All news with #privilege escalation tag

Phoenix Rowhammer: DDR5 Bypass Exploits and Practical Risks

🧪 In September 2025, researchers at ETH Zurich published Phoenix, a Rowhammer variant that targets DDR5 memory by exploiting weaknesses in Target Row Refresh (TRR) logic. The team validated the technique across 15 tested SK Hynix modules and demonstrated practical capabilities including arbitrary read/write primitives, theft of an RSA‑2048 private key, and a Linux sudo bypass in constrained scenarios. Phoenix works by inducing timed access "windows" after 128 and after 2608 refresh intervals that momentarily degrade TRR responses, allowing precise bit flips. The authors recommend mitigations such as reduced refresh intervals, deployment of ECC memory, and adoption of Fine Granularity Refresh to harden platforms.

Chinese Cybercriminals Hijack IIS Servers for SEO Fraud

🔍 A Chinese-speaking cybercrime group tracked as UAT-8099 is hijacking trusted Microsoft IIS servers worldwide to run SEO scams that redirect users to unauthorized adverts and illegal gambling sites. According to Cisco Talos, attackers exploit server vulnerabilities, upload web shells, and conduct reconnaissance before enabling the guest account, escalating privileges and activating RDP. For persistence they deploy SoftEther VPN, EasyTier and the FRP reverse proxy and install the BadIIS malware variants designed to evade detection.

Critical RBAC Flaw in Red Hat OpenShift AI Risks Clusters

⚠ Red Hat has patched a design flaw in OpenShift AI (CVE-2025-10725) with a CVSS score of 9.9 that can let an authenticated low-privilege user escalate to full cluster administrator and fully compromise clusters and hosted applications. The vulnerability stems from an overly permissive ClusterRole binding that grants broad permissions to system:authenticated. Red Hat advises removing the kueue-batch-user-role ClusterRoleBinding, tightening job-creation permissions to follow least privilege, and upgrading to fixed RHOAI images (2.19 and 2.21). Administrators should audit affected environments and apply the recommended fixes promptly.

OpenShift AI Privilege Escalation Flaw Exposes Clusters

🔒 Red Hat has disclosed a severe privilege escalation vulnerability in OpenShift AI (CVE-2025-10725) that can allow an authenticated, low-privileged user to escalate to full cluster administrator and fully compromise a deployment. The issue carries a CVSS score of 9.9 but is rated Important by Red Hat because exploitation requires an authenticated account. Affected releases include OpenShift AI 2.19, 2.21 and RHOAI. Administrators are advised to avoid broad ClusterRoleBindings such as binding kueue-batch-user-role to system:authenticated, and to grant job creation permissions only on a granular, need-to-know basis while applying vendor guidance.

Festo CPX-CEC-C1 and CPX-CMXX Privilege Flaw — Remote

⚠️ Festo CPX-CEC-C1 and CPX-CMXX devices contain an improper privilege management vulnerability (CWE-269) that permits unauthenticated remote access to critical webserver functions and may cause a denial of service. The issue is identified as CVE-2022-3079 with a CVSS v3.1 base score of 7.5 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/A:H). Festo currently has no firmware fix planned; recommended mitigations include restricting access to TCP port 80 and replacing affected units with specified follow-up products.

China-linked UNC5174 exploiting VMware Tools zero-day

⚠️ NVISO Labs says China-linked UNC5174 has been exploiting a newly patched local privilege escalation bug, CVE-2025-41244, in Broadcom VMware Tools and VMware Aria Operations since mid-October 2024. The vulnerability (CVSS 7.8) stems from a vulnerable get_version() regex that can match non-system binaries in writable directories (for example, /tmp/httpd) and cause metrics collection to execute them with elevated privileges. VMware and Broadcom have released fixes and mitigations; affected organizations should apply vendor patches and follow VMware's guidance, and Linux distributions will receive patched open-vm-tools packages from vendors.

