Security News

Microsoft on Tuesday issued fixes for 56 flaws, including a critical vulnerability that's known to be actively exploited in the wild. The most critical of the flaws is a Windows Win32k privilege escalation vulnerability that allows attackers with access to a target system to run malicious code with elevated permissions.

Google announced a critical bug in Chrome last week - a bug that affected Edge as well. The company kept details of the bug secret, presumably to avoid having thousands of crooks simultaneously figuring out, "Ah, so that's where to look!".

Google has patched a zero-day vulnerability in Chrome web browser for desktop that it says is being actively exploited in the wild. While it's typical of Google to limit details of the vulnerability until a majority of users are updated with the fix, the development comes weeks after Google and Microsoft disclosed attacks carried out by North Korean hackers against security researchers with an elaborate social engineering campaign to install a Windows backdoor.

Hackers linked to North Korea are targeting security researchers with an elaborate social-engineering campaign that sets up trusted relationships with them - and then infects their organizations' systems with custom backdoor malware. The effort includes attackers going so far as to set up their own research blog, multiple Twitter profiles and other social-media accounts in order to look like legitimate security researchers themselves, according to a blog post by TAG's Adam Weidermann.

A zero-day hunter has told The Register of the "Holy f**k" moment when he realised he'd been targeted by a North Korean campaign aimed at stealing Western researchers' vulns. Enraged by the deception, Caceres also offered a hefty bounty for information leading to the arrest of "James Willy", who appears to be one of the North Korean actors engaged on the Pyongyang-driven campaign.

A North Korean government-backed hacking group targets security researchers who focus on vulnerability and exploit development via social networks, disclosed Google tonight. According to a report released tonight by Google's Threat Analysis Group, a North Korean government-backed hacking group uses social networks to target security researchers and infect their computers with a custom backdoor malware.

The San Jose-based company said the attacks leveraged zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall secure remote access products such as NetExtender VPN client version 10.x and Secure Mobile Access that are used to provide users with remote access to internal resources. "Recently, SonicWall identified a coordinated attack on its internal systems by highly sophisticated threat actors exploiting probable zero-day vulnerabilities on certain SonicWall secure remote access products," the company exclusively told The Hacker News.

Google's Project Zero team has made public details of an improperly patched zero-day security vulnerability in Windows print spooler API that could be leveraged by a bad actor to execute arbitrary code. Details of the unpatched flaw were revealed publicly after Microsoft failed to rectify it within 90 days of responsible disclosure on September 24.

Google has patched two more zero-day flaws in the Chrome web browser for desktop, making it the fourth and fifth actively exploited vulnerabilities addressed by the search giant in recent weeks. Tracked as CVE-2020-16013 and CVE-2020-16017, the flaws were discovered and reported to Google by "Anonymous" sources, unlike previous cases, which were uncovered by the company's Project Zero elite security team.

Apple on Thursday released multiple security updates to patch three zero-day vulnerabilities that were revealed as being actively exploited in the wild. The zero-days were discovered and reported to Apple by Google's Project Zero security team.