An unknown Botnet called "Prometei" is attacking windows and Microsoft devices (vulnerable) using brute force SMb exploits. According to Cisco Talos, these SMB vulnerabilities help in mining cryptocurrency. The botnet has affected around a thousand devices. It came in March; however, according to experts at Cisco Talos, the campaign could only generate a small amount of $5000 in four months of its activities. The botnet was working since the beginning of March and took a blow on 8th June. However, the botnet kept working on its mining operations to steal credentials. According to experts, the botnet is working for somebody based in Europe, a single developer.


"Despite their activities being visible in logs, some botnets successfully fly under detection teams' radar, possibly due to their small size or constant development on the adversary's part. Prometei is just one of these types of networks that focuses on Monero mining. It has been successful in keeping its computing power constant over the three months we've been tracking it," says Cisco Talo's report.
Vanja Svajcer, a cybersecurity expert, says that earning $1250 monthly is more than average for a European. Therefore, the developer would 've made a fair profit from the botnet. Besides crypto mining, it can also steal private credentials and escape without getting traced.

About SMB attack 

The hacker exploits the Windows Server Message Block protocol using a vulnerability. After this, the hackers retrieve passwords from Mimikatz, which is an open-source app for credential authentication. To spread itself in SMB protocol, the hackers use the RdpcIip.exe spreader module. This spreader tries to authenticate SMB operation using retrieved credentials or a temporary guest profile, which doesn't require any password. If the spreader can infiltrate, it uses a Windows app to launch the botnet remotely. But if the attack fails, the hackers can use other versions of vulnerabilities to start botnet.

To protect yourself, Cisco Talos says, "defenders need to be constantly vigilant and monitor systems' behavior within their network. Attackers are like water — they will attempt to find the smallest crack to seep in. While organizations need to be focused on protecting their most valuable assets, they should not ignore threats that are not particularly targeted toward their infrastructure."

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, this February found three vulnerabilities present in AvertX IP cameras in their latest version.

These three vulnerabilities were found in models HD838 and 438IR of AvertX used as outdoor surveillance cameras with object-detection and infrared and technology built-in. The users can store the recordings both in the cloud on a Network Video Recorder (NVR) or in a memory card.

The three vulnerabilities that were found and confirmed by AvertX were:

CVE-2020-11625: User enumeration 

Faulty web user interface (UI) login attempts lead to varied results when the account doesn't exist that could enable attackers to use brute force attacks.

 CVE-2020-11624: Weak password requirements 

The software does not require users to change from the default password. When the user tries to login with the default password the pop shows 'password has been changed' but lets the user login.

 CVE-2020-11623: Exposed dangerous method or function 

An exposed UART interface exists that could be exploited by an attacker with physical access to the UART and change diagnostic and configuration functionalities.

 The Impact of these Vulnerabilities

The attackers can use a brute force attack by gaining legitimate accounts as the vulnerability allows to collect valid usernames and once the username is accessed it is easy to gain the password via brute force attack.

Since the camera can be accessed by using the default password- can easily make your camera and machine compromised. And the default password can be as easily accessed by reading a user manual, as a result, can connect to Iot devices.

Physical access to UATR ( universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter) can allow the attacker to change configurations, modify them, or even shut the camera down.

 The company AvertX, analyzed the faults and vulnerabilities and have released a patch with proper modifications and removed the UATR connector as well as changed the interface in the later produced batches.
2020 Unit 42 IoT Threat Report showed that security cameras make 5% of Interest Of Things (IoT) devices all over but they cover 33% of security issues related to IoT devices.

Video and audio conferencing software, Zoom patched a zero-day vulnerability that was affecting users running old versions of Windows: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and earlier. The flaw was detected on Thursday and later published in a blog post by security research organization ACROS Security.

The vulnerability that was previously unknown, allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on targeted user’s system on which one of the supported versions of Zoom Client for Windows is installed; in order to set the attack into motion, the attacker manipulates the victim into carrying out some typical action (Opening a received doc. file) and reportedly, there is no security warning displayed to the user as the attack takes place.

After disclosing the zero-day vulnerability to Zoom, ACROS released a micropatch for its 0patch client in order to safeguard its own clients against attack till the time Zoom came out with an official patch. In the wake of various security flaws, the company halted the production of new features for a while so that the major privacy-related concerns that are threatening user security can be treated with much-needed attention. However, this ‘feature freeze’ period ended very recently i.e., on July 1, last week itself, and the zero-day was detected a few days later.

In conversation with Threatpost, 0patch’s co-founder, Mitja Kolsek said, “Exploitation requires some social engineering – which is practically always the case with user-side remote code execution vulnerabilities,”

“While a massive attack is extremely unlikely, a targeted one is conceivable." “Zoom Client features a fairly persistent auto-update functionality that is likely to keep home users updated unless they really don’t want to be,” he wrote.

“However, enterprise admins often like to keep control of updates and may stay a couple of versions behind, especially if no security bugs were fixed in the latest versions.”

