Security News
5 open source Burp Suite penetration testing extensions you should check outWhen it comes to assessing the security of computer systems, penetration testing tools are critical for identifying vulnerabilities that attackers may exploit. LastPass breach: Hacker accessed corporate vault by compromising senior developer's home PCLastPass is, once again, telling customers about a security incident related to the August 2022 breach of its development environment and subsequent unauthorized access to the company's third-party cloud storage service that hosted backups.
The developers of the BlackLotus UEFI bootkit have improved the malware with Secure Boot bypass capabilities that allow it to infected even fully patched Windows 11 systems. BlackLotus is the first public example of UEFI malware that can avoid the Secure Boot mechanism, thus being able to disable security protections that come with the operating system.
ESET researchers have published the first analysis of a UEFI bootkit capable of circumventing UEFI Secure Boot, a critical platform security feature. "Our investigation started with a few hits on what turned out to be the BlackLotus user-mode component - an HTTP downloader - in our telemetry late in 2022. After an initial assessment, code patterns found in the samples brought us to the discovery of six BlackLotus installers. This allowed us to explore the whole execution chain and to realize that what we were dealing with here is not just regular malware," says Martin Smolár, the ESET researcher who led the investigation into the bootkit.
A stealthy Unified Extensible Firmware Interface bootkit called BlackLotus has become the first publicly known malware capable of bypassing Secure Boot defenses, making it a potent threat in the cyber landscape. "This bootkit can run even on fully up-to-date Windows 11 systems with UEFI Secure Boot enabled," Slovak cybersecurity company ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Acer has fixed a high-severity vulnerability affecting multiple laptop models that could enable local attackers to deactivate UEFI Secure Boot on targeted systems. Attackers with high privileges can abuse it in low-complexity attacks that require no user interaction to alter UEFI Secure Boot settings by modifying the BootOrderSecureBootDisable NVRAM variable to disable Secure Boot.
PC maker Lenovo has addressed yet another set of three shortcomings in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface firmware affecting several Yoga, IdeaPad, and ThinkBook devices. "The vulnerabilities allow disabling UEFI Secure Boot or restoring factory default Secure Boot databases: all simply from an OS," Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET explained in a series of tweets.
Lenovo has fixed two high-severity vulnerabilities impacting various ThinkBook, IdeaPad, and Yoga laptop models that could allow an attacker to deactivate UEFI Secure Boot. UEFI Secure Boot is a verification system that ensures no malicious code can be loaded and executed during the computer boot process.
A threat actor is selling on hacking forums what they claim to be a new UEFI bootkit named BlackLotus, a malicious tool with capabilities usually linked to state-backed threat groups. UEFI bootkits are planted in the system firmware and are invisible to security software running within the operating system because the malware loads in the initial stage of the booting sequence.
A security feature bypass vulnerability has been uncovered in three signed third-party Unified Extensible Firmware Interface boot loaders that allow bypass of the UEFI Secure Boot feature. "These vulnerabilities can be exploited by mounting the EFI System Partition and replacing the existing bootloader with the vulnerable one, or modifying a UEFI variable to load the vulnerable loader instead of the existing one," hardware security firm Eclypsium said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Some signed third-party bootloaders for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface could allow attackers to execute unauthorized code in an early stage of the boot process, before the operating system loads. Eclypsium security researchers Mickey Shkatov and Jesse Michael discovered vulnerabilities affecting UEFI bootloaders from third-party vendors that could be exploited to bypass the Secure Boot feature on Windows machines.