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Microsoft said it's introducing Sudo for Windows 11 as part of an early preview version to help users execute commands with administrator privileges. "Sudo for Windows is a new way for users to run elevated commands directly from an unelevated console session," Microsoft Product Manager Jordi Adoumie  said . "It is an ergonomic and familiar solution for users who want to elevate a command without having to first open a new elevated console." Sudo, short for superuser do, is a  program  for  Unix-like computer operating systems  that allows users to run programs with the security privileges of another user, usually a user with elevated permissions (e.g., administrator). The feature is available for Windows 11 builds 26045 and later. It can be enabled by heading to Settings > System > For Developers, and setting "Enable sudo" to On. Sudo for Windows comes with three options: run applications in a new elevated console window, run the elevated

The title of this article probably sounds like the caption to a meme. Instead, this is an actual problem GitGuardian's engineers had to solve in implementing the mechanisms for their new  HasMySecretLeaked service . They wanted to help developers find out if their secrets (passwords, API keys, private keys, cryptographic certificates, etc.) had found their way into public GitHub repositories. How could they comb a vast library of secrets found in publicly available GitHub repositories and their histories and compare them to your secrets without you having to expose sensitive information? This article will tell you how. First, if we were to set a bit's mass as equal to that of one electron, a ton of data would be around 121.9 quadrillion petabytes of data at standard Earth gravity or $39.2 billion billion billion US dollars in MacBook Pro storage upgrades (more than all the money in the world). So when this article claims GitGuardian scanned a "ton" of GitHub public commit data, t

Want to know what's the latest and greatest in SecOps for 2024? Gartner's recently released Hype Cycle for Security Operations report takes important steps to organize and mature the domain of Continuous Threat Exposure Management, aka CTEM. Three categories within this domain are included in this year's report: Threat Exposure Management, Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAP), and Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV). These category definitions are aimed at providing some structure to the evolving landscape of exposure management technologies. Pentera, listed as a sample vendor in the newly defined AEV category, is playing a pivotal role in increasing the adoption of CTEM, with a focus on security validation. Following is our take on the CTEM related product categories and what they mean for enterprise security leaders. The Industry is Maturing CTEM, coined by Gartner in 2022, presents a structural approach for continuously assessing, prioritizing, validating, and remediating expo

Two critical security flaws discovered in the open-source  CasaOS  personal cloud software could be successfully exploited by attackers to achieve arbitrary code execution and take over susceptible systems. The vulnerabilities, tracked as  CVE-2023-37265  and  CVE-2023-37266 , both carry a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10. Sonar security researcher Thomas Chauchefoin, who discovered the bugs,  said  they "allow attackers to get around authentication requirements and gain full access to the CasaOS dashboard." Even more troublingly, CasaOS' support for third-party applications could be weaponized to run arbitrary commands on the system to gain persistent access to the device or pivot into internal networks. Following responsible disclosure on July 3, 2023, the flaws were addressed in  version 0.4.4  released by its maintainers IceWhale on July 14, 2023. A brief description of the two flaws is as follows - CVE-2023-37265  - Incorrect identification of the s

In today's interconnected world, evolving security solutions to meet growing demand is more critical than ever. Collaboration across multiple solutions for intelligence gathering and information sharing is indispensable. The idea of multiple-source intelligence gathering stems from the concept that threats are rarely isolated. Hence, their detection and prevention require a comprehensive understanding of the broader landscape. A comprehensive and robust security framework should be established by aggregating resources, knowledge, and expertise from various sources. This collaborative effort allows for the analysis of diverse data sets, the identification of emerging patterns, and the timely dissemination of crucial information.  In this article, we discuss a versatile security platform that can operate in two distinct roles within a security ecosystem. This platform can function as a subscriber, actively collecting and aggregating security data from various endpoints and other so

Threat actors flooded the npm open source package repository for Node.js with bogus packages that briefly even resulted in a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. "The threat actors create malicious websites and publish empty packages with links to those malicious websites, taking advantage of open-source ecosystems' good reputation on search engines," Checkmarx's Jossef Harush Kadouri  said  in a report published last week. "The attacks caused a denial-of-service (DoS) that made NPM unstable with sporadic 'Service Unavailable' errors." While  similar campaigns  were recently observed propagating phishing links, the latest wave pushed the number of package versions to 1.42 million, a dramatic uptick from the approximate 800,000 packages released on npm. The attack technique leverages the fact that open source repositories are ranked higher on search engine results to create rogue websites and upload empty npm modules with links to those sites in the

In what's a continuing assault on the open source ecosystem,  over 15,000 spam packages  have flooded the npm repository in an attempt to distribute phishing links. "The packages were created using automated processes, with project descriptions and auto-generated names that closely resembled one another," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb  said  in a Tuesday report. "The attackers referred to retail websites using referral IDs, thus profiting from the referral rewards they earned." The modus operandi involves poisoning the registry with rogue packages that include links to phishing campaigns in their README.md files, evocative of a  similar campaign  the software supply chain security firm exposed in December 2022. The fake modules masqueraded as cheats and free resources, with some packages named as "free-tiktok-followers," "free-xbox-codes," and "instagram-followers-free." The ultimate goal of the operation is to entice user

