WordPress Delivers Second Patch For SQL Injection Bug

A bug exploitable in WordPress 4.8.2 and earlier creates unexpected and unsafe conditions ripe for a SQL injection attack, exposing sites created on the content management system to takeover. WordPress released WordPress 4.8.3 Tuesday, which mitigates the vulnerability. “This is a security releas...

Nagios Core Patches Root, RCE Vulnerabilities

Nagios Core has been updated to take care of two critical vulnerabilities that can be pinned together to attack servers hosting the open source IT infrastructure monitoring software. The flaws were privately disclosed by researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers, who said the vulnerabilities can...

Exploit Code Released for NTP Vulnerability

A researcher has released a proof-of-concept exploit for a vulnerability in the Network Time Protocol daemon that could crash a server with a single, malformed packet. The Network Time Foundation’s NTP Project on Monday patched the bug and nine others with the release of NTP 4.2.8p9. The...

Adobe Patches Nine Code Execution Flaws in Flash Player

Two weeks after rushing out an emergency patch for a zero-day vulnerability, Adobe today released another Flash Player security update. The new release patched nine vulnerabilities, all of which expose the host system to remote code execution. Adobe said it is not aware of public exploits against...

Google Plugs 21 Security Holes in Chrome Browser

Google on Wednesday patched 21 security vulnerabilities in Chrome, including a half dozen rated high severity that were reported by external researchers and were eligible for a bounty. Bug hunters earned a total of $30,000 in bounties, with a top payout of $7,500 to an unnamed researcher for a...

Old SSH Vulnerability at Center of Credential-Stuffing Attacks

Connected devices aren’t just for DDoS attacks anymore. Researchers at Akamai this week exposed how attackers are using a 12-year-old SSH vulnerability in combination with weak or default credentials to compromise an array of IOT and home networking devices. Those connected things are then being...

Patched libarchive Vulnerabilities Have Big Reach

The libarchive programming library was recently patched against three critical memory-related vulnerabilities that could be abused to execute code on computers running the vulnerable software. As is the case with most open source software packages, patching the core library is only half the battl...

CryptXXX Jumps From Angler to Neutrino Exploit Kit

Crooks behind the revamped CryptXXX 3.100 ransomware have switched its distribution from the Angler Exploit Kit to the Neutrino Exploit Kit. The sudden change in distribution was spotted on Monday by researchers at the SANS Internet Storm Center. “This is not the first time we’ve seen campaigns...

Researcher Pockets $30,000 in Chrome Bounties

Security researcher Mariusz Mlynski is having a good month. Having cashed in earlier in May to the tune of $15,500, Mlynski pocketed another $30,000 courtesy of Google’s bug bounty program after four high-severity vulnerabilities were patched in the Chrome browser, each worth $7,500 to the...

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report: Top Takeaways

Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report painted a bleak picture when it comes to malware, fraudulent login attempts and the staying power of really old exploits. Key findings in the 198-page biannual report run the gamut illustrating how old threats die hard and what new threats are on the...

Emergency Adobe Flash Player Security Update

The latest version of Adobe Flash Player, which was made available on Tuesday, will have a short shelf life. Adobe will release an emergency Flash update next week after public attacks were carried out against a zero day vulnerability in the latest version of the software, 19.0.0.207, for Windows...

Google Patches 43 Bugs in Chrome

A new version of Google Chrome is available, and it contains patches for 43 security vulnerabilities, many of them in the high-risk category. Two of the more serious vulnerabilities fixed in Chrome 44 are a pair of universal cross-site scripting bugs. One of the flaws is in blink, the Web layout...

Microsoft Issues Critical, Out-of-Band Patch for All Versions of Windows

Microsoft released an out-of-band patch Monday that addresses a critical remotely exploitable flaw in all versions of Windows. The vulnerability stems from how Windows’ Adobe Type Manager Library handles OpenType fonts. If a user was tricked into either opening a rigged document or visiting an...

HP Releases Details, Exploit Code for Unpatched IE Flaws

Researchers at HP’s Zero Day Initiative have disclosed full details and proof-of-concept exploit code for a series of bugs they discovered that allow attackers to bypass a key exploit mitigation in Internet Explorer. The disclosure is a rarity for ZDI. The company typically does not publish...

June 2015 Microsoft Patch Tuesday Security Bulletins

IT administrators today were granted a relatively light month of security bulletins from Microsoft, which is likely to be welcomed given that Windows Server 2003 security support ends in little more than a month. Microsoft today released eight bulletins, two of them rated critical, including a...

December 2014 Adobe Reader, Acrobat Security Patches

Adobe is expected to update its Reader and Acrobat software next Tuesday as part of its scheduled security updates, and the updates will, according to an Adobe spokesperson, include patches for a Reader vulnerability disclosed this week by Google’s Project Zero. Researcher James Forshaw, a...

VMware Patches Apache Struts Flaws in vCOPS

VMware has patched several serious security vulnerabilities in its vCenter Operations Center Management suite, one of which could lead to remote code execution on vulnerable machines. All of the vulnerabilities that the company patched lie in the Apache Struts Java application framework, and the...

