Security News > 2020
A vulnerability in Broadcom's cable modem firmware can open unknown millions of broadband modems by various manufacturers to attackers, a group of Danish researchers has warned. CVE-2019-19494, also dubbed Cable Haunt, is present in the spectrum analyzer, a standard component of Broadcom chips that identifies potential problems with the connection through the modem's coaxial cable.
In a paper called SHA-1 is a Shambles, researchers Gaëtan Leurent and Thomas Peyrin have demonstrated a new, powerful attack on the system that could enable attackers to fake digital certificates for as little as $45,000. People had long suspected weaknesses in SHA-1, but then in 2017, researchers at CWI Amsterdam along with Google successfully performed a collision attack against the algorithm.
The fairly new malware, which has been dubbed Oski Stealer, is being advertised on underground cyber-forums, including several Russian forums, security researcher Aditya K Sood explained in a report shared with SecurityWeek. Oski Stealer is being distributed via drive-by downloads, phishing attacks, and other standard infection methods, and acts as a native piece of software that can be installed on various systems.
The researchers say the flaw exists in middleware built into chips manufactured by semiconductor giant Broadcom that are widely used in cable modems. The research team has dubbed such attacks Cable Haunt and says "An estimated 200 million cable modems in Europe alone" are at risk.
Facebook last week rushed to patch a bug that exposed the accounts of individuals who manage pages, after the weakness was exploited against several high-profile pages. If a Facebook page's administrator edits a post, users can keep track of the modifications with the "View edit history" feature.
Exploits targeting the recent Citrix Application Delivery Controller vulnerability have already been published online, yet security patches will not be available for at least another week. Impacting both Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway, the vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2019-19781 and could lead to code execution without authentication, Citrix revealed on December 17, 2019.
The original filename and directory are recorded, the decryption key is stored too, and the special tag EKANS, which is SNAKE written backwards, finishes off the encrypted file. The key used for locking data is called the public key, because you can reveal it to anyone; the unlocking key is called the private key, because as long as you keep it private, you're the only one who can later unlock the encrypted data.
With several exploits targeting CVE-2019-19781 having been released over the weekend and the number of vulnerable endpoints still being over 25,000, attackers are having a field day. Some other researchers then published exploits and scanners for it.
Reddit had already banned pornographic deepfakes in 2018. Now, in the run up to the 2020 US presidential election, it's expanded its deepfake ban: Reddit is now prohibiting impersonation, including domains that mimic others.
Technology giant Citrix says it's racing to develop patches to fix a severe flaw in its software, for which proof-of-concept exploit code has now been released. Designated CVE-2019-19781, the directory traversal flaw has been present in Citrix's code for nearly six years, but only came to light - at least publicly - in December 2019.