Security News
The 2021 spring edition of Pwn2Own hacking contest concluded last week on April 8 with a three-way tie between Team Devcore, OV, and Computest researchers Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade. A zero-click exploit targeting Zoom that employed a three-bug chain to exploit the messenger app and gain code execution on the target system.
Gigaset has revealed a malware infection discovered in its Android devices was the result of a compromise of a server belonging to an external update service provider. Impacting older smartphone models - GS100, GS160, GS170, GS180, GS270, and GS370 series - the malware took the form of multiple unwanted apps that were downloaded and installed through a pre-installed system update app.
Contestants hacked Microsoft's Windows 10 OS twice during the second day of the Pwn2Own 2021 competition, together with the Google Chrome web browser and the Zoom video communication platform. The first to demo a successful Windows 10 exploit on Wednesday and earn $40,000 was Palo Alto Networks' Tao Yan who used a Race Condition bug to escalate to SYSTEM privileges from a normal user on a fully patched Windows 10 machine.
The maintainers of the PHP programming language have issued an update regarding the security incident that came to light late last month, stating that the actors may have gotten hold of a user database containing their passwords to make unauthorized changes to the repository. "We no longer believe the git.php.net server has been compromised. However, it is possible that the master.php.net user database leaked," Nikita Popov said in a message posted on its mailing list on April 6.
Owners of Gigaset Android phones have been repeatedly infected with malware since the end of March after threat actors compromised the vendor's update server in a supply-chain attack. Gigaset is a German manufacturer of telecommunications devices, including a series of smartphones running the Android operating system.
During the first day of Pwn2Own 2021, contestants won $440,000 after successfully exploiting previously unknown vulnerabilities to hack Microsoft's Windows 10 OS, the Exchange mail server, and the Teams communication platform. The first to fall was Microsoft Exchange in the Server category after the Devcore team achieved remote code execution on an Exchange server by chaining together an authentication bypass and a local privilege escalation.
After taking over the domains for the notorious Coinhive in-browsing Monero mining service, a researcher is now displaying alerts on hacked websites that are still injecting the mining service's JavaScript. Two years later, CoinHive is still injected on sites.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ordered federal agencies to scan their networks again for any signs of compromised on-premises Microsoft Exchange servers and report their findings within five days. CISA issued another directive ordering federal agencies to urgently update or disconnect their Exchange on-premises servers after Microsoft released security updates for zero-day bugs collectively dubbed ProxyLogon.
In the latest software supply chain attack, the official PHP Git repository was hacked and the code base tampered with. Yesterday, two malicious commits were pushed to the php-src Git repository maintained by the PHP team on their git.
In yet another instance of a software supply chain attack, unidentified actors hacked the official Git server of the PHP programming language and pushed unauthorized updates to insert a secret backdoor into its source code. The changes, which were committed as "Fix Typo" in an attempt to slip through undetected as a typographical correction, involved provisions for execution of arbitrary PHP code.