May 2014 Apple Safari Browser Security Patches

Apple released an update to Safari yesterday patching 22 vulnerabilities in the WebKit browser engine that allow code execution or a browser crash. Safari 7.0.4 is available for OS X Mavericks 10.9 and Safari 6.1.4 for OS X Mountain Lion 10.8. The vulnerabilities could be exploited if the user wa...

Emergency Adobe Flash Player Security Update Patches 0Day

Adobe today released an out-of-band security update for Flash Player that patches a vulnerability the company said is currently being exploited. Adobe Flash Player version 12.0.0.43 and earlier for Windows and Mac are affected as is 11.2.202.335 and earlier on Linux. The vulnerability,...

NTP Amplification Flaw To Blame For Gaming DDoS Attacks

US-CERT has issued an advisory that warns enterprises about distributed denial of service attacks flooding networks with massive amounts of UDP traffic using publicly available network time protocol NTP servers. Known as NTP amplification attacks, hackers are exploiting something known as the...

Exploit Kit Adds Vector for Silverlight Vulnerability

Developers behind the Angler Exploit Kit have apparently added a new exploit over the last week that leverages a known vulnerability in Microsoft’s Silverlight browser framework. Silverlight, similar to Adobe Flash, is Microsoft’s plug-in for streaming media on browsers and is perhaps most known...

Metasploit Exploit Module for IE Zero-Day Vulnerability

It’s been 14 days since Microsoft issued an advisory and temporary mitigation for a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, one being actively exploited in the wild and called by some experts as severe a browser bug as you can have. Yet users have since had little more to shield them from...

Apache Upgrade Repairs Struts, Fixes Two Vulnerabilities

Developers behind the Apache Struts framework have released an update that fixes two vulnerabilities. Creators of the open-source web application framework are encouraging users to upgrade to Struts 2.3.15.2 immediately. One of the fixes addresses an issue CVE-2013-4316 in the Dynamic Method...

Flaws in Emergency Alert System Hardware Allow Remote Login, Zombie Alert Insertion

There are a set of easily exploited vulnerabilities in the appliances used in the emergency alert system EAS that could be used by attackers to log in to these boxes remotely and send fake emergency alerts like the one that interrupted a TV broadcast in Montana on Monday. The vulnerabilities...

U.S. Cyber Command Using Classified Intel To Scare CEOs To Action

The U.S.’s Cyber Command is using special, classified briefings with private sector CEOs to scare them into greater vigilance about the threat of cyber attacks, according to an NPR report. The report, quoting unnamed participants in the classified, 2010 briefings said that government officials...

Google Releases Chrome 18, Fixes Nine Security Flaws

Google has released version 18 of its Chrome browser and has fixed a number of serious security vulnerabilities in the process. The latest version of Chrome also includes an updated release of the Flash player that now includes the background updated that enables users to set the software to upda...

Mobile, Android Threats Continued Sharp Growth in 2011

The occurrence of mobile malware increased by 155 percent across all platforms in 2011, and, according to Juniper Network’s 2011 Mobile Threat Report, malware specifically targeting the Android operating system saw its own increase of more than 3,000 percent. Juniper Networks attributes Android’s...

Blackhole Exploit Kit's Dominance On Infected Hosts Could Push Rivals To the Cloud

The Blackhole exploit kit has a near monopoly on infected Web pages, according to Web security firm M86’s latest Security Labs Report, issued today. PDF The bi-annual report, which covers the last half of 2011, July to December, describe Blackhole as the source of a whopping 95 percent of all the...

Google Fixes Three High-Priority Bugs in Chrome

Google has released a new version of its Chrome browser, fixing just a small handful of vulnerabilities in the process. All three of the bugs fixed in Chrome were rated high. The release by Google is a pretty small one by the company’s standards. Often, new versions of Chrome will include fixes f...

Google Fixes 27 Bugs in Chrome 15

Google has fixed more than two dozen vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser and also implemented a defense against the BEAST SSL attack. The bugs fixed in the new version of Chrome include 11 high-severity flaws. As part of its bug bounty program, Google paid more than $26,000 in rewards to...

Attackers Exploiting Critical Flash Bug Via Drive-By Download

Attackers have begun actively exploiting the critical Adobe Flash vulnerability that Adobe patched last week, using rigged Web pages and phishing techniques to compromise vulnerable machines. The attack code is being hosted on a number of sites around the Web right now, researchers said. Adobe...

Google Fixes More Than 25 Bugs in Chrome, Pays $16,500 in Bounties

Google has released another new version of Chrome that fixes a total of 27 different bugs on various platforms. The company paid out $16,500 in bounties to researchers for the vulnerabilities they reported, including one $3,000 payment for a high-severity bug. The new version of Chrome, version...

Adobe Flash Bug Being Used in Attacks Via Word Documents

Adobe on Monday warned its customers about a new unpatched vulnerability in its Flash Player application. Officials say that the bug is being used in targeted attacks involving a malicious Flash file embedded in a Microsoft Word document. The Flash vulnerability affects users on Windows, Apple OS...