The legitimate command-and-control (C2) framework known as Sliver is  gaining   more traction  from threat actors as it emerges as an open source alternative to  Cobalt Strike  and Metasploit. The findings come from Cybereason, which  detailed  its inner workings in an exhaustive analysis last week. Sliver, developed by cybersecurity company BishopFox, is a Golang-based cross-platform post-exploitation framework that's designed to be used by security professionals in their red team operations. Its myriad features for adversary simulation – including dynamic code generation, in-memory payload execution, and process injection – have also made it an appealing tool for threat actors looking to gain elevated access to the target system upon gaining an initial foothold. In other words, the software is used as a second-stage to conduct next steps of the attack chain after already compromising a machine using one of the initial intrusion vectors such as spear-phishing or exploitatio

Google on Tuesday announced the open source availability of  OSV-Scanner , a scanner that aims to offer easy access to vulnerability information about various projects. The  Go-based tool , powered by the Open Source Vulnerabilities ( OSV ) database, is designed to connect "a project's list of dependencies with the vulnerabilities that affect them," Google software engineer Rex Pan in a post shared with The Hacker News. "The OSV-Scanner generates reliable, high-quality vulnerability information that closes the gap between a developer's list of packages and the information in vulnerability databases," Pan added. The idea is to identify all the transitive dependencies of a project and highlight relevant vulnerabilities using data pulled from OSV.dev database. Google further stated that the open source platform supports 16 ecosystems, counting all major languages, Linux distributions (Debian and Alpine), as well as Android, Linux Kernel, and  OSS-Fuzz .

A version of an open source ransomware toolkit called  Cryptonite  has been observed in the wild with wiper capabilities due to its "weak architecture and programming." Cryptonite , unlike other ransomware strains, is not available for sale on the cybercriminal underground, and was instead offered for free by an actor named CYBERDEVILZ until recently through a GitHub repository. The source code and its forks have since been taken down. Written in Python, the malware employs the  Fernet module  of the cryptography package to encrypt files with a ".cryptn8" extension. But a  new sample  analyzed by Fortinet FortiGuard Labs has been found to lock files with no option to decrypt them back, essentially acting as a destructive data wiper. But this change isn't a deliberate act on part of the threat actor, but rather stems from a lack of quality assurance that causes the program to crash when attempting to display the ransom note after completing the encryption p

Google on Thursday  announced  the creation of a new "Open Source Maintenance Crew" to focus on bolstering the security of critical open source projects. Additionally, the tech giant pointed out  Open Source Insights  as a tool for analyzing packages and their dependency graphs, using it to determine "whether a vulnerability in a dependency might affect your code." "With this information, developers can understand how their software is put together and the consequences to changes in their dependencies," the company said. The development comes as security and trust in the open source software ecosystem has been increasingly thrown into question in the aftermath of a  string  of  supply chain   attacks  designed to compromise developer workflows. In December 2021, a critical flaw in the ubiquitous open source  Log4j logging library  left several companies scrambling to patch their systems against potential abuse. The announcement also comes less than

Continuous integration vendor Travis CI has patched a serious security flaw that exposed API keys, access tokens, and credentials, potentially putting organizations that use public source code repositories at risk of further attacks. The issue — tracked as  CVE-2021-41077  — concerns unauthorized access and plunder of secret environment data associated with a public open-source project during the software build process. The problem is said to have lasted during an eight-day window between September 3 and September 10. Felix Lange of Ethereum has been credited with discovering the leakage on September 7, with the company's Péter Szilágyi  pointing out  that "anyone could exfiltrate these and gain lateral movement into 1000s of [organizations]." Travis CI is a hosted CI/CD (short for continuous integration and continuous deployment) solution used to build and test software projects hosted on source code repository systems like GitHub and Bitbucket. "The desired b

Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed nine security vulnerabilities affecting three open-source projects —  EspoCRM ,  Pimcore , and  Akaunting  — that are widely used by several small to medium businesses and, if successfully exploited, could provide a pathway to more sophisticated attacks. All the security flaws in question, which impact EspoCRM v6.1.6, Pimcore Customer Data Framework v3.0.0, Pimcore AdminBundle v6.8.0, and Akaunting v2.1.12, were fixed within a day of responsible disclosure, researchers Wiktor Sędkowski of Nokia and Trevor Christiansen of Rapid7  noted. Six of the nine flaws were uncovered in the Akaunting project. EspoCRM is an open-source customer relationship management (CRM) application, while Pimcore is an open-source enterprise software platform for customer data management, digital asset management, content management, and digital commerce. Akaunting, on the other hand, is an open-source and online accounting software designed for invoice and exp

