Security News

A critical Discourse remote code execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2021-41163 was fixed via an urgent update by the developer on Friday. Discourse is an open-source forum, long-form chat, and mailing list management platform widely deployed on the web, offering excellent usability and integration potential while focusing heavily on social features.

Cisco SD-WAN implementations are vulnerable to a high-severity privilege-escalation vulnerability in the IOS IE operating system that could allow arbitrary code execution.The bug is an OS command-injection issue, which enables attackers to execute unexpected, dangerous commands directly on the operating system that normally wouldn't be accessible.

The PyPI repository has removed a Python package called 'mitmproxy2' that was an identical copy of the official "Mitmproxy" library, but with an "Artificially introduced" code execution vulnerability. Yesterday, Maximilian Hils, who is one of the developers behind the 'mitmproxy' Python library drew everyone's attention towards a counterfeit 'mitmproxy2' package uploaded to PyPI. 'mitmproxy2' is essentially "The same as regular mitmproxy but with an artificial RCE vulnerability included."

A high-severity code injection vulnerability has been disclosed in 23andMe's Yamale, a schema and validator for YAML, that could be trivially exploited by adversaries to execute arbitrary Python code. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-38305, involves manipulating the schema file provided as input to the tool to circumvent protections and achieve code execution.

These exploits show that the scope of the vulnerability transcends path traversal, allowing attackers remote code execution abilities. The path traversal vulnerability in Apache's HTTP server, first reported by BleepingComputer, has actively been exploited in the wild before the Apache project was notified of the flaw in September, or had a chance to patch it.

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.