Adobe Issues Huge Patch for Reader and Acrobat

UPDATE: After announcing that it was accelerating a critical patch of its Reader program last week, Adobe pushed out a large patch on Tuesday, fixing 23 separate vulnerabilities in its Reader and Acrobat applications. The huge quarterly security update included company issued Security Bulletin...

Adobe to Release Critical Reader Patch Early

Adobe is moving up the release date for the patch for the critical bug in Reader and Acrobat and will now push the fix out on Oct. 5 instead of the following week. The flaw was disclosed last month and has been the target of attacks for several weeks now. The company said on Thursday that it has...

Adobe Exploit Bypasses ASLR and DEP, Drops Signed Malicious File

Attackers are using a previously unknown exploitation technique that bypasses both ASLR and DEP to exploit the unpatched Adobe Reader bug that Adobe warned users about on Wednesday. The exploit works on machines running either Windows Vista or Windows 7 and is also dropping a file on compromised...

Microsoft to unveil patch management metrics project

Microsoft on Wednesday plans to launch a new research effort to determine the total cost of the patch-management cycle, from testing and distributing a fix to user deployment of the patch. The end result of the project, which will be completely open and transparent to outsiders, will be a full...

A Guide to Surviving a Ransomware Attack

Surviving ransomware is possible with a combination of preparation and intentionality. Often, there is a misguided characterization of ransomware attacks that implies defenders either completely thwart an attack or that attackers establish complete control of their targets’ IT infrastructure. But...

Taming the Digital Asset Tsunami

Internet Protocol IP addresses and the devices, web services and cloud assets behind them are the lifeblood of modern businesses. But too often companies amass thousands of digital assets, creating an unmanageable mess for IT and security teams. Left unchecked, a single forgotten, abandoned or...

Scammers Target NFT Discord Channel

Discord a public chat application designed for gamers has grown popular among crypto owners all over the world. Attackers are targeting the Discord servers of several popular nonfungible token NFT projects. Josh Fraser founder of Origin protocol shared a thread on Twitter earlier this month,...

Ozzy Osbourne NFTs Used to Bite Off Chunk of Crypto Coin

Ozzy Osbourne and his famously enterprising wife and manager, Sharon, decided to launch a new non-fungible token NFT collection called CryptoBatz — but the rollout was clouded. Scammers quickly found they could use an abandoned vanity Discord URL to drain potential buyers’ crypto wallets...

Researchers Flag 300K Banking Trojan Infections from Google Play in 4 Months

Overcoming Google Play app restrictions, attackers have successfully racked up more than 300,000 banking trojan installations over just the past four months in the official Android app marketplace. Researchers from Threat Fabric reported that these threat groups have honed their ability to use...

Fake Ransomware Infection Hits WordPress Sites

Fake red-on-black warnings have been plastered to hundreds of WordPress sites, warning that they’ve been encrypted. The warnings have at least one ransomware accoutrement that might look convincing at first blush: a countdown clock tick-tick-ticking away, warning site owners that they’ve got seve...

Cyber-Mercenary Group Void Balaur Attacks High-Profile Targets for Cash

Russian-language group Void Balaur, also tracked under the name Rockethack, has been identified as a prolific cyber-mercenary group, available for hire to break into the email and social-media accounts of high-profile, high-stakes targets around the world. After monitoring Void Balaur for more th...

Why Your Business Needs a Long-Term Remote Security Strategy

When COVID-19 first emerged, companies across all sectors of the economy were forced to rapidly transition to remote work. The goal was simple: Ensuring business continuity in the face of an unprecedented challenge — a challenge that most assumed would come and go in short order. As vaccines...

Insider Versus Outsider: Navigating Top Data Loss Threats

It’s no surprise that cloud adoption has increased considerably in the last year, as organizations sought to adapt to the rapid transition to remote work amid the pandemic. However, what’s shocking is that despite the many advantages cloud and software-as-a-service SaaS applications provide...

Microsoft Disrupts Large, Cloud-Based BEC Campaign

Threat hunters at Microsoft recently uncovered and disrupted infrastructure that powered a large-scale business email compromise BEC campaign. The infrastructure was hosted on multiple cloud platforms, which allowed it to stay under the radar for quite some time. “The attackers performed discrete...

Bad Apple: App Store Rife with Fraud, Fleeceware

A new analysis from the Washington Post reveals just how widespread fraud is across the Apple App Store, while also offering glimpse into the revenue flowing into Cupertino generated by those malicious activities. The Apple App Store has been under heightened scrutiny for maintaining its iron gri...

Microsoft Offers Up To $30K For Teams Bugs

Microsoft wants to send the message the company is serious about the security of its popular Teams desktop application and it’s willing to put some cash behind the talk. A new bug-bounty program offers up to $30,000 for security vulnerabilities, with top payouts going to those with the most...

Home-Office Photos: A Ripe Cyberattack Vector

That photo that appears when someone disables his or her Zoom video, or those photos of a remote worker’s home office shared on Instagram may seem innocuous and playful. However, they could become ammunition for threat actors to launch targeted scams and put personal and critical data at risk, a...