Security News

A threat actor - likely a state-sponsored cyberespionage group - has used a sophisticated technique to allow a piece of malware hosted on a server to communicate with command and control servers through a firewall. It's unclear exactly how the attackers planted the malware, but researchers believe they may have accessed the server through a dictionary attack on an exposed SSH port.

TCP source ports only need to be unique for each outbound connection, so most programmers simply let the operating system choose a port number for them, known in the jargon as an ephemeral port. Most of the time it won't, because the crooks use source port numbers below 10000, while conventional software and most modern operating systems stick to source port numbers of 32768 and above.

OpenSMTPD has been found vulnerable to yet another critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to take complete control over email servers running BSD or Linux operating systems. OpenSMTPD, also known as OpenBSD SMTP Server, is an open-source implementation of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol to deliver messages on a local machine or to relay them to other SMTP servers.

Over 20,000 web servers have been compromised via trojanized WordPress themes to deliver malware through malicious ads, Prevailion researchers have discovered. They are taking advantage of the widespread use of the WordPress content management system, an increased demand for premium themes and victims' lack of security awareness to get them to unknowingly compromise their own web servers.

Now, security firm ClearSky says that at least three advanced persistent threat groups, all with apparent ties to the Iranian government, have been joining the fray and hitting unpatched Fortinet, Pulse Secure and Palo Alto Networks VPN servers and Citrix remote gateways. Specific flaws needing to be patched include CVE-2019-11510 in Pulse Secure's VPN SSL servers, CVE-2018-13379 in Fortigate's SSL VPN servers, and CVE-2019-1579 in Palo Alto Network VPN servers, all of which ClearSky says Fox Kitten is now exploiting.

A vulnerability in 12,000+ internet-facing Jenkins servers can be abused to mount and amplify reflective DDoS attacks against internet hosts, Radware researchers have discovered. The vulnerability can also be triggered by a single, spoofed UDP packet to launch DoS attacks against those same vulnerable Jenkins servers, by forcing them into an infinite loop of replies that can't be stopped unless one of the servers is rebooted or has its Jenkins service restarted.

NCP engineering released version 5.30 of the Secure Enterprise Management Server, a central component of the NCP Next Generation Network Access Technology that serves as a single point of administration. With the NCP Secure Enterprise Management Server version 5.30, a Time-based One-time Password generated through the NCP Authenticator App can be used as an alternative to NCP's Advanced Authentication via SMS as a second factor.

The UN suffered a major data breach last year after it failed to patch a Microsoft SharePoint server, it emerged this week. According to the outlet, internal UN staffers announced the compromise on 30 August 2019, explaining that the "Entire domain" was probably compromised by an attacker who was lurking on the UN's networks.

Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point today disclosed details of two recently patched potentially dangerous vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure services that, if exploited, could have allowed hackers to target several businesses that run their web and mobile apps on Azure. According to a report researchers shared with The Hacker News, the first security vulnerability is a request spoofing issue that affected Azure Stack, a hybrid cloud computing software solution by Microsoft.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new critical vulnerability in the OpenSMTPD email server that could allow remote attackers to take complete control over BSD and many Linux based servers. OpenSMTPD is an open-source implementation of the server-side SMTP protocol that was initially developed as part of the OpenBSD project but now comes pre-installed on many UNIX-based systems.