In January 2018, the entire computer industry was put on alert by two new processor vulnerabilities dubbed Meltdown and Spectre that defeated the fundamental OS security boundaries separating kernel and user space memory. The flaws stemmed from a performance feature of modern CPUs known as speculative execution and mitigating them required one of the biggest patch coordination efforts in history, involving CPU makers, device manufacturers and operating system vendors.
Meltdown and Spectre were certainly not the first vulnerabilities to result from a hardware design decision, but their widespread impact sparked the interest of the security research community into such flaws. Since then, many researchers, both from academia and the private sector, have been studying the low-level operation of CPUs and other hardware components and have been uncovering more and more issues.
Many ransomware gangs have risen to the top over the years only to suddenly disband and be replaced by others. Security researchers believe many of these movements in the ransomware space are intentional rebranding efforts to throw off law enforcement when the heat gets too high. This is also the suspicion for Black Basta, a relatively new ransomware operation that saw immediate success in several months of operation. Some believe it has splintered off from the infamous Conti gang.
Ever since the Kremlin’s troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, targeted the American electorate during the 2016 U.S. presidential election with social media disinformation campaigns, nation-states across the globe have jumped into their own weaponized information campaigns to influence elections.
In 2019, the U.S. State Department issued a report addressing the rise of state-sponsored disinformation that looked at not only Russian influence campaigns but also Chinese, Iranian and North Korean disinformation efforts. According to the report, a growing number of nation-states, in pursuing geopolitical ends, “are leveraging digital tools and social media networks to spread narratives, distortions, and falsehoods to shape public perceptions and undermine trust in the truth.”
An attacker who submits a crafted tar file with size in header struct being 0 may be able to trigger an calling of malloc(0) for a variable gnu_longname, causing an out-of-bounds read.
An attacker who submits a crafted tar file with size in header struct being 0 may be able to trigger an calling of malloc(0) for a variable gnu_longlink, causing an out-of-bounds read.
Data intelligence company BigID announced this week at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas that it has rolled out new features for its privacy and data protection platform, allowing users to programmatically restrict access to sensitive cloud-based information when it’s under threat.
BigID’s core product, its Data Intelligence platform, already boasts numerous capabilities focused on the privacy, organization and discovery of a company’s data. The new features announced this week build on that framework, allowing IT staff to automatically lock down access to sensitive information tagged as having open or overprivileged access in the big three public cloud platforms.
Microsoft has released 141 security fixes for this month’s August 2022 release. Besides the usual security fixes, there was a zero-day of note:CVE-2022-34713: This is a vulnerability in Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). Microsoft confirmed in their advisory that the vulnerability was exploited in the wild as a zero-day. CVE-2022-34713 is an arbitrary code execution (ACE) vulnerability, which requires user interaction. As such an user need to open a specifically crafted file or visit a specially designed Web site to be exploited. This has a CVSS score of 7.8 and is rated important.Why is this Significant?This is significant as Microsoft observed CVE-2022-34713 was exploited as a 0-day in the wild. Because the exploitation requires user interaction, an attacker likely uses social engineering to get users to open a specifically crafted file or visit a specially designed Web site for exploitation.How Widespread is the Attack that Leverages CVE-2022-34713?At this time, there is no information available as to how widespread the attack is. However, since the vulnerability was publicly disclosed, attacks that leverage CVE-2022-34713 may increase.Also, a similar vulnerability in MSDT (CVE-2022-30190, also known as Follina) that was patched in June 2022 by Microsoft is widely exploited in the wild. This is another indicator that likelihood of CVE-2022-34713 exploitation will likely increase.FortiGuard Labs previously released a Threat Signal for CVE-2022-30190 (Follina). See the Appendix for a link to “Follina: 0-day Windows MSDT Vulnerability (CVE-2022-30190) Exploited In The Wild”.Is there Any Other Vulnerability in the August Patch Tuesday that Requires Attention?Microsoft also released a patch for another vulnerability in MSDT (CVE-2022-35743). While the vulnerability was not reported nor observed to have been exploited in the wild, the Microsoft advisory states that exploitation is likely to occur. As such a patch for CVE-2022-35743 should also be applied as soon as possible. This has a CVSS score of 7.8 and is rated important.Has Microsoft Released Security Advisories for CVE-2022-34713?Yes, Microsoft has issued an advisory for the vulnerability. See the Appendix for a link to “CVE-2022-34713: Microsoft Windows Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability”.Has Microsoft Released a Patch for CVE-2022-34713?Yes, Microsoft has released a patch for CVE-2022-34713 on August 9th, 2022 as part of regular MS Tuesday for the month.What is the Status of Coverage?FortiGuard Labs is investigating coverage, and will update this threat signal once any relevant updates are available.
