Security News

Cisco is warning of a critical flaw in the web server of its IP phones. Cisco issued patches in a Wednesday advisory for the flaw, which affects various versions of its Cisco IP phones for small- to medium-sized businesses.

We'll refer to this one a Fourthytuesday instead, now that Firefox has reduced its update wavelength to four weeks to get important-but-not-zero-day-critical fixes out just that bit more frequently. If your automatic update hasn't happened yet, a manual check will let you "Jump the queue" and get the update a bit sooner.

Google this week released the April 2020 set of security patches for the Android operating system to address over 50 vulnerabilities, including four critical issues in the System component. "The most severe of these issues is a critical security vulnerability in the System component that could enable a remote attacker using a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process," Google notes in an advisory.

A cybersecurity researcher today disclosed technical details and proof-of-concept of a critical remote code execution vulnerability affecting OpenWrt, a widely used Linux-based operating system for routers, residential gateways, and other embedded devices that route network traffic. Tracked as CVE-2020-7982, the vulnerability resides in the OPKG package manager of OpenWrt that exists in the way it performs integrity checking of downloaded packages using the SHA-256 checksums embedded in the signed repository index.

Attackers are exploiting two new zero-days in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library to achieve remote code execution on targeted Windows systems, Microsoft warns. "There are multiple ways an attacker could exploit the vulnerability, such as convincing a user to open a specially crafted document or viewing it in the Windows Preview pane," the company shared, and said that the Outlook Preview Pane is not an attack vector for this vulnerability.

Microsoft today issued a new security advisory warning billions of Windows users of two new critical, unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities that could let hackers remotely take complete control over targeted computers. According to Microsoft, both unpatched flaws are being used in limited, targeted attacks and impact all supported versions of the Windows operating system-including Windows 10, 8.1 and Server 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2019 editions, as well as Windows 7 for which Microsoft ended its support on January 14, 2020.

After the inadvertent leaking of details about a wormable Windows SMBv3 RCE flaw on Tuesday, Microsoft has rushed to release a patch. The flaw affects Windows 10 and Windows Server installations, so admins who have those in their care are urged to implement the security updates right away.

"To exploit the vulnerability against an SMB Server, an unauthenticated attacker could send a specially crafted packet to a targeted SMBv3 Server. To exploit the vulnerability against an SMB Client, an unauthenticated attacker would need to configure a malicious SMBv3 Server and convince a user to connect to it." Unlike the Microsoft Windows SMB Server flaws used by the EternalBlue and EternalRomance exploits, which were leveraged for the 2017 WannaCry and NotPetya outbreaks, CVE-2020-0796 only affects SMBv3 and does not affect Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 systems.

A critical vulnerability in a WordPress plugin known as "ThemeREX Addons" could open the door for remote code execution in tens of thousands of websites. The plugin, which is installed on approximately 44,000 sites, is used to apply various "Skins" that govern the look and feel of web destinations, including theme-enhancing features and widgets.

Less than a month after the patching of a critical RCE flaw in OpenSMTPD, OpenBSD's mail server, comes another call to upgrade to the latest version, as two additional security holes have been plugged. CVE-2020-8794 is an out-of-bounds read flaw introduced in December 2015 and can - depending on the vulnerable OpenSMTPD version - lead to the execution of arbitrary shell commands either as root or as any non-root user.