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The threat actors behind the BlackByte ransomware group have been observed likely exploiting a recently patched security flaw impacting VMware ESXi hypervisors, while also leveraging various vulnerable drivers to disarm security protections. "The BlackByte ransomware group continues to leverage tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have formed the foundation of its tradecraft since its inception, continuously iterating its use of vulnerable drivers to bypass security protections and deploying a self-propagating, wormable ransomware encryptor," Cisco Talos said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The exploitation of CVE-2024-37085 , an authentication bypass vulnerability in VMware ESXi that has also been weaponized by other ransomware groups, is a sign that the e-crime group is pivoting from established approaches. BlackByte made its debut in the second half of 2021 and is purported to be one of the autonomous ransomware offshoots to have emerged

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a critical security flaw affecting the Apache OFBiz open-source enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, known as CVE-2024-38856, carries a CVSS score of 9.8, indicating critical severity. "Apache OFBiz contains an incorrect authorization vulnerability that could allow remote code execution via a Groovy payload in the context of the OFBiz user process by an unauthenticated attacker," CISA said. Details of the vulnerability first came to light earlier this month after SonicWall described it as a patch bypass for another flaw, CVE-2024-36104, that enables remote code execution via specially crafted requests. "A flaw in the override view functionality exposes critical endpoints to unauthenticated threat actors using a crafted request, paving the way for remote

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the WPML WordPress multilingual plugin that could allow authenticated users to execute arbitrary code remotely under certain circumstances. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-6386 (CVSS score: 9.9), impacts all versions of the plugin before 4.6.13, which was released on August 20, 2024. Arising due to missing input validation and sanitization, the issue makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level access and above, to execute code on the server. WPML is a popular plugin used for building multilingual WordPress sites. It has over one million active installations. Security researcher stealthcopter, who discovered and reported CVE-2024-6386, said the problem lies in the plugin's handling of shortcodes that are used to insert post content such as audio, images, and videos. "Specifically, the plugin uses Twig templates for rendering content in shortcodes but fails to properly sanitize input, leadi

Details have emerged about a now-patched vulnerability in Microsoft 365 Copilot that could enable the theft of sensitive user information using a technique called ASCII smuggling. " ASCII Smuggling is a novel technique that uses special Unicode characters that mirror ASCII but are actually not visible in the user interface," security researcher Johann Rehberger said . "This means that an attacker can have the [large language model] render, to the user, invisible data, and embed them within clickable hyperlinks. This technique basically stages the data for exfiltration!" The entire attack strings together a number of attack methods to fashion them into a reliable exploit chain. This includes the following steps - Trigger prompt injection via malicious content concealed in a document shared on the chat to seize control of the chatbot Using a prompt injection payload to instruct Copilot to search for more emails and documents, a technique called automatic too

Google has revealed that a security flaw that was patched as part of a software update rolled out last week to its Chrome browser has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-7965 , the vulnerability has been described as an inappropriate implementation bug in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Inappropriate implementation in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 128.0.6613.84 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page," according to a description of the bug in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). A security researcher who goes by the online pseudonym TheDog has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on July 30, 2024, earning them a bug bounty of $11,000. Additional specifics about the nature of the attacks exploiting the flaw or the identity of the threat actors that may be utilizing it have not been released. The tech giant, however, acknowledged that it's aware of the

SonicWall has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting its firewalls that, if successfully exploited, could grant malicious actors unauthorized access to the devices. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-40766 (CVSS score: 9.3), has been described as an improper access control bug. "An improper access control vulnerability has been identified in the SonicWall SonicOS management access, potentially leading to unauthorized resource access and in specific conditions, causing the firewall to crash," the company said in an advisory released last week. "This issue affects SonicWall Firewall Gen 5 and Gen 6 devices, as well as Gen 7 devices running SonicOS 7.0.1-5035 and older versions." The issue has been addressed in the below versions - SOHO (Gen 5 Firewalls) - 5.9.2.14-13o Gen 6 Firewalls - 6.5.2.8-2n (for SM9800, NSsp 12400, and NSsp 12800) and 6.5.4.15.116n (for other Gen 6 Firewall appliances) SonicWall said the vulnerability is

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about the security risks in the machine learning (ML) software supply chain following the discovery of more than 20 vulnerabilities that could be exploited to target MLOps platforms. These vulnerabilities, which are described as inherent- and implementation-based flaws, could have severe consequences, ranging from arbitrary code execution to loading malicious datasets. MLOps platforms offer the ability to design and execute an ML model pipeline, with a model registry acting as a repository used to store and version-trained ML models. These models can then be embedded within an application or allow other clients to query them using an API (aka model-as-a-service). "Inherent vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities that are caused by the underlying formats and processes used in the target technology," JFrog researchers said in a detailed report. Some examples of inherent vulnerabilities include abusing ML models to run code of the attacker

