Monthly Archives: April 2023

News

Hacking the Layoff Process

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My latest book, A Hacker’s Mind, is filled with stories about the rich and powerful hacking systems, but it was hard to find stories of the hacking by the less powerful. Here’s one I just found. An article on how layoffs at big companies work inadvertently suggests an employee hack to avoid being fired:

…software performs a statistical analysis during terminations to see if certain groups are adversely affected, said such reviews can uncover other problems. On a list of layoff candidates, a company might find it is about to fire inadvertently an employee who previously opened a complaint against a manager—a move that could be seen as retaliation, she said.

So if you’re at a large company and there are rumors of layoffs, go to HR and initiate a complaint against a manager. It’ll protect you from being laid off.

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News

Cybercrime group FIN7 targets Veeam backup servers

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Researchers warn that a financially motivated cybercrime group known as FIN7 is compromising Veeam Backup & Replication servers and deploying malware on them. It’s not yet clear how attackers are breaking into the servers, but a possibility is that they’re taking advantage of a vulnerability patched in the popular enterprise data replication solution last month.

Researchers from cybersecurity firm WithSecure investigated two such compromises so far, dating from late March, but they believe are likely part of a larger campaign. The post-exploitation activity included setting up persistence, system and network reconnaissance, credential extraction and lateral movement.

To read this article in full, please click here

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Advisories

CVE-2022-31643

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A potential security vulnerability has been identified in the system BIOS for certain HP PC products which may allow loss of integrity. HP is releasing firmware updates to mitigate the potential vulnerability.

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Advisories

USN-6049-1: Netty vulnerabilities

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It was discovered that Netty’s Zlib decoders did not limit memory
allocations. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to cause
Netty to exhaust memory via malicious input, leading to a denial of
service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 16.04 ESM and Ubuntu 20.04 ESM.
(CVE-2020-11612)

It was discovered that Netty created temporary files with excessive
permissions. A local attacker could possibly use this issue to expose
sensitive information. This issue only affected Ubuntu 16.04 ESM, Ubuntu
18.04 ESM, and Ubuntu 20.04 ESM. (CVE-2021-21290)

It was discovered that Netty did not properly validate content-length
headers. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to smuggle
requests. This issue was only fixed in Ubuntu 20.04 ESM. (CVE-2021-21295,
CVE-2021-21409)

It was discovered that Netty’s Bzip2 decompression decoder did not limit
the decompressed output data size. A remote attacker could possibly use
this issue to cause Netty to exhaust memory via malicious input, leading
to a denial of service. This issue only affected Ubuntu 18.04 ESM, Ubuntu
20.04 ESM, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 22.10. (CVE-2021-37136)

It was discovered that Netty’s Snappy frame decoder function did not limit
chunk lengths. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to cause
Netty to exhaust memory via malicious input, leading to a denial of
service. (CVE-2021-37137)

It was discovered that Netty did not properly handle control chars at the
beginning and end of header names. A remote attacker could possibly use
this issue to smuggle requests. This issue only affected Ubuntu 18.04 ESM,
Ubuntu 20.04 ESM, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 22.10. (CVE-2021-43797)

It was discovered that Netty could be made into an infinite recursion when
parsing a malformed crafted message. A remote attacker could possibly use
this issue to cause Netty to crash, leading to a denial of service. This
issue only affected Ubuntu 20.04 ESM, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 22.10.
(CVE-2022-41881)

It was discovered that Netty did not validate header values under certain
circumstances. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to perform
HTTP response splitting via malicious header values. This issue only
affected Ubuntu 18.04 ESM, Ubuntu 20.04 ESM, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and Ubuntu
22.10. (CVE-2022-41915)

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