“Zoom takes all reports of potential security vulnerabilities seriously. This morning we received a report of an issue impacting users running Windows 7 and older. We have confirmed this issue and are currently working on a patch to quickly resolve it,” said Zoom, while addressing the issue initially.

A few days later, on July 10, a fix was released by the company and the officials said, "Zoom addressed this issue, which impacts users running Windows 7 and older, in the 5.1.3 client release on July 10. Users can help keep themselves secure by applying current updates or downloading the latest Zoom software with all current security updates from https://zoom.us/download.”

Citrix Software Inc., a multinational American software company whose products are used by 99% of Fortune 100 companies recently released a patch for 11 vulnerabilities that affect Citrix ADC, Citrix Gateway, and Citrix SD-WAN WANOP (appliance models 4000-WO, 4100-WO, 5000-WO, and 5100-WO).


Citrix says these 11 vulnerabilities are in no way part of the CVE-2019-19781 remote code execution flaw that they patched in January and do not affect any cloud versions. The software solutions company stated that this patch provides all-out security and advised users to activate the patch to prevent any potential attack and has barriers to defend against attacks.

"There are barriers to many of these attacks; in particular, for customers where there is no untrustworthy traffic on the management network, the remaining risk reduces to a denial-of-service attack. And in that case, only when Gateway or authentication virtual servers are being used. Other virtual servers, for example, load balancing and content switching virtual servers, are not affected by the issue" Citrix's CISO Fermin J. Serna said in a statement.

These versions of Citrix ADC, Citrix Gateway, and Citrix SD-WAN WANOP has the patched vulnerabilities-

• Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway 13.0-58.30 and later releases 
• Citrix ADC and NetScaler Gateway 12.1-57.18 and later 12.1 releases 
• Citrix ADC and NetScaler Gateway 12.0-63.21 and later 12.0 releases 
• Citrix ADC and NetScaler Gateway 11.1-64.14 and later 11.1 releases 
• NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 10.5-70.18 and later 10.5 releases 
• Citrix SD-WAN WANOP 11.1.1a and later releases 
• Citrix SD-WAN WANOP 11.0.3d and later 11.0 releases 
• Citrix SD-WAN WANOP 10.2.7 and later 10.2 releases 
• Citrix Gateway Plug-in for Linux 1.0.0.137 and later versions 

"System compromise by an unauthenticated user on the management network. • System compromise through Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) on the management interface • Creation of a download link for the device which, if downloaded and then executed by an unauthenticated user on the management network, may result in the compromise of their local computer." 

"Denial of service against either the Gateway or Authentication virtual servers by an unauthenticated user (the load balancing virtual server is unaffected). • Remote port scanning of the internal network by an authenticated Citrix Gateway user. Attackers can only discern whether a TLS connection is possible with the port and cannot communicate further with the end devices."

Over the last few months, the cyber world witnessed an alarming spike in the number of malicious attacks, it's seen as a direct result of more and more people working from home. As organizations have been experiencing unprecedented cybersecurity challenges, it has become even more crucial for users to keep their networks updated and hence secured.

DIR-865L model of D-Link routers, designed for monitoring home network from anywhere, was found to be containing six vulnerabilities as follows:

1. CVE-2020-13782 [Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command (Command Injection)]: A backend engine known as cgibin.exe controls the web interface for this router; attackers can place arbitrary code to be executed with administrative privileges.

2. CVE-2020-13786 [Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)]: Threat actors can intercept data present on sections under password protection by capturing the network traffic; the router's web interface consists of various pages that are vulnerable to this security flaw.

3. CVE-2020-13785 (Inadequate Encryption Strength): The attackers can learn a user's password via a brute force attack carried offline on the basis of information that's sent to the client from the router when the user logs into the SharePort Web Access portal in port 8181.

4. CVE-2020-13784 (Predictable Seed in Pseudo-Random Number Generator): By exploiting this vulnerability, the attackers can deduce the information required to perform CSRF attacks even if the router is encrypting session information using HTTPS.

5. CVE-2020-13783 (Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information): When an attacker attempts to acquire the admin password stored in the tools_admin.php page, he requires physical access to a logged-on machine as credentials sent over the wire are not clear. Once the attacker acquires physical access, he can view the password via the HTML source of the page.

6. CVE-2020-13787 (Cleartext transmission of sensitive information): Attackers capturing network traffic and stealing data can access the password used for guest wifi network, it's done via an option 'Wired Equivalent Privacy' (WEP).

These 6 newly discovered vulnerabilities by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers in the D-Link DIR-865L home wireless router can be exploited all at once to run arbitrary commands, delete information, upload malware, exfiltrate data or intercept information and obtain user credentials illicitly.

To stay protected against the session hijacking attacks, users are advised to default all traffic to HTTPS and stay updated with the latest available version of the firmware with fixes, one can find the firmware on the D-Link's website. The website also provides a 'how-to' tutorial for changing the time zone on the router for the users to further defend themselves from possible malicious attacks.