Two security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the open-source Traccar GPS tracking system that could be potentially exploited by unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution under certain circumstances. Both the vulnerabilities are path traversal flaws and could be weaponized if guest registration is enabled, which is the default configuration for Traccar 5, Horizon3.ai researcher Naveen Sunkavally said. A brief description of the shortcomings is as follows - CVE-2024-24809 (CVSS score: 8.5) - Path Traversal: 'dir/../../filename' and unrestricted upload of file with dangerous type CVE-2024-31214 (CVSS score: 9.7) - Unrestricted file upload vulnerability in device image upload could lead to remote code execution "The net result of CVE-2024-31214 and CVE-2024-24809 is that an attacker can place files with arbitrary content anywhere on the file system," Sunkavally said . "However an attacker only has partial control over the filename.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has placed a security flaw impacting Versa Director to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog based on evidence of active exploitation. The medium-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-39717 (CVSS score: 6.6), is case of file upload bug impacting the "Change Favicon" feature that could allow a threat actor to upload a malicious file by masquerading it as a seemingly harmless PNG image file. "The Versa Director GUI contains an unrestricted upload of file with dangerous type vulnerability that allows administrators with Provider-Data-Center-Admin or Provider-Data-Center-System-Admin privileges to customize the user interface," CISA said in an advisory. "The 'Change Favicon' (Favorite Icon) enables the upload of a .png file, which can be exploited to upload a malicious file with a .PNG extension disguised as an image." However, a successful exploitation is poss

SolarWinds has issued patches to address a new security flaw in its Web Help Desk (WHD) software that could allow remote unauthenticated users to gain unauthorized access to susceptible instances. "The SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) software is affected by a hardcoded credential vulnerability, allowing [a] remote unauthenticated user to access internal functionality and modify data," the company said in a new advisory released today. The issue, tracked as CVE-2024-28987 , is rated 9.1 on the CVSS scoring system, indicating critical severity. Horizon3.ai security researcher Zach Hanley has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. Users are recommended to update to version 12.8.3 Hotfix 2 , but applying the fix requires Web Help Desk 12.8.3.1813 or 12.8.3 HF1. The disclosure comes a week after SolarWinds moved to resolve another critical vulnerability in the same software that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code (CVE-2024-28986, CVSS score: 9.8).

Google has rolled out security fixes to address a high-severity security flaw in its Chrome browser that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-7971 , the vulnerability has been described as a type confusion bug in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Type confusion in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 128.0.6613.84 allowed a remote attacker to exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page," according to a description of the bug in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) and Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) have been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on August 19, 2024. No additional details about the nature of the attacks exploiting the flaw or the identity of the threat actors that may be weaponizing it have been released, primarily to ensure that a majority of the users are updated with a fix. The tech giant, however, acknowledged in a terse sta

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw in the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that could permit unauthenticated users to gain administrator privileges. "The plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability which allows any unauthenticated visitor to gain Administrator level access after which malicious plugins could be uploaded and installed," Patchstack's Rafie Muhammad said in a Wednesday report. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-28000 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been patched in version 6.4 of the plugin released on August 13, 2024. It impacts all versions of the plugin, including and prior to 6.3.0.1. LiteSpeed Cache is one of the most widely used caching plugins in WordPress with over five million active installations. In a nutshell, CVE-2024-28000 makes it possible for an unauthenticated attacker to spoof their user ID and register as an administrative-level user, effectively granting them privileges to

GitHub has released fixes to address a set of three security flaws impacting its Enterprise Server product, including one critical bug that could be abused to gain site administrator privileges. The most severe of the shortcomings has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2024-6800, and carries a CVSS score of 9.5. "On GitHub Enterprise Server instances that use SAML single sign-on (SSO) authentication with specific IdPs utilizing publicly exposed signed federation metadata XML, an attacker could forge a SAML response to provision and/or gain access to a user account with site administrator privileges," GitHub said in an advisory. The Microsoft-owned subsidiary has also addressed a pair of medium-severity flaws - CVE-2024-7711 (CVSS score: 5.3) - An incorrect authorization vulnerability that could allow an attacker to update the title, assignees, and labels of any issue inside a public repository. CVE-2024-6337 (CVSS score: 5.9) - An incorrect authorization vulnerab