CISA Adds Critical Sudo Vulnerability to KEV Catalog

🔒 CISA added a critical vulnerability affecting the Sudo utility to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The flaw, CVE-2025-32463 (CVSS 9.3), impacts Sudo versions prior to 1.9.17p1 and can be abused via the -R (--chroot) option to execute arbitrary commands as root, bypassing sudoers. Four additional flaws were also added to the KEV list. Agencies and organizations are advised to apply mitigations and updates by October 20, 2025 and upgrade or implement compensating controls immediately.

AutomationDirect CLICK PLUS Firmware Vulnerabilities Identified

🔒 AutomationDirect has disclosed multiple vulnerabilities in the CLICK PLUS series affecting firmware releases prior to v3.71. Issues include cleartext credential storage, a hard-coded AES key, an insecure RSA implementation, a predictable PRNG seed, authorization bypasses, and resource exhaustion flaws. CVSS v4 severity reaches 8.7 for the most critical cryptographic and key-generation weaknesses. AutomationDirect and CISA recommend updating to v3.80 and applying network isolation, access restrictions, logging, and endpoint protections until patches are deployed.

Microsoft Fixes Entra ID Token Flaw Allowing Impersonation

🔒 Microsoft has patched a critical token validation failure in Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), tracked as CVE-2025-55241 and assigned a CVSS score of 10.0. The flaw combined misused service-to-service (S2S) actor tokens issued by the Access Control Service (ACS) with a validation gap in the legacy Azure AD Graph API that enabled cross-tenant impersonation, including Global Administrators. Microsoft released a fix on July 17, 2025 and said no customer action is required; there is no indication the issue was exploited in the wild. Security firms warned the vulnerability could bypass MFA, Conditional Access and logging, potentially enabling full tenant compromise.

Microsoft Entra ID Flaw Could Allow Tenant-Wide Hijack

🔒 A critical token validation flaw in Microsoft Entra ID could permit full tenant compromise by abusing undocumented, unsigned actor tokens issued by a legacy Access Control Service. Researcher Dirk-jan Mollema showed that when paired with a vulnerability in the deprecated Azure AD Graph API (CVE-2025-55241) those tokens could impersonate any user — including Global Administrators — across tenants without leaving tenant logs. Microsoft confirmed a fix after the July report and later patched the CVE.

Critical Code-Execution CVEs Found in Chaos-Mesh Platform

⚠️ JFrog Security Research disclosed multiple CVEs in Chaos-Mesh, including three critical flaws that permit in-cluster attackers to execute arbitrary code on any pod. The Chaos Controller Manager exposes an unauthenticated ClusterIP GraphQL /query endpoint on port 10082 by default, enabling mutations such as killProcesses and cleanTcs. The critical issues (CVSS 9.8) arise from unsafe command construction in resolvers and an ExecBypass routine that allows OS command injection. Operators should upgrade to Chaos-Mesh 2.7.3 immediately; as a temporary mitigation redeploy the Helm chart with the control server disabled.

Phoenix Rowhammer Bypass Targets DDR5 TRR Defenses

🧨 Researchers have developed Phoenix, a new Rowhammer variant that defeats DDR5 TRR protections on SK Hynix modules by synchronizing and self-correcting against missed refresh intervals. After reverse-engineering TRR behavior, the team identified refresh slots that were not sampled and used precise hammering patterns covering 128 and 2,608 refresh intervals to flip bits. In tests they flipped bits across all tested DIMMs and produced a working privilege-escalation exploit, achieving a root shell on commodity DDR5 systems in under two minutes. The authors published an academic paper and an FPGA-based repository with experiments and proof-of-concept code.

The Gentlemen ransomware targets OT-heavy industries

🔒 A newly observed ransomware group, The Gentlemen, has rapidly expanded operations across Asia Pacific, South America, the US and the Middle East since first being identified in August. Trend Micro reports the group leverages legitimate drivers, GPO abuse and custom tooling to disable endpoint security and move laterally. Victims span manufacturing, construction, healthcare and insurance, and defenders are urged to adopt zero-trust, behavioral EDR/XDR and rigorous segmentation.

