Security News
Microsoft on Tuesday released its monthly security update, addressing 61 different security flaws spanning its software, including two critical issues impacting Windows Hyper-V that could lead to...
On this March 2024 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released fixes for 59 CVE-numbered vulnerabilities, but - welcome news! - none of them are currently publicly known or actively exploited. One of the two - CVE-2024-21338, an elevation of privilege vulnerability affecting the Windows Kernel - had been reported to Microsoft by Avast researchers, who later shared that it had been leveraged by North Korean hackers for months before the patch was released.
Scans on the public web show that approximately 150,000 Fortinet FortiOS and FortiProxy secure web gateway systems are vulnerable to CVE-2024-21762, a critical security issue that allows executing code without authentication. America's Cyber Defense Agency CISA confirmed last month that attackers are actively exploiting the flaw by adding it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
QNAP warns of vulnerabilities in its NAS software products, including QTS, QuTS hero, QuTScloud, and myQNAPcloud, that could allow attackers to access devices. NAS devices often store large amounts of valuable data for businesses and individuals, including sensitive personal information, intellectual property, and critical business data.
VMware has fixed four vulnerabilities in ESXi, Workstation, Fusion and Cloud Foundation, some of which could allow attackers to escape the sandbox and execute code on the host machine. VMware ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor, VMware Workstation and Fusion are desktop hypervisors, and VMware Cloud Foundation is a hybrid cloud platform.
"Our Web-Based PLC malware resides in PLC memory, but ultimately gets executed client-side by various browser-equipped devices throughout the ICS environment. From there, the malware uses ambient browser-based credentials to interact with the PLC's legitimate web APIs to attack the underlying real-world machinery," the researchers explained. "While previous attacks on PLCs infect either the control logic or firmware portions of PLC computation, our proposed malware exclusively infects the web application hosted by the emerging embedded webservers within the PLCs," the researchers noted.
In this Help Net Security video, Michelle Alvarez, Strategic Threat Analysis Manager at IBM X-Force, discusses the 2024 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, revealing top threats and trends the team observed last year across its global engagements and how these shifts are forming the threat landscape in 2024 and beyond. X-Force observed shifts toward credential-driven attacks with a 71% increase in attacks caused by using valid accounts.
Hackers have started to exploit the critical-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in TeamCity On-Premises, which JetBrains addressed in an update on Monday. LeakIX, a search engine for exposed device misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, told BleepingComputer that a little over 1,700 TeamCity servers have yet to receive the fix.
"Cybercriminals continue to adjust their tactics, and the FBI has observed emerging ransomware trends, such as the deployment of multiple ransomware variants against the same victim and the use of data-destruction tactics to increase pressure on victims to negotiate," according to the IC3 report. Crooks had no qualms about infecting critical infrastructure organizations with ransomware.
VMware released security updates to fix critical sandbox escape vulnerabilities in VMware ESXi, Workstation, Fusion, and Cloud Foundation products, allowing attackers to escape virtual machines and access the host operating system.These types of flaws are critical as they could permit attackers to gain unauthorized access to the host system where a hypervisor is installed or access other virtual machines running on the same host, breaching their isolation.