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical security flaw impacting Microsoft's Copilot Studio that could be exploited to access sensitive information. Tracked as CVE-2024-38206 (CVSS score: 8.5), the vulnerability has been described as an information disclosure bug stemming from a server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) attack. "An authenticated attacker can bypass Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) protection in Microsoft Copilot Studio to leak sensitive information over a network," Microsoft said in an advisory released on August 6, 2024. The tech giant further said the vulnerability has been addressed and that it requires no customer action. Tenable security researcher Evan Grant, who is credited with discovering and reporting the shortcoming, said it takes advantage of Copilot's ability to make external web requests. "Combined with a useful SSRF protection bypass, we used this flaw to get access to Microsoft's internal infrastructure for Cop

A previously undocumented backdoor named Msupedge has been put to use against a cyber attack targeting an unnamed university in Taiwan. "The most notable feature of this backdoor is that it communicates with a command-and-control (C&C) server via DNS traffic," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The origins of the backdoor are presently unknown as are the objectives behind the attack. The initial access vector that likely facilitated the deployment of Msupedge is said to involve the exploitation of a recently disclosed critical flaw impacting PHP ( CVE-2024-4577 , CVSS score: 9.8), which could be used to achieve remote code execution . The backdoor in question is a dynamic-link library (DLL) that's installed in the paths "csidl_drive_fixed\xampp\" and "csidl_system\wbem\." One of the DLLs, wuplog.dll, is launched by the Apache HTTP server (httpd). The parent process for the second

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security flaw impacting Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services that, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to escalate their privileges and access credentials for services used by the cluster. "An attacker with command execution in a pod running within an affected Azure Kubernetes Services cluster could download the configuration used to provision the cluster node, extract the transport layer security (TLS) bootstrap tokens, and perform a TLS bootstrap attack to read all secrets within the cluster," Google-owned Mandiant said . Clusters using "Azure CNI" for the "Network configuration" and "Azure" for the "Network Policy" have been found to be impacted by the privilege escalation bug. Microsoft has since addressed the issue following responsible disclosure. The attack technique devised by the threat intelligence firm hinges on accessing a little-known component called Azure WireS

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about the discovery of thousands of externally-facing Oracle NetSuite e-commerce sites that have been found susceptible to leaking sensitive customer information. "A potential issue in NetSuite's SuiteCommerce platform could allow attackers to access sensitive data due to misconfigured access controls on custom record types (CRTs)," AppOmni's Aaron Costello said . It's worth emphasizing here that the issue is not a security weakness in the NetSuite product, but rather a customer misconfiguration that can lead to leakage of confidential data. The information exposed includes full addresses and mobile phone numbers of registered customers of the e-commerce sites. The attack scenario detailed by AppOmni exploits CRTs that employ table-level access controls with the "No Permission Required" access type, which grants unauthenticated users access to data by making use of NetSuite's record and search APIs. That sa

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a critical security flaw impacting Jenkins to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following its exploitation in ransomware attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-23897 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a path traversal flaw that could lead to code execution. "Jenkins Command Line Interface (CLI) contains a path traversal vulnerability that allows attackers limited read access to certain files, which can lead to code execution," CISA said in a statement. It was first disclosed by Sonar security researchers in January 2024 and addressed in Jenkins versions 2.442 and LTS 2.426.3 by disabling the command parser feature. Back in March, Trend Micro said it uncovered several attack instances originating from the Netherlands, Singapore, and Germany, and that it found instances where remote code execution exploits for the flaw were actively being traded. In recent weeks, CloudSEK and

A newly patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows was exploited as a zero-day by Lazarus Group , a prolific state-sponsored actor affiliated with North Korea. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38193 (CVSS score: 7.8), has been described as a privilege escalation bug in the Windows Ancillary Function Driver (AFD.sys) for WinSock. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges," Microsoft said in an advisory for the flaw last week. It was addressed by the tech giant as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday update. Credited with discovering and reporting the flaw are Gen Digital researchers Luigino Camastra and Milánek. Gen Digital owns a number of security and utility software brands like Norton, Avast, Avira, AVG, ReputationDefender, and CCleaner. "This flaw allowed them to gain unauthorized access to sensitive system areas," the company disclosed last week, adding it discovered the exploitation in early J

SolarWinds has released patches to address a critical security vulnerability in its Web Help Desk software that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-28986 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been described as a deserialization bug. "SolarWinds Web Help Desk was found to be susceptible to a Java deserialization remote code execution vulnerability that, if exploited, would allow an attacker to run commands on the host machine," the company said in an advisory. "While it was reported as an unauthenticated vulnerability, SolarWinds has been unable to reproduce it without authentication after thorough testing." The flaw impacts all versions of SolarWinds Web Help Desk including and prior to 12.8.3. It has been addressed in hotfix version 12.8.3 HF 1 . The disclosure comes as Palo Alto Networks patched a high-severity vulnerability affecting Cortex XSOAR that could result in command injection and code execution.