Two Zero-Days Among Microsoft Patch Tuesday Fixes This Month

⚠️ Microsoft released its monthly Patch Tuesday addressing 81 vulnerabilities, including two disclosed zero-days affecting SQL Server and SMB. The first, CVE-2024-21907, involves improper handling in Newtonsoft.Json used by SQL Server and can cause denial of service via deeply nested JSON. The second, CVE-2025-55234, is a remotely exploitable SMB elevation-of-privilege that can be mitigated by hardening features like SMB Server Signing and Extended Protection for Authentication; Microsoft also offers audit tools to check compatibility before enabling them.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday: September 2025 Security Fixes

🔒 Microsoft today released Patch Tuesday updates addressing more than 80 vulnerabilities across Windows and related products, including 13 rated critical. There are no known zero‑day or actively exploited flaws in this bundle, but Microsoft patched several high‑risk issues such as CVE-2025-54918 (Windows NTLM), CVE-2025-55234 (SMB client), and CVE-2025-54916 (NTFS). Researchers warn many fixes are for privilege‑escalation bugs — some remotely exploitable — and note that Apple and Google recently patched zero‑days in their platforms as well.

Microsoft September 2025 Patch Tuesday: 86 Fixes Guidance

🔒Microsoft released its September 2025 security update addressing 86 vulnerabilities across Windows, Office, DirectX, Hyper-V and related components. Microsoft reported no active in-the-wild exploitation but identified eight flaws where exploitation is more likely, including a network RCE in NTFS (CVE-2025-54916). Talos published Snort rules to detect attempts and recommends administrators prioritize patches and update IDS/IPS signatures promptly.

Microsoft Sep 2025 Patch Tuesday: 81 fixes, two zero-days

🔒 Microsoft released its September 2025 Patch Tuesday addressing 81 vulnerabilities, including two publicly disclosed zero-days affecting Windows SMB Server and the Newtonsoft.Json library bundled with SQL Server. The update bundle contains nine Critical fixes — five remote code execution issues — and a total of 41 elevation-of-privilege vulnerabilities across Windows, Azure, and related components. Administrators are advised to apply patches promptly, enable and test SMB Server signing and Extended Protection for Authentication, enable auditing to check compatibility, and ensure SQL Server receives the patched Newtonsoft.Json to mitigate the disclosed flaws.

Legacy Sitecore ViewState Zero-Day Allows WeepSteel Backdoors

🔐 Mandiant observed attackers exploiting a zero‑day ViewState deserialization flaw (CVE-2025-53690) in legacy Sitecore deployments that reused a sample ASP.NET machineKey. Adversaries delivered a WeepSteel reconnaissance backdoor to collect system and network data and disguised exfiltration as normal ViewState traffic. Sitecore advises replacing and encrypting static machineKey values and instituting regular key rotation to mitigate further risk.

GhostRedirector Hits 65 Windows Servers with IIS Module

🔍 Researchers at ESET disclosed a previously undocumented campaign named GhostRedirector that has compromised at least 65 Windows servers mainly in Brazil, Thailand and Vietnam. The intruders deployed a passive C++ backdoor, Rungan, alongside a native IIS module, Gamshen, which selectively alters responses for Googlebot to perform SEO fraud. Initial access appears linked to SQL injection and abuse of xp_cmdshell, with subsequent PowerShell retrievals from a staging host.

Google fixes actively exploited Android flaws in September

🔒 Google has released the September 2025 Android security update addressing 84 vulnerabilities, including two zero-day flaws observed in limited, targeted exploitation: CVE-2025-38352 (Linux kernel) and CVE-2025-48543 (Android Runtime). The bulletin also patches four critical issues — including an RCE in the System component and three Qualcomm vulnerabilities affecting modem and data stacks. Users are urged to install security patch level 2025-09-01 or 2025-09-05 via Settings > System > Software updates > System update.