Researchers from the University of Minnesota apologized to the maintainers of Linux Kernel Project on Saturday for intentionally including vulnerabilities in the project's code, which led to the school being banned from contributing to the open-source project in the future. "While our goal was to improve the security of Linux, we now understand that it was hurtful to the community to make it a subject of our research, and to waste its effort reviewing these patches without its knowledge or permission," assistant professor Kangjie Lu, along with graduate students Qiushi Wu and Aditya Pakki,  said  in an email. "We did that because we knew we could not ask the maintainers of Linux for permission, or they would be on the lookout for the hypocrite patches," they added. The apology comes over a study into what's called "hypocrite commits," which was  published  earlier this February. The project aimed to deliberately add  use-after-free  vulnerabil

Besides rewarding ethical hackers from its pocket for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities in third-party open-source projects, Google today announced financial support for open source developers to help them arrange additional resources, prioritizing the security of their products. The initiative, called " Patch Rewards Program ," was launched nearly 6 years ago, under which Google rewards hackers for reporting severe flaws in many widely used open source software, including OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Linux kernel, Apache, Nginx, jQuery, and OpenVPN. So far, Google has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as bounty to hackers across the world who helped improve the overall security of many crucial open source software and technologies that power the Internet, operating systems, and networks. The company has now also decided to motivate volunteer work done by the open source community by providing upfront financial help to project teams, using which they can acquire addition

Lodash, a popular npm library used by more than 4 million projects on GitHub alone, is affected by a high severity security vulnerability that could allow attackers to compromise the security of affected services using the library and their respective user base. Lodash is a JavaScript library that contains tools to simplify programming with strings, numbers, arrays, functions, and objects, helping programmers write and maintain their JavaScript code more efficiently. Liran Tal, a developer advocate at open-source security platform Snyk, recently published details and proof-of-concept exploit of a high-severity prototype pollution security vulnerability that affects all versions of lodash, including the latest version 4.17.11. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-10744 , potentially affects a large number of frontend projects due to the popularity of lodash that is being downloaded at a rate of more than 80 million times per month. Prototype pollution is a vulnerability t

Developers around the world depend on open source components to build their software products. According to industry estimates, open source components account for 60-80% of the code base in modern applications. Collaboration on open source projects throughout the community produces stronger code, squashing the bugs and catching the vulnerabilities that impact the security of organizations who look to open source components as the key to their application building success. Thanks in part to the "thousand eyeballs" of the community, the number of reported vulnerabilities in open source projects is on the rise, spiking 51% in 2017 from the previous year. This is even more concerning since, as shown in the same study, most vulnerabilities are found in popular projects. Data shows that 32% of the top 100 open source projects have at least one vulnerability, meaning that developers have their work cut out for them, no matter which components they are using in their products.

What just happened would definitely gonna surprise you. Linus Torvalds—father of the Linux open-source operating system—finally admitted his behavior towards other developers in the Linux community was hurting people and Linux. In a surprising move this weekend, Torvalds apologized for insulting and abusing other developers for almost three decades and took a break from the open-source software to work on his behavior. In an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) on Sunday, Torvalds said that he was confronted by people of the Linux community this week about his lifetime of not understanding emotions, and apologized for his personal behavior that has hurt people and possibly has driven some of them away from working in kernel development altogether. Torvalds wrote, "I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely." "I am going to take

Facebook has open sourced Fizz—a library designed to help developers implement TLS 1.3 protocol with all recommended security and performance related configurations. Since late last month, Google Chrome web browser has started marking all non-HTTPS websites as 'Not Secure' in an effort to make the web a more secure place, forcing website administrators to switch to HTTPS. TLS 1.3 is the newest and most secure cryptographic protocol of the Transportation Layer Security (TLS), the successor to Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), which encrypts data in transit between clients and servers to prevent data theft or tampering. To make internet traffic more secure, TLS 1.3 incorporates several new features like encrypting handshake messages to keep certificates private, redesigning the way secret keys are derived, and a zero round-trip (0-RTT) connection setup, making certain requests faster than TLS 1.2. Written in C++ 14, Fizz is a reliable and highly performant TLS library that

A security researcher has found four vulnerabilities, including a critical remote code execution bug, in OpenVPN, those were not even caught in the two big security audits of the open source VPN software this year. OpenVPN is one of the most popular and widely used open source VPN software solutions mostly used for various connectivity needs, but it is especially popular for anonymous and private access to the Internet. This year, two independent security audits of OpenVPN were carried out to look for flaws, backdoors, and other defects in the open source software – one conducted by a team led by Johns Hopkins University crypto-boffin Dr. Matthew D. Green. The audits resulted in a patch of a few vulnerabilities in the widely used open source software, giving OpenVPN a clean chit. Researcher Used Fuzzer to find Bugs in OpenVPN Researcher Guido Vranken of Netherlands exclusively used a fuzzer and recently discovered four security holes in OpenVPN that escaped both the secur