All news with #privilege escalation tag

⚠️ CISA has ordered Federal Civilian Executive Branch agencies to remediate a high-severity vulnerability in Broadcom's VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools (CVE-2025-41244), patched by Broadcom in October 2024. The flaw enables a local, non-administrative user on a VM to escalate privileges to root when Aria Operations’ SDMP is enabled or when VMware Tools runs in credential-less mode. Agencies must patch within three weeks under BOD 22-01; CISA also urges all organizations to prioritize mitigations or discontinue affected products if no fix is available.

⚠️ King Addons for Elementor, installed on over 10,000 WordPress sites, contains two unauthenticated critical vulnerabilities that can enable full site takeover. Patchstack identified an arbitrary file upload (CVE-2025-6327) and a registration-based privilege escalation (CVE-2025-6325) that allow remote attackers to place files in web-accessible directories and create administrative accounts. The vendor released version 51.1.37 to add a role allowlist, input sanitization, upload permission checks and stricter file-type validation — administrators should update immediately and verify whether the 'King Addons Login | Register Form' widget is active.

⚠️ Hitachi Energy's TropOS wireless devices contain multiple vulnerabilities — including OS command injection and improper privilege management — that can be exploited remotely by authenticated users to obtain root access. Affected 4th Gen firmware versions up to 8.9.6.0 are vulnerable (CVE-2025-1036, CVE-2025-1037, CVE-2025-1038); CVSS v4 scores reach 8.7. Hitachi Energy advises immediate update to version 8.9.7.0, and CISA recommends isolating devices, minimizing network exposure, and following ICS security best practices.

🔓 Academic researchers disclosed TEE.Fail, a DDR5 memory-bus interposition side-channel that can extract secrets from Trusted Execution Environments such as Intel SGX, Intel TDX, and AMD SEV-SNP. By inserting an inexpensive interposer between a DDR5 DIMM and the motherboard and recording command/address and data bursts, attackers can map deterministic AES-XTS ciphertexts to plaintext values and recover signing and cryptographic keys. The method requires physical access and kernel privileges but can be implemented for under $1,000; Intel, AMD and NVIDIA were notified and are developing mitigations.

🔍 This analysis examines CVE-2025-54918, a critical NTLM/LDAP authentication bypass that enables privilege escalation from a standard domain user to SYSTEM on Domain Controllers. The vulnerability chains coercion (PrinterBug-style) with NTLM relay and packet manipulation to evade channel binding and LDAP signing. The post outlines the attack flow, detection indicators such as empty usernames and LOCAL_CALL flags, and mitigations using CrowdStrike Falcon capabilities.

🔒 CISA warns that threat actors are actively exploiting a high-severity Windows SMB vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-33073, which can allow elevation to SYSTEM on unpatched machines. Microsoft patched the flaw in its June 2025 Patch Tuesday release, citing an improper access control weakness that can be abused over a network. The bug affects Windows Server, Windows 10 and Windows 11 up to 24H2. Federal agencies must remediate within three weeks under BOD 22-01, and all organizations are urged to apply the update immediately.

🔒 Siemens released security updates for SiPass integrated to address four vulnerabilities—an Accusoft ImageGear heap-based buffer overflow, stored cross-site scripting, an authorization bypass via user-controlled keys, and recoverable password storage. Exploitation could enable account compromise, data manipulation, impersonation, or arbitrary code execution on affected servers. Siemens recommends updating to V3.0, restricting access to trusted personnel, and avoiding untrusted image uploads; CISA advises isolating devices and using secure remote access.

🛡️ This advisory details an SQL injection vulnerability in Siemens SINEC NMS (versions prior to V4.0 SP1) affecting the getTotalAndFilterCounts endpoint. Assigned CVE-2025-40755 with high severity (CVSS v3.1 8.8 / CVSS v4 8.7), an authenticated low-privilege attacker could inject SQL to insert data and escalate privileges. Siemens advises updating to V4.0 SP1 or later and applying network protections such as segmentation and firewalls; CISA reports no known public exploitation.