A new security vulnerability affecting devices running UPnP protocol has been discovered by a researcher named Yunus Çadırcı; dubbed as CallStranger the security flaw could be exploited by remote unauthenticated attackers to perform a number of malicious acts such as data exfiltration and distributed denial-of-service popularly known as DDoS attacks.

UPnP protocol is designed to speed up the process of automatic discovery and to facilitate interaction with devices on a network, it doesn't have any kind of verification or authentication and therefore is supposed to be employed within trusted LANs. Most of the internet-connected devices contain support for UPnP, however, the Device Protection service responsible for adding security features has not been broadly accepted.

The security vulnerability that is being tracked as CVE-2020-12695, affects Windows PCs, TVs, Cisco, Belkin Broadcom, Dell, D-Link, Gaming Consoles, Samsung, routers from Asus, Huawei, ZTE, TP-Link and probably many more.

While giving insights into his discovery, Çadırcı told, “[The vulnerability] is caused by Callback header value in UPnP SUBSCRIBE function can be controlled by an attacker and enables an SSRF-like vulnerability which affects millions of Internet-facing and billions of LAN devices.”

“Home users are not expected to be targeted directly. If their internet-facing devices have UPnP endpoints, their devices may be used for DDoS source. Ask your ISP if your router has Internet-facing UPnP with CallStranger vulnerability — there are millions of consumer devices exposed to the Internet. Don't port forward to UPnP endpoints,” he further added.

“Because it also can be used for DDoS, we expect botnets will start implementing this new technique by consuming end-user devices. Because of the latest UPnP vulnerabilities, enterprises blocked Internet exposed UPnP devices so we don’t expect to see port scanning from the Internet to Intranet but Intranet2Intranet may be an issue.” The researcher concluded.

In order to stay safe, vendors are recommended to act upon the latest specifications put forth by the OCF, and users are advised to actively look out for vendor support channels for updates. Meanwhile, Device manufacturers are advised to disable the UPnP protocol on Internet-obtainable interfaces.

The russia-linked APT group have been running campaigns wherein the authors exploited a critical vulnerability (CVE-2019-10149), also called as "The Return of the WIZard" in the Exim mail transfer agent (MTA) software, according to the warnings of the U.S National Security Agency (NSA).

As per the findings of the NSA, the threat actors have been exploiting the vulnerability since an update was released in June 2019. The critical flaw that affects Exim mail transfer agent (MTA) software's version from 4.87 to 4.91 could be taken advantage of by dubious remote hackers to execute arbitrary commands – such as sending a command in the "MAIL FORM" field of a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol message on mail servers.

In the same campaign, the attackers from Unit 74455, the Russian GRU Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST) had also exploited two other issues in Exim, first one is a remote code execution flaw (CVE-2019-15846) that was fixed in September 2019 and was found to be affecting version 4.92.1 and older. The second one was a DoS and code execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-16928), it affected versions from 4.92 to 4.92.2, according to the revelations made by RiskIQ.

In an advisory published by the NSA, the experts state, "Russian military cyber actors, publicly known as Sandworm Team, have been exploiting a vulnerability in Exim mail transfer agent (MTA) software since at least last August.”

"The Russian actors, part of the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate’s (GRU) Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST), have used this exploit to add privileged users, disable network security settings, execute additional scripts for further network exploitation; pretty much any attacker’s dream access – as long as that network is using an unpatched version of Exim MTA.”

“Update Exim immediately by installing version 4.93 or newer to mitigate this and other vulnerabilities. Other vulnerabilities exist and are likely to be exploited, so the latest fully patched version should be used. Using a previous version of Exim leaves a system vulnerable to exploitation. System administrators should continually check software versions and update as new versions become available.” The advisory further reads.

Ever since this year began, the Maze ransomware has been hitting headlines. Recently researchers discovered more samples of Maze in numerous industries making it one of the major threats for the cyber-world.

Another form of the "ChaCha" ransomware, Maze surfaced in mid-2019 and has been wreaking havoc ever since, across continents and any organization it could get it hands-on.

Per sources, Maze is most usually dispensed by way of emails loaded with malicious Exel and Word attachments. But that’s not the only method of distribution.

According to reports, cyber-criminals also use “exploit kits” by the name of “Spelevo”. Sources mention that in previous cases it has been used to exploit Flash Player vulnerabilities, CVE-2018-15982 and CVE-2018-4878. Other exploits that Maze has abused include CVE-2018-8174 (Internet Explorer) and CVE-2018-1150 (Pulse VPN).

Maze ransomware initially tries to get a strong idea of the target device’s internal surroundings and begins to create a place for itself. Once that’s done it tries to access user privileges to carry lateral movements and kick start the file encryption throughout drives. But, before the encryption, files are exfiltrated so as to be used for future compulsion in any way possible.

If the security system of a device isn’t laden with necessary protective gauges it could possibly crash completely under the pressure of Maze ransomware. The infection could put sensitive information at large and incapacitate operations almost killing the company’s finances.

