Security News
Taiwanese hardware vendor QNAP warns customers to secure their Linux-powered network-attached storage devices against a high-severity Sudo privilege escalation vulnerability. The vulnerability also affects the QTS, QuTS hero, QuTScloud, and QVP NAS operating systems, as QNAP revealed in a security advisory published on Wednesday.
Traditional, well-behaved image viewers, including the very tool you just used to crop the file, would ignore the extra data, but deliberately-coded data recovery or snooping apps might not. The low-level details of the bug were different, not least because Google's app was coded in Java and used Java libraries, while Microsoft's apps are written in C++ and use Windows libraries, but the leaky side-effects were identical.
Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to address a privacy-defeating flaw in its screenshot editing tool for Windows 10 and Windows 11. "If you take a screenshot of your bank statement, save it to your desktop, and crop out your account number before saving it to the same location, the cropped image could still contain your account number in a hidden format that could be recovered by someone who has access to the complete image file," Microsoft explains.
Interestingly, WooCommerce suggests that even if attackers had found and exploited this vulnerability, the only information about your logon passwords they'd have been able to steal would have been so-called salted password hashes, and so the company has written that "It's unlikely that your password was compromised". As a result, it's offering the curious advice that you can get away without changing your admin password as long as [a] you're using the standard WordPress password management system and not some alternative way of handling passwords that WooCommerce can't vouch for, and [b] you're not in the habit of using the same password on multiple services.
Google has just revealed a fourfecta of critical zero-day bugs affecting a wide range of Android phones, including some of its own Pixel models. The four bugs we're talking about here are known as baseband vulnerabilities, meaning that they exist in the special mobile phone networking firmware that runs on the phone's so-called baseband chip.
Patching is a long and arduous process - Developing permanent fixes takes 60 days on average, even for critical vulnerabilities. Deploying even a single patch across the architecture takes 12 days on average.
Last month, Microsoft dealt with three zero-days, by which we mean security holes that cybercriminals found first, and figured out how to abuse in real-life attacks before any patches were available. Intriguingly for a bug that was discovered in the wild, albeit one reported rather blandly by Microsoft as Exploitation Detected, the Outlook flaw is jointly credited to CERT-UA, Microsoft Incident Response, and Microsoft Threat Intelligence.
"The attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted email which triggers automatically when it is retrieved and processed by the Outlook client," Microsoft explained. While Microsoft doesn't provide any details about what kind of nefarious deeds attackers are doing after exploiting the bug - or how widespread attacks are - Zero Day Initiative's Dustin Childs advises: "Definitely test and deploy this fix quickly."
Today is Microsoft's March 2023 Patch Tuesday, and security updates fix two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities and a total of 83 flaws. This month's Patch Tuesday fixes two zero-day vulnerabilities actively exploited in attacks.
Veeam Backup & Replication admins, get patching!Veeam Software has patched CVE-2023-27532, a high-severity security hole in its widely-used Veeam Backup & Replication solution, and is urging customer to implement the fix as soon as possible. Fortinet plugs critical RCE hole in FortiOS, FortiProxyFortinet has patched 15 vulnerabilities in a variety of its products, including CVE-2023-25610, a critical flaw affecting devices running FortiOS and FortiProxy.