Word splitting is a function of BASH that I was unfamiliar with, but it is definitely one that impacted my recent research. From the bash(1) man page : IFS The Internal Field Separator that is used for word splitting after expansion and to split lines into words with the read builtin command. The default value is <space><tab><newline>. Word Splitting The shell scans the results of parameter...

The past few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time preparing for the OSCP exam , which means refreshing a lot of skills that I haven’t used in years. A large part of that is rebuilding muscle memory around buffer overflows, so that’s how I spent my four-day weekend. I logged about 70 hours compiling small programs, writing buffer overflows, building simple ROP chains, and honestly having...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s November 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-972 on Wednesday, November 10th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-42292 Up first this month, we have a 0-day in Microsoft Excel that allows an attacker to bypass security features. This vulnerability has seen active exploitation. It...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s October 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-968 on Wednesday, October 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-40449 Up first this month, we have an elevation of privilege in Win32k that has been exploited in-the-wild via MysterySnail . This vulnerability appears to impact all...

All of us at Tripwire’s Vulnerability Exposure and Research Team (VERT) are constantly reviewing the news for interesting stories and developments in the cybersecurity world. Here’s what stood out to us during the week of September 27, 2021. We’ve also included the comments from a few folks here at Tripwire VERT. REvil Ransomware Group Goes Offline Back in July 2021, CyberNews reported that the...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s September 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-964 on Wednesday, September 15th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-40444 This CVE describes a publicly exploited vulnerability in MSHTML that provides user level access upon successful exploitation. According to Microsoft, a...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s August 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-959 on Wednesday, August 11th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-36948 This privilege escalation vulnerability that affects the Windows Update Medic Service (WaasMedic) has been actively exploited. Medic Service is a feature of modern...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s July 2021 Security Upd ates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-954 on Wednesday, July 14th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-34527 The vulnerability dubbed PrintNightmare was patched prior to the Tuesday patch drop, but it is still worth including here. This vulnerability also generated a bit of...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s June 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-947 on Wednesday, June 9th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-31955 This is one of two vulnerabilities fixed in today’s patch drop which were reported by Kaspersky Lab after detecting exploitation by threat actor PuzzleMaker. This Windows...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s May 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-943 on Wednesday, May 12th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-31204 Up first in the list this month, we have a vulnerability that impacts .NET and Visual Studio and could allow a successful attacker to elevate their permissions. We see...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s April 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-939 on Wednesday, April 14th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-28310 Borin Larin of Kaspersky Lab discovered this vulnerability being actively used for exploitation and suspects that it is tied to the BITTER APT group. Larin and co...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s March 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-933 on Wednesday, March 10th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-26855 CVE-2021-26857 CVE-2021-26858 CVE-2021-27065 These CVEs are part of the bundle of Exchange vulnerabilities that were patched last week, more specifically, these are...

While I was teaching, one of my students asked if I had seen Cybergeddon , a film distributed by Yahoo! in 2012. I had not, so I decided it would be fun for VERT to watch the film and review it, since my hobby is writing film reviews for RotundReviews . Cybergeddon is not talked about as much as it should be given some of the background around it. It should be noted that while we’ll reference it...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s February 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-928 on Wednesday, February 10th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-1732 A vulnerability in Win32k that allows for privilege escalation has been exploited in the wild. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s January 2021 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-922 on Wednesday, January 13th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2021-1647 A vulnerability in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine (MMPE) is currently seeing active exploitation. Since the MMPE is updated regularly with malware...

Vulnerability Description The United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has advised that an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor was able to insert sophisticated malware into officially signed and released updates to the SolarWinds network management software . The attacks have been ongoing since at least March 2020 and CISA has warned that many high-value targets...

Today’s VERT Threat Alert addresses Microsoft’s December 2020 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-918 on Wednesday, December 9th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs There are no In-The-Wild or Disclosed CVEs patched this month. CVE Breakdown by Tag While historical Microsoft Security Bulletin groupings are gone, Microsoft...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s November 2020 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-915 on Wednesday, November 11th. Note: Microsoft has changed their advisory format and no longer provides basic vulnerability descriptions. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs CVE-2020-17087 This CVE describes a local elevation of privilege...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s October 2020 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-909 on Wednesday, October 14th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs (October 2020 Patch Tuesday Analysis) CVE-2020-16938 This CVE describes an information disclosure in the Windows kernel that could allow a local attacker to disclose information...

Today’s VERT Alert addresses Microsoft’s September 2020 Security Updates . VERT is actively working on coverage for these vulnerabilities and expects to ship ASPL-903 on Wednesday, September 9th. In-The-Wild & Disclosed CVEs There were no in-the-wild or disclosed CVEs included in this month’s security guidance. CVE Breakdown by Tag While historical Microsoft Security Bulletin groupings are gone...