Per sources, Maze ransomware has shown its hold across industries like construction, education, energy, finance, government, healthcare, hospitality, law, life sciences, media and communications, pharma, technology, and telecommunications. McAfee, in March, made available a detailed report about the Maze ransomware.

According to a report, there’s an “Anti-Ransomware Protection module” which hunts ransomware related encryption-based activities. It allows users to keep track of the activities.

Per sources, lately, Maze ransomware was spotted compromising several IT service providers. It also set up a footing in another victim device’s network via insecure Remote Desktop Protocol or by using brute-force on the account of the local administrator.
Cloud backups too aren’t safe from the Maze ransomware because they are widely tracked on the vulnerable networks. With the login credentials, all backed-up data could be sent to the threat-actors via a server under their control.

The solution for any such occurrences is as repetitive as ever; stronger security mechanisms, better passwords especially remote systems with remote access possibilities and of course, heftier protection measures.

CISA has sent warnings to the users regarding two critical vulnerabilities in SaltStack Salt, an open-source remote task and configuration management framework that has been actively exploited by cybercriminals, leaving around thousands of cloud servers across the globe exposed to the threat.

The vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit are of high-severity and researchers have labeled them as particularly 'dangerous'. It allows attackers to execute code remotely with root privileges on Salt master repositories to carry out a number of commands.

Salt is employed for the configuration, management, and monitoring of servers in cloud environments and data centers. It provides the power of automation as it scans IT systems to find vulnerabilities and then brings automation workflows to remediate them. It gathers real-time data about the state of all the aspects and it employs effective machine learning and industry expertise to examine threats more precisely. In a way, it is used to check installed package versions on all IT systems, look out for vulnerabilities, and then remediate them by installing fixes.

The two vulnerabilities, the first one called CVE-2020-11651 is an authentication bypass flaw and the other one CVE-2020-11652 is a directory transversal flaw, as per the discovery made by F-Secure researchers. The attackers can bypass all authentication and authorization controls by exploiting the vulnerabilities that would allow them to easily connect to the request server. Once the authentication is bypassed, attackers can post arbitrary control messages and make changes in the master server file system. All Salt versions prior to 2019.2.4 and 3000.2 are affected by the vulnerabilities.

Xen Orchestra, an effective all in one user-friendly web-based management service became the latest victim of cybercriminals involved in the exploitation of the two high-severity vulnerabilities in Salt. The attackers ran a cryptominer on the firm's virtual machines (VMs), it has been noticed by the company on the 3rd of May as various services on their infrastructure became inaccessible.

While commenting on the matter, Olivier Lambert, Xen Orchestra's founder, said, “A coin mining script ran on some of our VMs, and we were lucky nothing bad happened to us – no RPMs affected and no evidence that private customer data, passwords or other information have been compromised. GPG signing keys were not on any affected VMs. We don’t store any credit card information nor plain text credentials. Lesson learned...”

“In short, we were caught in a storm affecting a lot of people. We all have something in common: we underestimated the risk of having the Salt master accessible from outside,” he added. “Luckily, the initial attack payload was really dumb and not dangerous. We are aware it might have been far more dangerous and we take it seriously as a big warning. The malware world is evolving really fast: having an auto-update for our management software wasn’t enough."

“If you are running SaltStack in your own infrastructure, please be very careful. Newer payloads could be far more dangerous,” warned Lambert.

The new Chrome 81 version released on April 7th by Google for Windows, Mac, and Linux primarily focused on security owing to the vulnerability users are subjected to due to the coronavirus pandemic. The launch of the update was delayed for similar reasons. It brought along new features, bug fixes, and over 30 security flaw patches from Google's security researchers and some experts from outside.

The new Chrome 81 version is being promoted to the Stable channel, meanwhile, Chrome 83 and Chrome 84 will be promoted to the Beta version and the Canary version respectively. As per sources, Chrome 82 will be disregarded because of the COVID-19 charged atmosphere, and all progress from the version will be channelized into the subsequent version, Chrome 83.

While warning users of more security flaws in Chrome 81, Google confirms two new high-severity vulnerabilities infecting the web browser. As these new security exploits could allow hackers to run commands over an affected system by gaining unauthorized control, users worldwide are being advised by the U.S Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to apply the latest update launched by the company in defense against these security vulnerabilities.

Both of the aforementioned security vulnerabilities were reported by Zhe Jin from Qihoo 360, a Chinese internet security services provider; for one of these, Jin received a bounty of $10,000 for CVE-2020-6462 which is a use-after-free error in the Chrome task scheduling component. The second one, CVE-2020-6461 was also of a similar use-after-free form but this one affected storage, according to the update notice from Prudhvikumar Bommana, Google Chome Technical Program Manager. 

Google has confirmed that the update will be pushed for all the users in the upcoming days and weeks, however, users are advised to remain proactive and keep looking up for updates to be applied manually by going to Help | About Google Chrome, where you can find the version you are currently running and an option to check for further updates. After installing the latest version, simply restart the web browser, and there you go being safeguarded against both the flaws.

