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Fortra has addressed a critical security flaw impacting FileCatalyst Workflow that could be abused by a remote attacker to gain administrative access. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-6633, carries a CVSS score of 9.8, and stems from the use of a static password to connect to a HSQL database. "The default credentials for the setup HSQL database (HSQLDB) for FileCatalyst Workflow are published in a vendor knowledge base article ," Fortra said in an advisory. "Misuse of these credentials could lead to a compromise of confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the software." "The HSQLDB is only included to facilitate installation, has been deprecated, and is not intended for production use per vendor guides. However, users who have not configured FileCatalyst Workflow to use an alternative database per recommendations are vulnerable to attack from any source that can reach the HSQLDB." Cybersecurity company Tenable, which has been credited wi

Cybersecurity researchers have unpacked a new malware strain dubbed PG_MEM that's designed to mine cryptocurrency after brute-forcing their way into PostgreSQL database instances. "Brute-force attacks on Postgres involve repeatedly attempting to guess the database credentials until access is gained, exploiting weak passwords," Aqua security researcher Assaf Morag said in a technical report. "Once accessed, attackers can leverage the COPY ... FROM PROGRAM SQL command to execute arbitrary shell commands on the host, allowing them to perform malicious activities such as data theft or deploying malware." The attack chain observed by the cloud security firm entails targeting misconfigured PostgreSQL databases to create an administrator role in Postgres and exploiting a feature called PROGRAM to run shell commands. In addition, a successful brute-force attack is followed by the threat actor conducting initial reconnaissance and executing commands to strip the

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a high-severity security flaw in the Vanna.AI library that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution vulnerability via prompt injection techniques. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-5565 (CVSS score: 8.1), relates to a case of prompt injection in the "ask" function that could be exploited to trick the library into executing arbitrary commands, supply chain security firm JFrog said . Vanna is a Python-based machine learning library that allows users to chat with their SQL database to glean insights by "just asking questions" (aka prompts) that are translated into an equivalent SQL query using a large language model (LLM). The rapid rollout of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models in recent years has brought to the fore the risks of exploitation by malicious actors, who can weaponize the tools by providing adversarial inputs that bypass the safety mechanisms built into them. One such prominent clas

Threat actors are attempting to actively exploit a critical security flaw in the ValvePress Automatic plugin for WordPress that could allow site takeovers. The shortcoming, tracked as  CVE-2024-27956 , carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of a maximum of 10. It impacts all versions of the plugin prior to 3.92.0. The issue has been resolved in version 3.92.1 released on February 27, 2024, although the release notes make no mention of it. "This vulnerability, a SQL injection (SQLi) flaw, poses a severe threat as attackers can exploit it to gain unauthorized access to websites, create admin‑level user accounts, upload malicious files, and potentially take full control of affected sites," WPScan  said  in an alert this week. According to the Automattic-owned company, the issue is rooted in the plugin's user authentication mechanism, which can be trivially circumvented to execute arbitrary SQL queries against the database by means of specially crafted requests. In the attack

Employment agencies and retail companies chiefly located in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region have been targeted by a previously undocumented threat actor known as  ResumeLooters  since early 2023 with the goal of stealing sensitive data. Singapore-headquartered Group-IB said the hacking crew's activities are geared towards job search platforms and the theft of resumes, with as many as 65 websites compromised between November 2023 and December 2023. The stolen files are estimated to contain 2,188,444 user data records, of which 510,259 have been taken from job search websites. Over two million unique email addresses are present within the dataset. "By using SQL injection attacks against websites, the threat actor attempts to steal user databases that may include names, phone numbers, emails, and DoBs, as well as information about job seekers' experience, employment history, and other sensitive personal data," security researcher Nikita Rostovcev  said  in a report sh

A security flaw has been disclosed in Kyocera's  Device Manager  product that could be exploited by bad actors to carry out malicious activities on affected systems. "This vulnerability allows attackers to coerce authentication attempts to their own resources, such as a malicious SMB share, to capture or relay Active Directory hashed credentials if the 'Restrict NTLM: Outgoing NTLM traffic to remote servers' security policy is not enabled," Trustwave  said . Tracked as  CVE-2023-50916 , Kyocera, in an  advisory  released late last month, described it as a path traversal issue that enables an attacker to intercept and alter a local path pointing to the backup location of the database to a universal naming convention (UNC) path. This, in turn, causes the web application to attempt to authenticate the rogue UNC path, resulting in unauthorized access to clients' accounts and data theft. Furthermore, depending on the configuration of the environment, it could be exploited to

MongoDB on Saturday disclosed it's actively investigating a security incident that has led to unauthorized access to "certain" corporate systems, resulting in the exposure of customer account metadata and contact information. The American database software company  said  it first detected anomalous activity on December 13, 2023, and that it immediately activated its incident response efforts. It further noted that "this unauthorized access has been going on for some period of time before discovery," but emphasized it's not "aware of any exposure to the data that customers store in MongoDB Atlas." It did not disclose the exact time period of the compromise. In light of the breach, MongoDB recommends that all customers be on the lookout for social engineering and phishing attacks, enforce phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA), as well as rotate their MongoDB Atlas passwords. That's not all. The company said it's also expe

