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Google has rolled out monthly security patches for Android to address a number of flaws, including a zero-day bug that it said may have been exploited in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2023-35674 , the high-severity vulnerability is described as a case of privilege escalation impacting the  Android Framework . "There are indications that CVE-2023-35674 may be under limited, targeted exploitation," the company  said  in its Android Security Bulletin for September 2023 without delving into additional specifics. The update also addresses three other privilege escalation flaws in Framework, with the search giant noting that the most severe of these issues "could lead to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges needed" sans any user interaction. Google said it has further plugged a critical security vulnerability in the System component that could lead to remote code execution without requiring interaction on the part of the victim. "The severity assessment is

An unknown threat actor has been observed weaponizing high-severity security flaws in the MinIO high-performance object storage system to achieve unauthorized code execution on affected servers. Cybersecurity and incident response firm Security Joes said the intrusion leveraged a publicly available exploit chain to backdoor the MinIO instance. The comprises  CVE-2023-28432  (CVSS score: 7.5) and  CVE-2023-28434  (CVSS score: 8.8), the former of which was  added  to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on April 21, 2023. The two vulnerabilities "possess the potential to expose sensitive information present within the compromised installation and facilitate remote code execution (RCE) on the host where the MinIO application is operational," Security Joes  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. In the attack chain investigated by the company, the flaws are said to have been weaponized b

Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has been made available for a recently disclosed and patched critical flaw impacting VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRealize Network Insight). The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2023-34039 , is rated 9.8 out of a maximum of 10 for severity and has been described as a case of authentication bypass due to a lack of unique cryptographic key generation. "A malicious actor with network access to Aria Operations for Networks could bypass SSH authentication to gain access to the Aria Operations for Networks CLI," VMware said earlier this week. Summoning Team's Sina Kheirkhah, who published the PoC following an analysis of the patch released by VMware, said the root cause can be traced back to a bash script containing a method named refresh_ssh_keys(), which is responsible for overwriting the current SSH keys for the support and ubuntu users in the authorized_keys file. "There is SSH authentication in place; however, VMware forgot to regenerate th

Recently disclosed security flaws impacting Juniper firewalls, Openfire, and Apache RocketMQ servers have come under active exploitation in the wild, according to multiple reports. The Shadowserver Foundation  said  that it's "seeing exploitation attempts from multiple IPs for Juniper J-Web CVE-2023-36844 (& friends) targeting /webauth_operation.php endpoint," the same day a proof-of-concept (PoC) became available. The  issues , tracked as CVE-2023-36844, CVE-2023-36845, CVE-2023-36846, and CVE-2023-36847, reside in the J-Web component of Junos OS on Juniper SRX and EX Series. They could be chained by an unauthenticated, network-based attacker to execute arbitrary code on susceptible installations. Patches for the flaw were released on August 17, 2023, a week after which watchTowr Labs published a proof-of-concept (PoC) by combining CVE-2023-36846 and CVE-2023-36845 to execute a PHP file containing malicious shellcode. Currently, there are  more than 8,200 Junip

VMware has released software updates to correct two security vulnerabilities in Aria Operations for Networks that could be potentially exploited to bypass authentication and gain remote code execution. The most severe of the flaws is CVE-2023-34039 (CVSS score: 9.8), which relates to a case of authentication bypass arising as a result of a lack of unique cryptographic key generation. "A malicious actor with network access to Aria Operations for Networks could bypass SSH authentication to gain access to the Aria Operations for Networks CLI," the company  said  in an advisory. ProjectDiscovery researchers Harsh Jaiswal and Rahul Maini have been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. The second weakness, CVE-2023-20890 (CVSS score: 7.2), is an arbitrary file write vulnerability impacting Aria Operations for Networks that could be abused by an adversary with administrative access to write files to arbitrary locations and achieve remote code execution. Credited