Mozilla Firefox users are receiving alerts regarding multiple vulnerabilities in the web browser by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). An advisory has also been issued in the regard asking the users to update their web browsers as soon as possible.

While rating the severity of the vulnerability as 'High' on all the versions of Mozilla Firefox that have been released before version 75 and version 68.7 on Mozilla Firefox ESR, the CERT-In stated in the advisory that remote hackers can take advantage of these browser flaws to acquire sensitive data through the browser.

According to the CERT-In advisory, “Out-of-Bounds Read Vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox ( CVE-2020-6821 ). This vulnerability exists in Mozilla Firefox due to a boundary condition when using the WebGLcopyTexSubImage method. A remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability by specially crafted web pages. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to disclose sensitive information,”

“Information Disclosure Vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox ( CVE-2020-6824). This vulnerability exists in Mozilla Firefox to generate a password for a site but leaves Firefox open.A  remote attacker could exploit this vulnerability by revisiting the same site of the victim and generating a new password. The generated password will remain the same on the targeted system,” the advisory further reads.

The aforementioned vulnerability also allows the attacker to execute 'arbitrary code' on the targeted system, letting them run any chosen command onto it. As per sources, another flaw was also found to be existing in the internet browser that concerns with a boundary condition in GMP Decode Data as images exceeding 4GB are being processed on 32-bit builds. The exploitation of this flaw requires the attacker to trick users into opening specially designed images. Upon successful exploitation, the attacker can yet again execute arbitrary code on the targeted system.

Another way by which a remote attacker can take advantage of this exploit is by convincing a user to install a crafted extension, on doing so the attacker will be able to obtain sensitive information.

In July 2019, London based Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center discovered a vulnerability in OnePlus 7 Pro devices manufactured by Chinese smartphone maker OnePlus. The flaw that could have been exploited by hackers to obtain users' fingerprints was patched by the company with a firmware update it pushed in the month of January this year. As per the findings, the flaw wasn't an easy one to be exploited but researchers pointed out the possibility of a bigger threat in regard to TEEs and TAs.

Synopsys CyRC's analysis of the vulnerability referred as CV toE-2020-7958, states that it could have resulted in the exposure of OnePlus 7 pro users' biometric data. The critical flaw would have allowed authors behind malicious android applications with root privileges to obtain users' bitmap fingerprint images from the device's Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), a technique designed to protect sensitive user information by keeping the Android device's content secure against illicit access.

As it has become increasingly complex for malicious applications to acquire root privileges on Android devices, the exploitation of the flaw would have been an arduous task and might also be an unlikely one given the complexity of the successful execution. Meanwhile, the fix has been made available for months now– ensuring the protection of the users.

However, the issue with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Trusted Applications (TAs) remains the major highlight of Synopsys's advisory released on Tuesday, “Upon obtaining root privileges in the REE [Rich Execution Environment], it becomes possible to directly communicate with the factory testing APIs exposed by Trusted Applications (TAs) running in the TEE. This attacker invokes a sequence of commands to obtain raw fingerprint images in the REE,” it read.

While explaining the matter, Travis Biehn, principal consultant at Synopsys, told, “Of course, people’s fingerprints don’t usually change. As attackers become successful in retrieving and building large datasets of people’s fingerprints, the usefulness of naïve fingerprint recognition in any application as a security control is permanently diminished,”

“A further possible consequence is that fingerprints become less trustworthy as evidence in our justice systems.”

“...this vulnerability shows that there'there are challenges with Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Trusted Applications (TAs); these are software components that are opaque to most (by design), expertise is limited, and typically involve long supply chains. These factors together mean there'there are opportunities for organizations to make a mistake, and hard for security experts to catch at the right time,” he further added.

The flaw would have allowed attackers to recreate the targeted user's complete fingerprint and then use it to generate a counterfeit fingerprint that further would have assisted them in accessing other devices relying upon biometric authentication.

Earlier this year Cisco was in the headlines for the Zero-day vulnerabilities that were discovered in several of its devices including IP Phones, routers, cameras and switches.

The vulnerabilities that were quite exploitable were found in the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), which is a layer 2 network protocol so that any discrepancies of the devices could be tracked.

Now again, Cisco has been found to be more unreliable than ever. Only this time the researchers learnt about numerous severe security vulnerabilities.

These susceptibilities could let the attackers or hackers execute “arbitrary commands” with the supposed “consent” of the user. Per sources, the affected Cisco parts this time happen to be the software, namely the Cisco UCS Manager Software, Cisco NX-OS Software and Cisco FXOS Software.

Reports reveal that the vulnerability in the Cisco FXOS and NX-OS Software admits unauthorized “adjacent” attackers into the system and lets them execute arbitrary code in order to achieve the “DoS”. (Denial of Service)

The vulnerabilities in Cisco FXOS and UCS Manager Software lets unauthenticated “local attackers” to execute arbitrary commands on the victim’s devices.

