Security News

Lexmark printers - those ubiquitous, inky office workhorses that fill homes and offices, and are found all the way on up to the federal government - have an unpatched vulnerability that could lead to serious, easy-to-execute attacks that require neither privileges nor user interaction and which can lead to arbitrary code execution. Beyond known security vulnerabilities, Lexmark printers have in the past been prone to a trivial hack thanks to what researchers have called "Gross negligence" on the part of users.

Researchers from three universities in Germany have identified a new TLS attack method that can allow a man-in-the-middle attacker to extract user data or execute arbitrary code. The new attack, dubbed ALPACA, has been described as an "Application layer protocol content confusion attack."

Microsoft today will release a patch for a vulnerability affecting the Microsoft Office MSGraph component, responsible for displaying graphics and charts, that could be exploited to execute code on a target machine. According to the researchers, the issue is in a MSGraph file parsing function, which "Is commonly used across multiple different Microsoft Office products, such as Excel, Office Online Server and Excel for OSX.".

Siemens on Tuesday released an advisory to inform customers about several high-severity vulnerabilities affecting its Solid Edge product. The vulnerabilities were discovered in Siemens Solid Edge last year by security researcher Andrea Micalizzi, who has identified many vulnerabilities in industrial systems over the past years.

A Checkbox Survey vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code without authentication is being exploited in the wild, the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University warns. A flexible online survey tool written in ASP.NET, Checkbox Survey helps organizations create professional surveys that can be easily accessed from either desktop computers or mobile devices.

Cisco this week announced the availability of patches for a high-severity vulnerability in AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client that could be exploited for code execution. Initially disclosed in November 2020, the flaw affects the interprocess communication channel of the secure VPN application and could be abused by a local attacker to cause an AnyConnect user to run a malicious script.

Researchers at security biz Qualys discovered 21 vulnerabilities in Exim, a popular mail server, which can be chained to obtain "a full remote unauthenticated code execution and gain root privileges on the Exim Server." Exim is a mail transfer agent, responsible for receiving and forwarding email messages.

Microsoft security researchers have discovered over two dozen critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in Internet of Things devices and Operational Technology industrial systems. Threat actors can exploit them to trigger system crashes and execute malicious code remotely on vulnerable IoT and OT systems.

Google's Chrome browser has several security vulnerabilities that could pave the way to multiple types of attacks, including a V8 bug that could allow remote code execution within a user's browser. Liu told SecurityWeek that the bug is somewhat mitigated by the fact that it doesn't allow attackers to escape the sandbox where Chrome runs, meaning attackers can't reach any of the other program, data and applications on the computer.

Adobe on Tuesday announced patches for vulnerabilities in four of its products, including critical code execution flaws affecting Photoshop and Bridge. In Photoshop, the company fixed two critical buffer overflow bugs that can be exploited for arbitrary code execution in the context of the targeted user.