Unpatched Citrix NetScaler systems exposed to the internet are being targeted by unknown threat actors in what's suspected to be a ransomware attack. Cybersecurity company Sophos is  tracking  the activity cluster under the moniker  STAC4663 . Attack chains involve the exploitation of  CVE-2023-3519 , a critical code injection vulnerability impacting NetScaler ADC and Gateway servers that could facilitate unauthenticated remote code execution. In one intrusion detected in mid-August 2023, the security flaw is said to have been used to conduct a domain-wide attack, including injecting payloads into legitimate executables such as the Windows Update Agent (wuauclt.exe) and the Windows Management Instrumentation Provider Service (wmiprvse.exe). An analysis of the payload is underway. Other notable aspects include the distribution of obfuscated PowerShell scripts, PHP web shells, and the use of an Estonian service called BlueVPS for malware staging. Sophos said the modus operandi

Cyber attacks on e-commerce applications are a common trend in 2023 as e-commerce businesses become more omnichannel, they build and deploy increasingly more API interfaces, with threat actors constantly exploring more ways to exploit vulnerabilities. This is why regular testing and ongoing monitoring are necessary to fully protect web applications, identifying weaknesses so they can be mitigated quickly. In this article, we will discuss the recent Honda e-commerce platform attack, how it happened, and its impact on the business and its clients. In addition, to the importance of application security testing, we will also discuss the different areas of vulnerability testing and its various phases. Finally, we will provide details on how a long-term preventative solution such as  PTaaS  can protect e-commerce businesses and the differences between continuous testing (PTaaS) and standard pen testing. The 2023 Honda E-commerce Platform Attack Honda's power equipment, lawn, garden, and

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning that Barracuda Networks Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances patched against a recently disclosed critical flaw continue to be at risk of potential compromise from suspected Chinese hacking groups. It also  deemed  the fixes as "ineffective" and that it "continues to observe active intrusions and considers all affected Barracuda ESG appliances to be compromised and vulnerable to this exploit." Tracked as  CVE-2023-2868  (CVSS score: 9.8), the zero-day bug is said to have been weaponized as early as October 2022, more than seven months before the security hole was plugged. Google-owned Mandiant is tracking the China-nexus activity cluster under the name  UNC4841 . The remote command injection vulnerability, impacting versions 5.1.3.001 through 9.2.0.006, allows for unauthorized execution of system commands with administrator privileges on the ESG product. In the attacks observed so far, a successful b

Thousands of  Openfire XMPP servers  are unpatched against a recently disclosed high-severity flaw and are susceptible to a new exploit, according to a  new report  from VulnCheck. Tracked as  CVE-2023-32315  (CVSS score: 7.5), the vulnerability relates to a path traversal vulnerability in Openfire's administrative console that could permit an unauthenticated attacker to access otherwise restricted pages reserved for privileged users. It affects all versions of the software released since April 2015, starting with version 3.10.0. It was remediated by its developer, Ignite Realtime, earlier this May with the release of versions 4.6.8, 4.7.5, and 4.8.0. "Path traversal protections were already in place to protect against exactly this kind of attack, but didn't defend against certain non-standard URL encoding for UTF-16 characters that were not supported by the embedded web server that was in use at the time," the maintainers  said  in a detailed advisory. "A

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a critical security flaw in Adobe ColdFusion to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, cataloged as  CVE-2023-26359  (CVSS score: 9.8), relates to a deserialization flaw present in Adobe ColdFusion 2018 (Update 15 and earlier) and ColdFusion 2021 (Update 5 and earlier) that could result in arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user without requiring any interaction. Deserialization  (aka unmarshaling) refers to the process of reconstructing a data structure or an object from a byte stream. But when it's performed without validating its source or sanitizing its contents, it can lead to  unexpected consequences  such as code execution or denial-of-service (DoS). It was  patched  by Adobe as part of updates issued in March 2023. As of writing, it's immediately not clear how the flaw is being  abused in the wil