The reason for this vulnerability rises from the absence of “input validation”. The misuse of this makes it way easy for attackers to execute the arbitrary code making use of the user’s authority (which they don’t even know about) who’s logged in, per sources.

The other vulnerabilities in the Cisco FXOS and UCS Software include allowing unauthenticated local attackers to execute arbitrary commands.

A hacker could also try to send specially structures “arguments” to certain commands. This exploit if successful could grant admittance to the hacker to not only enter but also execute arbitrary commands.

All the exploitable loopholes of the Cisco software are really dangerous and critical in all the possible terms. Cisco has been in the limelight for more times than that could be overlooked. It is up to the users now to be well stacked with respect to security mechanisms.

However, understanding the seriousness of the vulnerabilities in the software, Cisco has indeed released various security updates that work for all the vulnerable software, in its Software Security Advisory.

The users are advised to get on top of the updates as soon as possible.

Windows Devices in Hospitals Vulnerable to Potential Exploits According to recent reports, hackers can exploit the vulnerabilities present in health devices, and it can prove dangerous to the health of the patients at the hospital. But, the problem could be avoided by following some simple steps. The health devices have a more likable chance to the Bluekeep exploit than any other devices connected in the hospitals. Health devices can be exploited up to 2 times, using the Bluekeep exploit. This puts both the patients and the hospital staff in danger as witnessing the current scenario, the health sector has recently been one of the primary targets of the hackers.


Therefore, the issue of cybersecurity among the health sector is one of the main concerns of the digital age. Bluekeep was first discovered in 2019, and it is a vulnerability in Microsoft RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol). The vulnerability affects Windows7, Windows8, Windows Server2008, and Windows Server2008 R2. When the news of Bluekeep vulnerability surfaced, Microsoft immediately released a security patch to resolve the issue. Various intelligence agencies, including the US NSA (National Security Advisory) and Britain's NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre), immediately informed Microsoft to fix all the security patches related to the vulnerability.

The matter of concern was that Bluekeep could be used as malware to do the same damage that EternalBlue had caused, the exploit that triggered Wannacry. In this incident, various high profile organizations were taken the victim, but the greatest attack happened on the National Health Service of UK, in which the entire networks of the hospitals were shut down. But despite various warnings, health devices that run on Windows are still vulnerable to a potential Bluekeep exploit.

According to researchers at CyberMDX, a healthcare cybersecurity company, a newly made report's data suggests that more than 20% of healthcare devices (that run on Windows) in hospitals are vulnerable to the blue keep exploit, as they have still not configured to the latest security patches. The healthcare devices include x-ray machines, anesthesia machines, ultrasound devices, and radiology equipment. If these devices are not fixed to the latest security patch, chances are that hackers could exploit them using the blue keep vulnerability. This can risk the lives of the patients and the healthcare staff.

Personal accounts of Runet users in various services, including Internet banks, turned out to be the worst protected from hackers. This is the opinion of Positive Technologies specialists.
After analyzing 38 websites of various organizations, including IT companies, government agencies, financial and telecommunications organizations, Positive Technologies employees concluded that nine out of ten web applications in Runet are vulnerable to hacker attacks.

Despite the fact that the situation has improved compared to the previous year, half of the sites contain "high-level" vulnerabilities. In 2019, there were 22 vulnerabilities per application, which is one and a half times lower than in 2018. According to Positive Technologies, the probability that data will leak from applications to the network is 68%, unauthorized access is possible in 39% of cases and authentication system weaknesses were found in 45%.

Also, hackers often hack applications in the banking sector. The protection of apps of credit organizations works only in 40% of cases.

According to experts, this is due to the fact that the dynamics of the main updates of the program is quite high. He noted that the system does not have time to “undergo full training” and automatic configuration.

Applications of government agencies turned out to be the most vulnerable to hacker attacks. Experts stressed that funding for this sector was low. At first, the tenders were won by those who requested the lowest price. And then expenses were reduced even more — by hiring students, for example.
Experts noted that it is quite difficult to protect web applications. Sometimes systems are used in monitoring mode, and real people monitor this. They have to determine whether the attack occurs or not.

“A 24-hour web service requires at least four operators, and this is from five million rubles a year ($78,700),” said Rustem Khairetdinov, vice president of InfoWatch Group. There is no way to hire such a staff of specialists in small companies and regional government agencies.

According to Radware researchers, a vulnerability (CVE-2020-2100) in 12,000+ Jenkins servers can be exploited to launch and amplify DDoS attacks to internet hosts.




The said vulnerability can also be abused and triggered by a spoofed UDP packet to launch DoS attacks against the internet server in a repeated sequence of replies that can only be stopped by rebooting the server.

 The vulnerability (CVE-2020-2100) 

CVE-2020-2100 vulnerability was discovered by Adam Thorn from the University of Cambridge. It is caused by a network discovery service, present by default and enabled in public facing servers.

