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.

Developers at Starbucks left an API (Application Programming Interface) key exposed to hackers with no password protection that could have been used by them to gain access to internal systems and consequently manipulate the list of authorized users. Hackers could have exploited the vulnerability in several ways which allowed them to execute commands on systems, add or remove the listed users and AWS account takeover.

The key was discovered by Vinoth Kumar who is an India security researcher, he happened to locate the open key in a public GitHub repository and responsibly reported it to Starbucks on 17th October via HackerOne vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform. While reporting the same, HackerOne told, “Vinoth Kumar discovered a publicly available Github repository containing a Starbucks JumpCloud API Key which provided access to internal system information.”

“While going through Github search I discovered a public repository which contains JumpCloud API Key of Starbucks.” the expert himself told.

The key would have allowed an attacker to access a Starbucks JumpCloud API and hence the severity of the flaw was all the way up to critical. Colorado-based JumpCloud is an Active Directory management platform that offers a directory-as-a-service (DaaS) solution that customers employ to authorize, authenticate and manage users, devices, and applications. Other services it provides include web app single-on (SSO) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) service.

The issue had been taken into consideration by Starbucks very early on, however, Kumar tends to take note of the same on October 21 and told that the repository had been taken down and the API key had been revoked. As soon as the company examined Kumar's proof-of-concept of the flaw and approved of the same, the expert was rewarded with a bounty worth US$4,000 for responsibly disclosing the vulnerability.

While commenting on the matter, Starbucks said, “Thank you for your patience! We have determined that this report demonstrates “significant information disclosure and is therefore eligible for a bounty,”

“At this time, we are satisfied with the remediation of the issue and are ready to move to closure. Thank you again for the report! We hope to see more submissions from you in the future.”

As if it wasn't enough already, the famous social networking and microblogging website Twitter has suffered yet another data vulnerability recently. In a recent data breach incident, an expert claimed that he was able to exploit a Twitter bug and used it to match more than 17 Million mobile numbers to user profiles. The list of the accounts targeted includes prominent lawmakers and officials. This hack was achieved by exploiting a bug in Twitter's Android application.


According to the reports of TechCrunch, Safety expert, Ibrahim Balic discovered that it is attainable to post complete records of created contact information via the contact upload option in the Twitter app. "If you put your contact information .i.e the phone number, the app in return, retrieve user information," says Ibrahim. The users whose phone numbers were matched were from countries like Germany, France, Armenia, Iran, Greece, Turkey, and Israel. In one particular incident, the user whose number was matched was found to be a prominent Israeli politician, reports TechCrunch.

About the Bug-
Ibrahim Balic started to alert the users of this issue 2 months earlier, through a WhatsApp group. When Twitter came to know this, the micro-blogging platform immediately obstructed his attempts. Ibrahim was able to create more than 2 Billion mobile numbers, steadily, after rearranging the numbers created, he uploaded them online via the Twitter Android application. However, the vulnerability didn't exist in the web-based Twitter app. It is yet to confirm whether Ibrahim's activity was associated with what Twitter issued in a statement earlier this week, saying it had suffered a data exploit. Twitted admitted that a malicious bug was implanted into its application by an anonymous cyber-criminal, which could've jeopardized numerous Twitterites information across the world, including Indian users. Twitter, however, did not reveal the person responsible for the exploit.

What can this Vulnerability do? 
This exploit in the Twitter android application can allow hackers to see personal information of the users, and also gives them the command of user accounts, by allowing hackers to tweet or send messages. The researcher Balic is known for exposing the security flaw in Apple's developer center in the year 2013. "We are working our best to ensure that the bug couldn't be exploited again," said the Twitter spokesperson. Twitter has faced various security issues in the past this year.

Android is vulnerable anew owing it to a new bug that goes by the name of “StrandHogg”. It is a serious issue as the bug could penetrate the entire security mechanism with a single wrong click of the user.

This bug has a special provision where it allows malicious applications and malware to pose as legitimate applications. The applications look so real that the user is unaware at all times.

The fake applications then find a way to the users’ sensitive data that too in real-time. Per reports, all the versions of Android are susceptible to this bug even the latest Android 10.

Surprisingly, the worst part about the bug is that the users would have no idea at all that they have been attacked and they’d be completely unaware of the malicious applications on their device.

Listening in on conversations and recording them, accessing login credentials, read/sending unwanted texts and even complete control of the photo album, call logs and contacts are allegedly a few of the many things the bug can do.

“StrandHogg” can let the hackers have a complete hold over the affected device’s camera which is pretty disconcerting given the hackers could turn on visuals whenever they find fit which could be a massive breach of privacy.

All of the senior police personnel have been alerted regarding the hazard. Several measures have also been scheduled to be taken along the lines of public awareness about the bug.

Things to steer clear off include pop up notifications asking permission for sending notifications, messages or other related things and applications asking to log in again despite being already logged in.

If such requests are allowed, the bug would let the hackers have almost complete access to the device from the camera to live conversations be it a cell phone or a tablet.

Other warning signs include suddenly non-functional links and permissions being asked by applications that have never needed them before.

The Home Ministry’s Cyber Crime Coordination Centre reportedly cited that over 500 Android applications are under the peril of an attack by this bug. They also released to all the states, a list of the plan of action of the bug.

Hackers can now allegedly, exploit Intel chips via voltage alterations which could lead to a messed up flow of electricity only to weaken the security mechanisms of the chips.