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the WinRAR utility that could be potentially exploited by a threat actor to achieve remote code execution on Windows systems. Tracked as  CVE-2023-40477  (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerability has been described as a case of improper validation while processing recovery volumes. "The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a memory access past the end of an allocated buffer," the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI)  said  in an advisory. "An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current process." Successful exploitation of the flaw requires user interaction in that the target must be lured into visiting a malicious page or by simply opening a booby-trapped archive file. A security researcher, who goes by the alias goodbyeselene, has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on June 8, 2023. The issue has been address

Networking hardware company Juniper Networks has released an "out-of-cycle" security update to address multiple flaws in the J-Web component of Junos OS that could be combined to achieve remote code execution on susceptible installations. The four vulnerabilities have a cumulative CVSS rating of 9.8, making them Critical in severity. They affect all versions of Junos OS on SRX and EX Series. "By chaining exploitation of these vulnerabilities, an unauthenticated, network-based attacker may be able to remotely execute code on the devices," the company  said  in an advisory released on August 17, 2023. The J-Web interface allows users to configure, manage, and monitor Junos OS devices. A brief description of the flaws is as follows - CVE-2023-36844  and  CVE-2023-36845  (CVSS scores: 5.3) - Two PHP external variable modification vulnerabilities in J-Web of Juniper Networks Junos OS on EX Series and SRX Series allows an unauthenticated, network-based attacker to

A previously undetected attack method called  NoFilter  has been found to abuse the Windows Filtering Platform ( WFP ) to achieve privilege escalation in the Windows operating system. "If an attacker has the ability to execute code with admin privilege and the target is to perform  LSASS Shtinkering , these privileges are not enough," Ron Ben Yizhak, a security researcher at Deep Instinct, told The Hacker News. "Running as "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" is required. The techniques described in this research can escalate from admin to SYSTEM." The  findings  were presented at the DEF CON security conference over the weekend. The starting point of the  research  is an in-house tool called RPC Mapper the cybersecurity company used to map remote procedure call ( RPC ) methods, specifically those that invoke  WinAPI , leading to the discovery of a method named "BfeRpcOpenToken," which is part of WFP. WFP is a  set of API and system services  that's

Cybersecurity researchers have documented a novel post-exploit persistence technique on iOS 16 that could be abused to fly under the radar and maintain access to an Apple device even when the victim believes it is offline. The method "tricks the victim into thinking their device's Airplane Mode works when in reality the attacker (following successful device exploit) has planted an artificial Airplane Mode which edits the UI to display Airplane Mode icon and cuts internet connection to all apps except the attacker application," Jamf Threat Labs researchers Hu Ke and Nir Avraham said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Airplane Mode , as the name implies, allows users to turn off wireless features in their devices, effectively preventing them from connecting to Wi-Fi networks, cellular data, and Bluetooth as well as sending or receiving calls and text messages. The approach devised by Jamf, in a nutshell, provides an illusion to the user that the Airplane Mode is

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a critical security flaw in Citrix ShareFile storage zones controller to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active in-the-wild exploitation. Tracked as  CVE-2023-24489  (CVSS score: 9.8), the shortcoming has been described as an improper access control bug that, if successfully exploited, could allow an unauthenticated attacker to compromise vulnerable instances remotely. The problem is rooted in ShareFile's handling of cryptographic operations, enabling adversaries to upload arbitrary files, resulting in remote code execution. "This vulnerability affects all currently supported versions of customer-managed ShareFile storage zones controller before version 5.11.24," Citrix  said  in an advisory released in June. Dylan Pindur of Assetnote has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. It's worth noting that the  first signs of exploitatio