Radware researchers explains, “The vulnerability allows attackers to abuse Jenkins servers by reflecting UDP requests off port UDP/33848, resulting in an amplified DDoS attack containing Jenkins metadata. This is possible because Jenkins/Hudson servers do not properly monitor network traffic and are left open to discover other Jenkins/Hudson instances”.

 “An attacker can either send a UDP broadcast packet locally to 255.255.255.255:33848 or they could send a UDP multicast packet to JENKINS_REFLECTOR:33848. When a packet is received, regardless of the payload, Jenkins/Hudson will send an XML response of Jenkins metadata in a datagram to the requesting client, giving attackers the ability to abuse its UDP multicast/broadcast service to carry out DDoS attacks.”

Although the CVE-2020-2100 vulnerability was fixed in Jenkins 2.219 and LTS 2.204.2 two weeks ago.

 “Administrators that need these features can re-enable them again by setting the system property hudson.DNSMultiCast.disabled to false (for DNS multicast) or the system property hudson.udp to 33848, or another port (for UDP broadcast/multicast),” developers from Jenkins explained.

 The danger from the vulnerability 

Pascal Geenens, Cyber Security Evangelist for Radware said, “Much like was the case with memcached, people that design and develop on the open source Jenkins project assume that these servers will be internally facing”.

But contrary to that, the Jenkins servers were exposed to the public. Nearly 13,000 vulnerable servers were distributed globally including Asia, Europe and North America to the top service providers. “Many DevOps teams depend upon Jenkins to build, test and continuously deploy their applications running in cloud and shared hosting environments such as Amazon, OVH, Hetzner, Host Europe, DigitalOcean, Linode, and many more” Geenens stated.

The researchers concluded, "Combined with over 12,000 exposed Jenkins servers globally, it creates a viable DDoS threat. "

A bug in the TastSelv Borger tax service which falls under the management of the US company DXC Technology has exposed almost 1.2 million CPR numbers of Danish citizens to the American multinational companies – Google and Adobe. The leak has been discovered by The Danish Agency for Development and Simplification for the first time, however, the researchers claim that CPR numbers along with other sensitive information have been exposed for around 5 years now.

People who have a tax liability to Denmark are allowed by TastSelv's services to see and alter their tax returns, annual statements and pay residual tax. As per the findings of the security researchers at the agency, all the exposed data was found to be encrypted and hence reportedly, Google and Adobe were not able to view the same due to encryption which barred them.

Other sources have it that in an attempt to downplay the entire incident, The Danish Agency for Development and Simplification put forth a solid confirmation on the CPR numbers being encrypted when accessed by the companies. Meanwhile, cybersecurity specialist and founder of the CSIS group, Peter Kruse asserted that Google did access those 1.2 million CPR numbers as there was no encryption, according to him the numbers were rather in plain text.

How was the glitch exploited?

It was when the users who were logged into TastSelv Borger happened to click on the text displayed as 'Correct contact information' and consequently rectified the contact information, faced an error in the app. The error triggered the process of transferring the CPR numbers to Google and Adobe, as per DR news website.

Referencing from the statement given by the government agency, “We take this kind of case very seriously. And of course, we need to be able to make sure that our suppliers handle all data according to applicable law and within the framework agreed upon with them.”

“The data received by Google is unencrypted. Google has been able to read data in unencrypted form,” he added.

“Google Hosted Libraries have been designed to remove all information that allows identifying users before logging on. Thus, no user information is shared with Google in this process.” Google told the website which first reported the incident.

The extremely well-known Cisco’s products, including IP Phones, Routers, cameras, and switches, were determined to have several severe “zero-day” vulnerabilities by researchers in the “Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)”, per sources.

CDP is a proprietary “Layer 2” network protocol that is put into effect in all the Cisco devices to be privy to the mechanisms of the devices.

Reports mention that a total of five vulnerabilities were ascertained out of which, four were “Remote Code Execution” (RCE) that let hackers or any other cyber-con to manipulate every single operation of the devices without any sort of consent of the user.

According to sources, one of the vulnerabilities led to a “Denial of Service” in the Cisco FXOS, NX-OS and IOS XR software that ended up damaging the victims’ networks

By exploiting the vulnerabilities effectively, numerous organizations’ and companies’ networks were smashed, costing all the affected parties heavily.

Per legitimate sources, following is the list of all the vulnerable devices in the represented categories:

Switches
• Nexus 1000 Virtual Edge
• Nexus 1000V Switch
• Nexus 3000 Series Switches
• Network Convergence System (NCS) 1000 Series
• Network Convergence System (NCS) 5000 Series
• Network Convergence System (NCS) 540 Routers
• Network Convergence System (NCS) 5500 Series
• Network Convergence System (NCS) 560 Routers
• MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches
• Nexus 5500 Series Switches
• Nexus 5600 Series Switches
• Nexus 6000 Series Switches
• Nexus 7000 Series Switches
• Nexus 9000 Series Fabric Switches
• Network Convergence System (NCS) 6000 Series
• UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects
• UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnects
• UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnects

