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Security Leftovers

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Security
  • Zerologon – hacking Windows servers with a bunch of zeros

    The big, bad bug of the week is called Zerologon.

    As you can probably tell from the name, it involves Windows – everyone else talks about logging in, but on Windows you’ve always very definitely logged on – and it is an authentication bypass, because it lets you get away with using a zero-length password.

    You’ll also see it referred to as CVE-2020-1472, and the good news is that it was patched in Microsoft’s August 2020 update.

  • Rethinking Security on Linux: evaluating Antivirus & Password Manager solutions

    Recently I had an experience that let me re-evaluate my approach to Security on Linux. I had updated my Desktop computer to the latest openSUSE Leap (15.2) version. I also installed the proprietary Nvidia drivers. At random points during the day I experienced a freeze of my KDE desktop. I cannot move my mouse or type on my keyboard. It probably involves Firefox, because I always have Firefox open during these moments. So for a couple of days, I try to see in my logs what is going on. In /var/log/messages (there is a very nice YaST module for that) you can see the latest messages.

    Suddenly I see messages that I cannot explain. Below, I have copied some sample log lines that give you an impression of what was happening. I have excluded the lines with personal information. But to give you an impression: I could read line for line the names, surnames, addresses and e-mail addresses of all my family members in the /var/log/messsages file.

    [...]

    I needed to find out what was happening. I needed to know if a trojan / mallware was trying to steal my personal information. So I tried searching for the ZIP archive which was referenced. This might still be stored somewhere on my PC. I used KFind to lookup all files which were created in the last 8 hours. And then I found a lot of thumbnail files which were created by… Gwenview. Stored in a temp folder.

    I started to realize that it might not be a hack, but something that was rendering previews, just like in Gwenview. I checked Dolphin and detected that I had the preview function enabled. I checked the log files again. Indeed, whenever I had opened a folder with Dolphin, all Word and Excel files in that folder were ‘processed’. I browsed several folders after deleting Calligra and there were no more log lines added. I re-installed the Calligra suite and noticed the calligra-extras-dolphin package. I browsed the same folders and indeed, the log lines started appearing all over again. I had found the culprit. It wasn’t a hack.

  • New vulnerabilities allow hackers to bypass MFA for Microsoft 365

    Critical vulnerabilities in multi-factor authentication (MFA) implementation in cloud environments where WS-Trust is enabled could allow attackers to bypass MFA and access cloud applications such as Microsoft 365 which use the protocol according to new research from Proofpoint.

    As a result of the way Microsoft 365 session login is designed, an attacker could gain full access to a target's account including their mail, files, contacts, data and more. At the same time though, these vulnerabilities could also be leveraged to gain access to other cloud services from Microsoft including production and development environments such as Azure and Visual Studio.

    Proofpoint first disclosed the these vulnerabilities publicly at its virtual user conference Proofpoint Protect but they have like existed for years. The firm's researchers tested several Identity Provider (IDP) solutions, identified those that were susceptible and resolved the security issues.

  • NIST Password Guidelines

    The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines security parameters for Government Institutions. NIST assists organizations for consistent administrative necessities. In recent years, NIST has revised the password guidelines. Account Takeover (ATO) attacks have become a rewarding business for cybercriminals. One of the members of the top management of NIST expressed his views about traditional guidelines, in an interview “producing passwords that are easy to guess for bad guys are hard to guess for legitimate users.” (https://spycloud.com/new-nist-guidelines). This implies that the art of picking the most secure passwords involves a number of human and psychological factors. NIST has developed the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) to manage and overcome security risks more effectively.

  • Steps of the cyber kill chain

    The cyber kill chain (CKC) is a traditional security model that describes an old-school scenario, an external attacker taking steps to penetrate a network and steal its data-breaking down the attack steps to help organizations prepare. CKC is developed by a team known as the computer security response team. The cyber kill chain describes an attack by an external attacker trying to get access to data within the perimeter of the security

    Each stage of the cyber kill chain shows a specific goal along with that of the attacker Way. Design your Cyber Model killing chain surveillance and response plan is an effective method, as it focuses on how the attacks happen. Stages include,

  • Security updates for Friday

    Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium and netbeans), Oracle (mysql:8.0 and thunderbird), SUSE (rubygem-rack and samba), and Ubuntu (apng2gif, gnupg2, libemail-address-list-perl, libproxy, pulseaudio, pure-ftpd, samba, and xawtv).

  • The new BLESA Bluetooth security flaw can keep billions of devices vulnerable

    Billions of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and Linux-based IoT devices are now using Bluetooth software stacks that are potentially susceptible a new security flaw. Titled as BLESA (Bluetooth Low Energy Spoofing Attack), the vulnerability impacts devices running the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol.

  • Are you backing up ransomware with your data?
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  • German Hospital Hacked, Patient Taken to Another City Dies

                     

                       

    German authorities said Thursday that what appears to have been a misdirected hacker attack caused the failure of IT systems at a major hospital in Duesseldorf, and a woman who needed urgent admission died after she had to be taken to another city for treatment.

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  • Woman dies during a ransomware attack on a German hospital [iophk: Windows kills]

                     

                       

    The cyberattack was not intended for the hospital, according to a report from the German news outlet RTL. The ransom note was addressed to a nearby university. The attackers stopped the attack after authorities told them it had actually shut down a hospital.

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  • Windows Exploit Released For Microsoft ‘Zerologon’ Flaw

                     

                       

    Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has been released for a Windows flaw, which could allow attackers to infiltrate enterprises by gaining administrative privileges, giving them access to companies’ Active Directory domain controllers (DCs).

                       

    The vulnerability, dubbed “Zerologon,” is a privilege-escalation glitch (CVE-2020-1472) with a CVSS score of 10 out of 10, making it critical in severity. The flaw was addressed in Microsoft’s August 2020 security updates. However, this week at least four public PoC exploits for the flaw were released on Github, and on Friday, researchers with Secura (who discovered the flaw) published technical details of the vulnerability.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.