Nearly 2,000 Citrix NetScaler instances have been compromised with a backdoor by weaponizing a recently disclosed critical security vulnerability as part of a large-scale attack. "An adversary appears to have exploited CVE-2023-3519 in an automated fashion, placing web shells on vulnerable NetScalers to gain persistent access," NCC Group  said  in an advisory released Tuesday. "The adversary can execute arbitrary commands with this webshell, even when a NetScaler is patched and/or rebooted." CVE-2023-3519 refers to a critical code injection vulnerability impacting NetScaler ADC and Gateway servers that could lead to unauthenticated remote code execution. It was patched by Citrix last month. The development comes a week after the Shadowserver Foundation  said  it identified close to 7,000 vulnerable, unpatched NetScaler ADC and Gateway instances online and the flaw is being abused to drop PHP web shells on vulnerable servers for remote access. A follow-up anal

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the Python URL parsing function that could be exploited to bypass domain or protocol filtering methods implemented with a blocklist, ultimately resulting in arbitrary file reads and command execution. "urlparse has a parsing problem when the entire URL starts with blank characters," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in a Friday advisory. "This problem affects both the parsing of hostname and scheme, and eventually causes any blocklisting methods to fail." The flaw has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2023-24329  and carries a CVSS score of 7.5. Security researcher Yebo Cao has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue in August 2022. It has been addressed in the following versions - >= 3.12 3.11.x >= 3.11.4 3.10.x >= 3.10.12 3.9.x >= 3.9.17 3.8.x >= 3.8.17, and  3.7.x >= 3.7.17 urllib.parse  is a widely used parsing function that makes it possible to break dow

A set of 16 high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in the  CODESYS V3  software development kit (SDK) that could result in remote code execution and denial-of-service under specific conditions, posing risks to operational technology (OT) environments. The flaws, tracked from CVE-2022-47378 through CVE-2022-47393 and dubbed  CoDe16 , carry a CVSS score of 8.8 with the exception of CVE-2022-47391, which has a severity rating of 7.5. Twelve of the flaws are buffer overflow vulnerabilities. "Exploitation of the discovered vulnerabilities, which affect all versions of CODESYS V3 prior to version 3.5.19.0, could put operational technology (OT) infrastructure at risk of attacks, such as remote code execution (RCE) and denial-of-service (DoS)," Vladimir Tokarev of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Community  said  in a report. While a successful weaponization of the flaws requires user authentication as well as an in-depth knowledge of the proprietary protocol of CODESY

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a recently patched security flaw in Microsoft's .NET and Visual Studio products to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Tracked as  CVE-2023-38180  (CVSS score: 7.5), the high-severity flaw relates to a case denial-of-service (DoS) impacting .NET and Visual Studio. It was  addressed  by Microsoft as part of its August 2023 Patch Tuesday updates shipped earlier this week, tagging it with an "Exploitation More Likely" assessment. While exact details surrounding the nature of exploitation are unclear, the Windows maker has acknowledged the existence of a proof-of-concept (PoC) in its advisory. It also said that attacks leveraging the flaw can be pulled off without any additional privileges or user interaction. "Proof-of-concept exploit code is available, or an attack demonstration is not practical for most systems," the company 

Microsoft has patched a total of  74 flaws  in its software as part of the company's Patch Tuesday updates for August 2023, down from the voluminous 132 vulnerabilities the company fixed last month. This comprises six Critical, 67 Important, and one Moderate severity vulnerabilities. Released along with the security improvements are two defense-in-depth updates for Microsoft Office ( ADV230003 ) and the Memory Integrity System Readiness Scan Tool ( ADV230004 ). The updates are also in addition to 30 issues addressed by Microsoft in its Chromium-based Edge browser since last month's Patch Tuesday edition and one side-channel flaw impacting certain processor models offered by AMD ( CVE-2023-20569  or  Inception ). ADV230003 concerns an already known security flaw tracked as  CVE-2023-36884 , a remote code execution vulnerability in Office and Windows HTML that has been actively exploited by the Russia-linked RomCom threat actor in attacks targeting Ukraine as well as pro-Ukr