IP Phones
• Unified IP Conference Phone 8831
• Wireless IP Phone 8821-EX
• Wireless IP Phone 8821
• IP Conference Phone 7832
• IP Conference Phone 8832
• IP Phone 6800 Series
• IP Phone 7800 Series
• IP Phone 8800 Series
• IP Phone 8851 Series

IP Cameras
• Video Surveillance 8000 Series IP Cameras

Routers
• IOS XRv 9000 Router
• Carrier Routing System (CRS)
• ASR 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers
• Firepower 1000 Series
• Firepower 2100 Series
• Firepower 4100 Series
• Firepower 9300 Security Appliances
• White box routers running Cisco IOS XR

The exploitation of the other four Remote Execution vulnerabilities could be in a way that a “maliciously” fabricated “CDP Packet” could be sent on the targeted Cisco devices and have their mechanisms altered.

There’s a vulnerability that could be hunted down or traced by (CVE-2020-3119). It helps the attackers to completely override the default switch and network infrastructure settings.

One of the vulnerabilities which could be traced as (CVE-2020- 3118), could help attackers gain control of the target’s router via remote code execution and use it in any harmful way they find acceptable.

Cisco’s 800 series IP cameras were vulnerable to attackers’ remote code execution. The vulnerability could be located as (CVE-2020-3110)

According to sources, in the other Cisco “Voice over IP Phone” vulnerability, an overflow in the parsing function could be exploited to access “code execution”. This vulnerability could be traced to (CVE-2020-311).

The troubles this vulnerability could cause an organization are manifold.
Acquiring access to other devices via “man-in-the-middle” attacks.
Damaging the network’s structure
“Data Exfiltration”, ranging from network traffic to sensitive information and personal phone calls, by the help of manipulated routers and switches.

Per reports, Cisco has come up with patches and the users are directed to employ them without any further delay.
[CVE-2020-3111
CVE-2020-3118
CVE-2020-3120
CVE-2020-3110
CVE-2020-3119]

Smart light bulbs can not only make the lighting in an apartment and house more convenient and cheaper but also threaten the safety of their owners.

Experts have proven that hackers can hack computers through smart light bulbs. The vulnerability in the smart home system was noticed by cybersecurity company Check Point.

Experts have discovered a way to hack computers through a lamp using a Philips smart home system. At the first stage, the virus program is downloaded to the victim's smartphone and causes the lighting to fail. Experts have noticed that the only way to fix the problem is to reinstall the app, so the user deletes the program and re-downloads it to their phone.

At the stage when the owner of the lamp connects it to the smart home system, attackers take advantage of the vulnerability in the ZigBee protocol, which Philips uses. At the moment of pairing between the lamp and the smart hub, the malicious algorithm causes an overflow of the system buffer, which bypasses the antivirus and is installed on the computer's disk. After that, the device goes under the remote control of hackers.

Check Point experts said that the study has already attracted the attention of the manufacturer of smart lamps and eliminated the gap in the system. Experts advised owners of the Philips smart home system to update their software.

Experts have found vulnerabilities in Philips smart bulbs (at the moment, the problem with these devices has already been solved), but it is possible that similar vulnerabilities are found in many other smart home devices.

Earlier EHackingNews reported that in the fall of 2019, an IT specialist from Russia and blogger Anna Prosvetova discovered a vulnerability in Xiaomi Furrytail Pet Smart Feeder. Since feeders are used when the owners leave the house for a long time, pets may starve to death. The vulnerability was discovered in the application API through which feeders are controlled.

Last week, Google has announced the cutting down of 'patch gap' in half for Chrome and the future plans of cutting it down further are also making the headlines.

Security Engineers at Google told that the 'patch gap' for Google Chrome which earlier was 33 days has now been successfully reduced to only 15 days. Some of you might be wondering what exactly a 'patch gap' means, it refers to the time frame it takes from when a security bug gets fixed in an open-source library to when that fix reaches in software which used that library.

These days, when the software ecosystem contains most of the apps relying upon the open-source modules, patch-gap plays a major role as it creates a potential security risk.

How Patch-Gap involve Major Security Risk?

As soon as a security bug gets fixed by someone in a particular open-source library, all the details related to that bug become available in the public domain. It is simply because of the open nature of the open-source libraries and projects. Now, the software which is largely dependent on these easily accessible components available in open source libraries, become vulnerable to the attacks and exploits that hackers can craft by exploiting the details regarding the security flaws.

How Patch-Gap will be Useful?

Considering the likeliness of the aforementioned possibility, if the software developers are releasing patches on a fixed release schedule which includes updates incoming every week or in a couple of months, the patch-gap here will allow hackers to set-off attacks that most software will have difficulty in dealing with.

A member of the Chrome Security team, Andrew R. Whalley said, "We now make regular refresh releases every two weeks, containing the latest severe security fixes,"

"This has brought down the median 'patch gap' from 33 days in Chrome 76 to 15 days in Chrome 78, and we continue to work on improving it," he further told.