Security News
A cybersecurity researcher today publicly disclosed technical details and PoC for 4 unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities affecting an enterprise security software offered by IBM after the company refused to acknowledge the responsibly submitted disclosure. According to Pedro Ribeiro from Agile Information Security firm, IBM Data Risk Manager contains three critical severity vulnerabilities and a high impact bug, all listed below, which can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker reachable over the network, and when chained together could also lead to remote code execution as root.
NUS researchers Prof Massimo Alioto and Mr Sachin Taneja testing the self-healing and self-concealing PUF for hardware security. Prof Alioto elaborated, "On-chip sensing, as well as machine learning and adaptation, allow us to raise the bar in chip security at significantly lower cost. As a result, PUFs can be deployed in every silicon system on earth, democratising hardware security even under tight cost constraints."
Two security researchers used a 3D printer and fabric glue to create a fake fingerprint that fooled authentication sensors 80% of the time. The biggest challenge was getting the size right for the fake fingerprint; 1 percent too small or too large and the fake fingerprint did not work.
"Furthermore, we noted a significant increase over time in the number of zero-days leveraged by groups suspected to be customers of companies that supply offensive cyber capabilities," said FireEye, which went on to refer to a group of malicious persons variously named by researchers as Stealth Falcon and FruityArmor [sic]. This group "Used malware sold by NSO Group", said FireEye, which speculated that it might also be linked to Uzbekistani state spying operations: "The zero-days used in SandCat operations were also used in Stealth Falcon operations, and it is unlikely that these distinct activity sets independently discovered the same three zero-days."
A recent analysis of the Zoom video conferencing application revealed that the keys used to encrypt and decrypt meetings may be sent to servers in China, even if all participants are located in other countries. "A scan shows a total of five servers in China and 68 in the United States that apparently run the same Zoom server software as the Beijing server. We suspect that keys may be distributed through these servers. A company primarily catering to North American clients that sometimes distributes encryption keys through servers in China is potentially concerning, given that Zoom may be legally obligated to disclose these keys to authorities in China," Citizen Lab explained in a report published on Friday.
A white hat hacker says he has earned $75,000 from Apple for reporting several Safari vulnerabilities that can be exploited to hijack the camera and microphone of devices running iOS or macOS. Researcher Ryan Pickren identified a total of seven vulnerabilities in Apple's Safari web browser, three of which can be exploited to spy on users through the camera and microphone of their iPhone, iPad or Mac computer. Apple patched the vulnerabilities that allow hackers to spy on users in January, while the other flaws were fixed in March.
Thousands of mobile applications for Android contain hidden behavior such as backdoors and blacklists, a group of researchers has discovered. Set to discover such behaviors, researchers from The Ohio State University, New York University, and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security came up with a tool that can detect "The execution context of user input validation and also the content involved in the validation," thus finding any secrets of interest.
In a rare find, a researcher has unveiled dozens of related bugs in a core Windows API that could enable attackers to elevate their privileges in the operating system. The bugs take advantage of a long-understood problem with win32k, which is the user interface kernel component in Windows.
A security researcher has discovered over 25 different potential vulnerabilities in Windows, including some that could lead to elevation of privileges. The researcher tested the flaws on a guest account on the latest Windows Insider Preview, which was updated last in September 2019.
"Whether in the IoT or on social networks, there are many circumstances where old information is circulating and could cause problems - whether it's old security data or a misleading rumor," says Wenye Wang, co-author of a paper on the work and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State. "Ultimately, our work can be used to determine the best places to inject new data into a network so that the old data can be eliminated faster," says Jie Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at NC State and first author of the paper.