Security News

A set of unique spyware strains created by an Israeli firm and allegedly used by governments around the world to surveil dissidents has been defanged by Microsoft, the software giant said. The spyware exploits two elevation-of-privilege security vulnerabilities in Windows, CVE-2021-31979 and CVE-2021-33771, both of which were addressed in Microsoft's July Patch Tuesday update this week.

Have you noticed that lately we've been hearing more about in-the-wild attacks exploiting 0-day vulnerabilities? "Halfway into 2021, there have been 33 0-day exploits used in attacks that have been publicly disclosed this year - 11 more than the total number from 2020," researchers with Google's Threat Analysis Group have pointed out in a recent blog post. TAG analysts Maddie Stone and Clement Lecigne have shared information about several attack campaigns exploiting 0-day vulnerabilities that TAG discovered this year, and in some of them they believe the 0-day exploits were sourced from the same commercial surveillance company.

Microsoft on Tuesday disclosed that the latest string of attacks targeting SolarWinds Serv-U managed file transfer service with a now-patched remote code execution exploit is the handiwork of a Chinese threat actor dubbed "DEV-0322.". While it was previously revealed that the attacks were limited in scope, SolarWinds said it's "Unaware of the identity of the potentially affected customers."

In this week's Oh! No! story, a server room fills with toxic fumes. Download the IBM 3270 retrofont that Duck admired in the podcast.

U.S. technology firm Kaseya, which is firefighting the largest ever supply-chain ransomware strike on its VSA on-premises product, ruled out the possibility that its codebase was unauthorizedly tampered with to distribute malware. While initial reports raised speculations that REvil, the ransomware gang behind the attack, might have gained access to Kaseya's backend infrastructure and abused it to deploy a malicious update to VSA servers running on client premises, in a modus operandi similar to that of the devastating SolarWinds hack, it has since emerged that a never-before-seen security vulnerability in the software was leveraged to push ransomware to Kaseya's customers.

Amidst the massive supply-chain ransomware attack that triggered an infection chain compromising thousands of businesses on Friday, new details have emerged about how the notorious Russia-linked REvil cybercrime gang may have pulled off the unprecedented hack. The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure on Sunday revealed it had alerted Kaseya to a number of zero-day vulnerabilities in its VSA software that it said were being exploited as a conduit to deploy ransomware.

There is a similarly serious zero-day flaw present in a much broader range of newer Western Digital MyCloud network storage devices that will remain unfixed for many customers who can't or won't upgrade to the latest operating system. At issue is a remote code execution flaw residing in all Western Digital network attached storage devices running MyCloud OS 3, an operating system the company only recently stopped supporting.

Update: Microsoft acknowledged PrintNightmare as a zero-day that has been affecting all Windows versions since before June 2021 security updates. Technical details and a proof-of-concept exploit have been accidentally leaked for a currently unpatched vulnerability in Windows that allows remote code execution.

A critical vulnerability in SonicWall VPN appliances that was believed to have been patched last year has been now found to be "Botched," with the company leaving a memory leak flaw unaddressed, until now, that could permit a remote attacker to gain access to sensitive information. Tracked as CVE-2021-20019, the vulnerability is the consequence of a memory leak when sending a specially-crafted unauthenticated HTTP request, culminating in information disclosure.

Google has rolled out yet another update to Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux to fix four security vulnerabilities, including one zero-day flaw that's being exploited in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2021-30554, the high severity flaw concerns a use after free vulnerability in WebGL, a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within the browser.