Security News

Cisco is warning three critical security vulnerabilities affect its flagship IOS XE software, the operating system for most of its enterprise networking portfolio. The most severe of the critical bugs is an unauthenticated remote-code-execution and denial-of-service bug, affecting the Cisco Catalyst 9000 family of wireless controllers.

Apple has warned iPhone and Mac users that it's aware of a zero-day bug that's being actively exploited. It's a nasty flaw, as it's in the XNU kernel at the heart of Apple's operating systems including macOS and iOS. As Apple's advisory explains, that means "A malicious application may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges".

For those not in the Apple camp, the macOS Finder is the default file manager and GUI front-end used on all Macintosh operating systems. It's the first thing users see upon booting, and it governs the launching of other applications and the overall user management of files, disks and network volumes.

Netgear has fixed a high severity remote code execution vulnerability found in the Circle parental control service, which runs with root permissions on almost a dozen modern Small Offices/Home Offices Netgear routers. While one would expect the attack vector exposed by Circle security flaw would be removed after the service is stopped, the Circle update daemon containing the bug is enabled by default and it can be exploited even if the service is disabled.

The vulnerabilities affect both Windows and Unix-based users, and if left unpatched, can be exploited by attackers to achieve arbitrary code execution on a system installing untrusted npm packages. On further review of the researchers' reports, GitHub security team found some more high-severity vulnerabilities in the aforementioned packages, affecting both Windows and Unix-based systems.

TensorFlow, a popular Python-based machine learning and artificial intelligence project developed by Google has dropped support for YAML, to patch a critical code execution vulnerability. Maintainers behind both TensorFlow and Keras, a wrapper project for TensorFlow, have patched an untrusted deserialization vulnerability that stemmed from unsafe parsing of YAML. Tracked as CVE-2021-37678, the critical flaw enables attackers to execute arbitrary code when an application deserializes a Keras model provided in the YAML format.

Researchers have disclosed a group of 16 different vulnerabilities collectively dubbed BrakTooth, which impact billions of devices that rely on Bluetooth Classic for communication. Potentially, billions of devices could be affected worldwide, researchers said.

Taiwanese chip designer Realtek has warned of four vulnerabilities in three SDKs accompanying its Wi-Fi modules, which are used in almost 200 products made by more than five dozen vendors. Security firm IoT Inspector, based in Bad Homburg, Germany, disclosed the vulnerabilities to Realtek in May, and said more than 65 hardware makers' products incorporate the Realtek RTL819xD module, which implements wireless access point functions and includes one of the vulnerable SDKs. "By exploiting these vulnerabilities, remote unauthenticated attackers can fully compromise the target device and execute arbitrary code with the highest level of privilege," the biz said in its advisory, estimating - conservatively, we think - that almost a million vulnerable devices may be in use, including VoIP and wireless routers, repeaters, IP cameras, and smart lighting controls.

IT management and security company Ivanti this week released patches for multiple vulnerabilities in its Pulse Connect Secure VPN appliances, including a critical issue that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. Tracked as CVE-2021-22937, the issue is in fact a bypass of the patch released in October last year for CVE-2020-8260, a high-severity remote code execution flaw in the admin web interface of Pulse Connect Secure.

Cisco has addressed a vulnerability in the Firepower Device Manager On-Box software that could be exploited to gain code execution on vulnerable devices. FDM On-Box is used to configure Cisco Firepower firewalls, providing administrators with both management and diagnostics capabilities.