Veeam has released  security updates  to address four flaws in its ONE IT monitoring and analytics platform, two of which are rated critical in severity. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-38547  (CVSS score: 9.9) - An unspecified flaw that can be leveraged by an unauthenticated user to gain information about the SQL server connection Veeam ONE uses to access its configuration database, resulting in remote code execution on the SQL server. CVE-2023-38548  (CVSS score: 9.8) - A flaw in Veeam ONE that allows an unprivileged user with access to the Veeam ONE Web Client to obtain the NTLM hash of the account used by the Veeam ONE Reporting Service. CVE-2023-38549  (CVSS score: 4.5) - A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that allows a user with the Veeam ONE Power User role to obtain the access token of a user with the Veeam ONE Administrator role. CVE-2023-41723  (CVSS score: 4.3) - A vulnerability in Veeam ONE that permits a user with the Veeam ONE Rea

Vulnerable  Redis services  have been targeted by a "new, improved, dangerous" variant of a malware called SkidMap that's engineered to target a wide range of Linux distributions. "The malicious nature of this malware is to adapt to the system on which it is executed," Trustwave security researcher Radoslaw Zdonczyk  said  in an analysis published last week. Some of the Linux distribution SkidMap sets its eyes on include Alibaba, Anolis, openEuler, EulerOS, Stream, CentOS, RedHat, and Rocky. SkidMap was  first disclosed  by Trend Micro in September 2019 as a cryptocurrency mining botnet with capabilities to load malicious kernel modules that can obfuscate its activities as well as monitor the miner process. The operators of the malware have also been found camouflaging their backup command-and-control (C2) IP address on the Bitcoin blockchain, evocative of another botnet malware known as  Glupteba . "The technique of fetching real-time data from a de

Misconfigured Redis database servers are the target of a novel cryptojacking campaign that leverages a legitimate and open source command-line file transfer service to implement its attack. "Underpinning this campaign was the use of transfer[.]sh," Cado Security  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It's possible that it's an attempt at evading detections based on other common code hosting domains (such as pastebin[.]com)." The cloud cybersecurity firm said the command line interactivity associated with transfer[.]sh has made it an ideal tool for hosting and delivering malicious payloads. The attack chain commences with targeting insecure Redis deployments, followed by registering a  cron job  that leads to arbitrary code execution when parsed by the scheduler. The job is designed to retrieve a payload hosted at transfer[.]sh. It's worth noting that  similar   attack mechanisms  have been employed by other threat actors like TeamTNT and

At least 1,200 Redis database servers worldwide have been corralled into a botnet using an "elusive and severe threat" dubbed HeadCrab since early September 2021. "This advanced threat actor utilizes a state-of-the-art, custom-made malware that is undetectable by agentless and traditional anti-virus solutions to compromise a large number of Redis servers," Aqua security researcher Asaf Eitani  said  in a Wednesday report. A significant concentration of infections has been recorded in China, Malaysia, India, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S. to date. The origins of the threat actor are presently unknown. The findings come two months after the cloud security firm shed light on a Go-based malware codenamed  Redigo  that has been found compromising Redis servers. The attack is designed to target Redis servers that are exposed to the internet, followed by issuing a  SLAVEOF command  from another Redis server that's already under the adversary's control. In

A group of academics has demonstrated novel attacks that leverage Text-to-SQL models to produce malicious code that could enable adversaries to glean sensitive information and stage denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. "To better interact with users, a wide range of database applications employ AI techniques that can translate human questions into SQL queries (namely  Text-to-SQL ),"  Xutan Peng , a researcher at the University of Sheffield, told The Hacker News. "We found that by asking some specially designed questions, crackers can fool Text-to-SQL models to produce malicious code. As such code is automatically executed on the database, the consequence can be pretty severe (e.g., data breaches and DoS attacks)." The  findings , which were validated against two commercial solutions  BAIDU-UNIT  and  AI2sql , mark the first empirical instance where natural language processing (NLP) models have been exploited as an attack vector in the wild. The black box attacks a

A high-severity vulnerability has been disclosed in the SQLite database library, which was introduced as part of a code change dating all the way back to October 2000 and could enable attackers to crash or control programs. Tracked as  CVE-2022-35737  (CVSS score: 7.5), the 22-year-old issue affects SQLite versions  1.0.12  through 3.39.1, and has been addressed in  version 3.39.2  released on July 21, 2022. "CVE-2022-35737 is  exploitable  on 64-bit systems, and exploitability depends on how the program is compiled," Trail of Bits researcher Andreas Kellas  said  in a technical write-up published today. "Arbitrary code execution is confirmed when the library is compiled without stack canaries, but unconfirmed when stack canaries are present, and denial-of-service is confirmed in all cases." Programmed in C, SQLite is the most widely used database engine , included by default in Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS, as well as popular web browsers such as Googl

