Cover photo by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash.

This week it's mostly about bugs 🐛.

Hackers can use just-fixed Intel bugs to install malicious firmware on PCs

Intel Boot Guard was designed to ensure all firmware that loads is digitally signed by the manufacturer, turns out, it can be subverted.

Excerpt from the article:

An attacker who is able to bypass Boot Guard during wakeup would then be able to carry out a host of malicious activities. Chief among them is obtaining the keys used to encrypt hard drives, as long as the keys are stored in memory, as they are with many computers during sleep. With that, an attacker could obtain the decrypted versions of all data stored on the computer without requiring the user's password.

Trojanized Security Software Hits South Korea Users in Supply-Chain Attack

Supply-Chain attack is when the source of software used by thousands or millions of people is compromised thereby, the users download the compromised software without knowing.

Excerpt from the article:

The attack, while limited in scope, exploits WIZVERA VeraPort, which is billed as a "program designed to integrate and manage internet banking-related installation programs," such as digital certificates issued by the banks to individuals and businesses to secure all transactions and process payments.

Researchers Find Tens of AWS APIs Leaking Sensitive Data

The title says it all.

Excerpt from the article:

According to the security researchers who identified the vulnerable APIs, the attack works across all three AWS partitions (aws, aws-us-gov or aws-cn). AWS services susceptible to abuse include Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Key Management Service (KMS), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS).

“The root cause of the issue is that the AWS backend proactively validates all the resource-based policies attached to resources such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and customer-managed keys,” Palo Alto Networks explains.

Apple Lets Some of its Big Sur macOS Apps Bypass Firewall and VPNs

When residents apps are allowed exclusive access with no restrictions.

Excerpt from the article:

Apple is facing the heat for a new feature in macOS Big Sur that allows many of its own apps to bypass firewalls and VPNs, thereby potentially allowing malware to exploit the same shortcoming to access sensitive data stored on users' systems and transmit them to remote servers.

WARNING: Unpatched Bug in GO SMS Pro App Exposes Millions of Media Messages

The app in question is GO SMS Pro.

Excerpt from the article:

GO SMS Pro, a popular messaging app for Android with over 100 million installs, has been found to have an unpatched security flaw that publicly exposes media transferred between users, including private voice messages, photos, and videos.

Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Patched in Drupal

Is there anything worse than a Remote Code Execution (RCE) in a Web Application?

Excerpt from the article:

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-13671, has been classified as critical, but it’s worth mentioning that Drupal uses the NIST Common Misuse Scoring System, which assigns vulnerabilities a score ranging between 0 and 25, with “critical” being only the second highest rating, after “highly critical.”

An attacker who can upload files to a server can use certain types of extensions to bypass restrictions and get malicious code executed.

Facebook Messenger Bug Lets Hackers Listen to You Before You Pick Up the Call

The title says it all.

Excerpt from the title:

In a nutshell, the vulnerability could have granted an attacker who is logged into the app to simultaneously initiate a call and send a specially crafted message to a target who is signed in to both the app as well as another Messenger client such as the web browser.

That's it for this week, I'll see you next Friday.