Two research teams from Europe and America had realized that this disruption in the voltage could cause sensitive information stored on the Intel chips to leak using the “Secure Guard Extensions” feature.

The researchers were asked to keep these facts concealed for the last half-year. Intel then sent out updates of its firmware to thwart any possibilities of attack.

“Plundervolt”, per source is the technique named by the researchers which comprises of planting malicious software on the target device to temporarily reduce the voltage of its electrical flow to the Intel chip.

The drop in voltage referred to as “undervolting” generally lets genuine users to conserve power when not needed and to vary the voltage to “overclock” the processor for more strenuous tasks.

But reportedly, by transitorily “undervolting” a processor and timing it accordingly could easily aid a hacker to make the chip dance to their tunes and falter, in turn revealing sensitive data stored within the “SGX enclave”.

Per the researchers, the CPU voltage when reduced could cause a “computation” error in the Intel chips. A “bit-flip” or a “fault injection” in the chips can change a “zero” to “one” on the SGX enclave.

In these potentially exploitable chips, if cryptographic computations are done, the “secret key” could be easily discover-able. The entire chip’s security would become times weaker, leading the data to decipher easily.

The attack in question is undoubtedly not easy to execute. It requires the target computer to already have the malware installed on it by the attacker. The SGS feature of Intel which was vastly advertised as corruption and threat proof in terms of sensitive data. This attack happens to present a startling position of compromise.

ARM Chips other than Intel’s were also experimented upon by artificially fluctuating their voltage much like “Plundervolt” to destabilize the security of the processors.

Intel chips haven’t always had a good record in ensuring security if the processors. Per reports, previous attacks “Spectre” and “Foreshadow” also abused the “speculative execution feature” of the chips way before the patched were released.

“Return-oriented programming” is another technique that could be used to exploit the chips which could make an “already planted” malware invisible to the anti-virus software.

Intel though, did send out an update for its Chips’ firmware which helps the user to freeze the voltage settings to cancel out any further possibilities of the above-mentioned attack.

Although, the way of counteracting the issue of “over-clocking” and the details as to the elaborate details of the update haven’t been sent out by Intel, yet. All that could be said is that keep the processors well updates and all patched up.

An antivirus maker discovered a bug in the decrypter application of the Ryuk Ransomware, the application "the Ryuk gang" basically provides to victims to recoup their files after they paid the ransom.

While the bug causes a deficient recuperation of certain types of documents, prompting data loss, regardless of whether the victim paid the ransom demand, the primary issue, as elaborated by the antivirus maker Emsisoft in a blog post, is that the decrypter shortens one byte from the end of each file it decodes.

The secondary issue is that the Ryuk gang's decryptor additionally erases the original encoded files, which means that the victims can't re-run the 'decryption operation' again with a "fixed" decryptor. 

While the last byte in many records is there for cushioning and is generally unused, for some file extensions those bytes contain essential data that when expelled will permanently degenerate that information and thusly prevent the document from being opened.

"A lot of virtual disk type files like VHD/VHDX as well as a lot of database files like Oracle database files will store important information in that last byte and files damaged this way will fail to load properly after they are decrypted," Emsisoft says.

"We're hoping to get the word out about this as quickly and widely as possible so that affected organizations can avoid data loss,"

Emsisoft advised the victims to connect by means of ryukhelp@emsisoft.com to have its analysts fix the decrypter they got from the Ryuk gang.

 In any case, while Emsisoft is the organization who discharged the most "free ransomware decrypters" in the past, this is a 'paid service', as it infers its experts attempting to address each decrypter partially, a very tedious undertaking.

Infections attributed to Ryuk include - manage service provider T-Systems, financial service provider ASD Audit, insulating technology manufacturer TECNOL, automation tool manufacturer Pliz, city of New Bedford (US), Tribune Publishing, managed service provider PerCSoft, healthcare provider CorVel, IT service provider CloudJumper, the city of Lake City (US), and many other more.

Numerous vulnerabilities in the four well-known open sources virtual network computing (VNC) systems have been as of late identified by Kaspersky researchers however luckily most of them have just been patched.

After breaking down the four broadly utilized open source VNC systems, including LibVNC, UltraVNC, TightVNC and TurboVNC, the cybersecurity firm says UltraVNC and TightVNC are frequently prescribed by industrial automation system vendors for associating with human-machine interfaces (HMIs).

A sum of 37 CVE identifiers has been allowed to the vulnerabilities discovered by Kaspersky in server and client software.

A portion of the defects are said to have been exploited for remote code execution, enabling the attacker to make changes to the targeted system and more than 20 of the security bugs have been thusly identified in UltraVNC.

Sometimes, the security firm noticed, the flaws were found as a major aspect of the research project were varieties of previously distinguished weaknesses. While the majority of the 37 vulnerabilities have been fixed, on account of TightVNC, however, TightVNC 1.X has been discontinued and package maintainers have not discharged any fixes, in spite of being advised of in January 2019.

Pavel Cheremushkin, a scientist at Kaspersky ICS CERT said that, Kaspersky called attention to that while a portion of these vulnerabilities can represent a genuine hazard, especially on account of industrial systems, exploitation of the server-side bugs much of the time requires verification, and the software might be structured not to allow authentication without a password.

This implies setting a strong password on the server can avoid numerous attacks. On the client-side, the best defense prescribed is to ensure that users don't associate with untrusted VNC servers.