Researchers have disclosed seven new security vulnerabilities in an open-source database management system solution called ClickHouse that could be weaponized to crash the servers, leak memory contents, and even lead to the execution of arbitrary code. "The vulnerabilities require authentication, but can be triggered by any user with read permissions," Uriya Yavnieli and Or Peles, researchers from DevSecOps firm JFrog,  said  in a report published Tuesday. "This means the attacker must perform reconnaissance on the specific ClickHouse server target to obtain valid credentials. Any set of credentials would do, since even a user with the lowest privileges can trigger all of the vulnerabilities." The list of seven flaws is below – CVE-2021-43304 and CVE-2021-43305  (CVSS scores: 8.8) – Heap buffer overflow flaws in the LZ4 compression codec that could lead to remote code execution CVE-2021-42387 and CVE-2021-42388  (CVSS scores: 7.1) – Heap out-of-bounds read

Cloud infrastructure security company Wiz on Thursday revealed details of a now-fixed Azure Cosmos database vulnerability that could have been potentially exploited to grant any Azure user full admin access to other customers' database instances without any authorization. The flaw, which grants read, write, and delete privileges, has been dubbed " ChaosDB ," with Wiz researchers noting that "the vulnerability has a trivial exploit that doesn't require any previous access to the target environment, and impacts thousands of organizations, including numerous Fortune 500 companies." Cosmos DB is Microsoft's proprietary  NoSQL database  that's advertised as "a fully managed service" that "takes database administration off your hands with automatic management, updates and patching." The Wiz Research Team reported the issue to Microsoft on August 12, after which the Windows maker took steps to mitigate the issue within 48 hours of r

A new set of critical vulnerabilities uncovered in SAP's Sybase database software can grant unprivileged attackers complete control over a targeted database and even the underlying operating system in certain scenarios. The six flaws, disclosed by cybersecurity firm Trustwave today, reside in Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise ( ASE ), a relational database management software geared towards transaction-based applications. The cybersecurity company said the issues — both specific to the operating system and the platform as a whole — were discovered during a security testing of the product, one of which has a CVSS rating of 9.1. Identified as CVE-2020-6248 , the most severe vulnerability allows arbitrary code execution when making database backups, thus allowing an attacker to trigger the execution of malicious commands. "During database backup operations, there are no security checks for overwriting critical configuration files," Trustwave researchers said  in a

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a sustained malicious campaign dating back to May 2018 that targets Windows machines running MS-SQL servers to deploy backdoors and other kinds of malware, including multi-functional remote access tools (RATs) and cryptominers. Named " Vollgar " after the Vollar cryptocurrency it mines and its offensive "vulgar" modus operandi, researchers at Guardicore Labs said the attack employs password brute-force to breach Microsoft SQL servers with weak credentials exposed to the Internet. Researchers claim the attackers managed to successfully infect nearly 2,000-3,000 database servers daily over the past few weeks, with potential victims belonging to healthcare, aviation, IT & telecommunications, and higher education sectors across China, India, the US, South Korea, and Turkey. Thankfully for those concerned, researchers have also released a script to let sysadmins detect if any of their Windows MS-SQL servers have been

International hotel chain Marriott today disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 5.2 million hotel guests, making it the second security incident to hit the company in recent years. "At the end of February 2020, we identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property," Marriott said in a statement . "We believe this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, we confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests." The incident exposed guests' personal information such as contact details (name, mailing address, email address, and phone number), loyalty account information (account number and points balance), and additional information such as company, gender, dates of births, room preferences, and language preferences. The ho

For the first time ever, the Apache Pulsar PMC team is publishing a user survey report. The 2020 Apache Pulsar User Survey Report reveals Pulsar's accelerating rate of global adoption, details how organizations are leveraging Pulsar to build real-time streaming applications, and highlights key features on Pulsar's product roadmap. Apache Pulsar is a cloud-native, distributed open source publish-subscribe (pub/sub) based high-performance server-to-server messaging and streaming system that manages hundreds of billions of events per day. It provides very low end-to-end latency, guaranteed message delivery, zero data loss, and a serverless lightweight computing framework for stream native data processing. Pulsar adoption has largely been driven by the market's increased demand for real-time, data-enabled technologies. While companies have tried to leverage monolithic messaging systems to build-out real-time offerings, they've hit major roadblocks. Ultimately, the

On the same day yesterday, when the US-based telecom giant T-Mobile admitted a data breach , the UK-based telecommunication provider Virgin Media announced that it has also suffered a data leak incident exposing the personal information of roughly 900,000 customers. What happened? Unlike the T-Mobile data breach that involved a sophisticated cyber attack, Virgin Media said the incident was neither a cyber attack nor the company's database was hacked. Rather the personal details of around 900,000 Virgin Media UK-based customers were exposed after one of its marketing databases was left unsecured on the Internet and accessible to anyone without requiring any authentication. "The precise situation is that information stored on one of our databases has been accessed without permission. The incident did not occur due to a hack, but as a result of the database being incorrectly configured," the company said in a note published on its website on Thursday night. Acc