in an advisory. "Given the configuration of the sandboxed container that the Redis instance runs in, a remote attacker would be unable to execute remote code or abuse the integrity of the Cisco IOS XR Software host system." The flaw, which it said was identified during the resolution of a technical assistance center (TAC) case, impacts Cisco 8000 Series routers running IOS XR Software that has the health

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 Linux botnet malware known as XorDdos has witnessed a 254% surge in activity over the last six months, according to latest research from Microsoft. The trojan, so named for carrying out denial-of-service attacks on Linux systems and its use of XOR-based encryption for communications with its command-and-control (C2) server, is  known  to have been  active  since at least 2014. "XorDdos' modular nature provides attackers with a versatile trojan capable of infecting a variety of Linux system architectures," Ratnesh Pandey, Yevgeny Kulakov, and Jonathan Bar Or of the Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team  said  in an exhaustive deep-dive of the malware. "Its SSH brute-force attacks are a relatively simple yet effective technique for gaining root access over a number of potential targets." Remote control over vulnerable IoT and other internet-connected devices is gained by means of secure shell (SSH) brute-force attacks, enabling the malware to form a botnet

Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) on Thursday pointed fingers at a North Macedonian spyware developer named Cytrox for developing exploits against five zero-day (aka 0-day) flaws, four in Chrome and one in Android, to target Android users. "The 0-day exploits were used alongside n-day exploits as the developers took advantage of the time difference between when some critical bugs were patched but not flagged as security issues and when these patches were fully deployed across the Android ecosystem," TAG researchers Clement Lecigne and Christian Resell  said . Cytrox is alleged to have packaged the exploits and sold them to different government-backed actors located in Egypt, Armenia, Greece, Madagascar, Côte d'Ivoire, Serbia, Spain, and Indonesia, who, in turn, weaponized the bugs in at least three different campaigns. The commercial surveillance company is the maker of  Predator , an implant  analogous  to that of NSO Group's  Pegasus , and is known to hav

A case of software supply chain attack has been observed in the Rust programming language's  crate registry  that leveraged typosquatting techniques to publish a rogue library containing malware. Cybersecurity firm SentinelOne dubbed the attack " CrateDepression ." Typosquatting attacks  take place  when an adversary mimics the name of a popular package on a public registry in hopes that developers will accidentally download the malicious package instead of the legitimate library. In this case, the crate in question is "rustdecimal," a typosquat of the real " rust_decimal " package that's been downloaded over 3.5 million times to date. The package was  flagged  earlier this month on May 3 by Askar Safin, a Moscow-based developer. According to an  advisory  published by the Rust maintainers, the crate is said to have been first pushed on March 25, 2022, attracting fewer than 500 downloads before it was permanently removed from the repository.

The North Korea-backed Lazarus Group has been observed leveraging the  Log4Shell vulnerability  in VMware Horizon servers to deploy the NukeSped (aka Manuscrypt) implant against targets located in its southern counterpart. "The attacker used the Log4j vulnerability on VMware Horizon products that were not applied with the security patch," AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center (ASEC)  said  in a new report. The intrusions are said to have been first discovered in April, although  multiple threat actors , including those aligned with  China  and  Iran , have employed the same approach to further their objectives over the past few months. NukeSped is a backdoor that can perform various malicious activities based on commands received from a remote attacker-controlled domain. Last year, Kaspersky disclosed a spear-phishing campaign aimed at stealing critical data from defense companies using a NukeSped variant called  ThreatNeedle . Some of the key functions of the bac

Fraudulent domains masquerading as Microsoft's Windows 11 download portal are attempting to trick users into deploying trojanized installation files to infect systems with the Vidar information stealer malware. "The spoofed sites were created to distribute malicious ISO files which lead to a Vidar info-stealer infection on the endpoint," Zscaler  said  in a report. "These variants of Vidar malware fetch the C2 configuration from attacker-controlled social media channels hosted on Telegram and Mastodon network." Some of the rogue distribution vector domains, which were registered last month on April 20, consist of ms-win11[.]com, win11-serv[.]com, and win11install[.]com, and ms-teams-app[.]net. In addition, the cybersecurity firm cautioned that the threat actor behind the impersonation campaign is also leveraging backdoored versions of Adobe Photoshop and other legitimate software such as Microsoft Teams to deliver Vidar malware. The ISO file, for its part,