⚠️ Rockwell Automation disclosed two privilege-chaining vulnerabilities in FactoryTalk Linx (versions 6.40 and prior) that allow authenticated Windows users to escalate to SYSTEM privileges by hijacking MSI repair console windows. The issues are tracked as CVE-2025-9067 and CVE-2025-9068 and carry a CVSS v4 base score of 8.5 (CVSS v3.1 7.8). Rockwell recommends applying the Microsoft MSI patch and upgrading to FactoryTalk Linx 6.50 or later; CISA notes these flaws are not remotely exploitable and no public exploitation has been reported.

🔒 Two independent research teams demonstrated practical physical attacks that extract encrypted data from server trusted execution environments by intercepting DDR4 memory traffic. The U.S. WireTap proof-of-concept slowed memory clocks and used an inexpensive legacy logic analyzer to recover keys from Intel SGX. The Battering RAM team employed a tiny interposer and a Raspberry Pi Pico to mirror writes and target both Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP covertly. Both efforts drastically lower cost and complexity compared with prior work, though vendors note that physical attacks sit outside their threat model.

🔒 Microsoft released updates addressing 183 vulnerabilities across its products, including three flaws now known to be exploited in the wild. Two Windows zero-days — CVE-2025-24990 (Agere modem driver, ltmdm64.sys) and CVE-2025-59230 (RasMan) — can grant local elevation of privilege; Microsoft plans to remove the legacy Agere driver rather than patch it. A third exploited issue bypasses Secure Boot in IGEL OS (CVE-2025-47827). With Windows 10 support ending unless enrolled in ESU, organizations should prioritize these fixes; CISA has added the three to its KEV catalog and set a federal remediation deadline.

⚠️ AMD released mitigations and firmware/BIOS updates to address a vulnerability dubbed RMPocalypse, which ETH Zürich researchers Benedict Schlüter and Shweta Shinde say can be triggered by a single 8-byte overwrite of the Reverse Map Paging (RMP) table during SEV‑SNP initialization. The flaw, assigned CVE-2025-0033, stems from a race condition in the AMD Secure Processor/Platform Security Processor (PSP/ASP) that could allow an admin-privileged or malicious hypervisor to modify initial RMP content and void SEV‑SNP integrity guarantees. AMD listed impacted EPYC families and provided vendor guidance; Microsoft and Supermicro have acknowledged the issue and are working on remediations.

🔒 Microsoft is restricting access to Internet Explorer mode in Edge after discovering attackers leveraged an unpatched zero-day in the Chakra JavaScript engine combined with social engineering to achieve remote code execution and privilege escalation. The company removed quick UI triggers (toolbar button, context menu, hamburger items) so IE mode now requires explicit configuration under Settings > Default Browser. Commercial, policy-managed deployments remain unaffected.

🔒 Threat actors are abusing Velociraptor, an open-source DFIR tool, to support ransomware operations attributed to Storm-2603. Attackers exploited on-premises SharePoint ToolShell flaws to deploy an outdated Velociraptor build (0.73.4.0) vulnerable to CVE-2025-6264, enabling privilege escalation and remote command execution. After lateral movement and creation of domain admin accounts, the group tampered with GPOs, disabled real‑time protection, and staged exfiltration before deploying Warlock, LockBit, and Babuk. Vendors caution that legitimate collection and orchestration capabilities can be repurposed by adversaries.

🔒 A critical authentication bypass in the Service Finder Bookings plugin (CVE-2025-5947, CVSS 9.8) allows unauthenticated attackers to sign in as any user, including administrators. The root cause is improper cookie validation in the account-switching function service_finder_switch_back(), which enables privilege escalation. Maintainers released Service Finder version 6.1 on July 17, 2025 to address the issue, and exploitation attempts have been observed since August 1, 2025. Administrators should upgrade immediately and audit sites for unauthorized accounts or unexpected changes.

🧪 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.

⚠ 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.

🔒 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.

🔒 Researchers at KU Leuven and the University of Birmingham disclosed Battering RAM, a low-cost DDR4 interposer attack that can undermine hardware memory encryption used in cloud environments. The $50 interposer sits transparently in the memory path, passes boot-time trust checks, and can be toggled to redirect physical addresses to attacker-controlled locations to corrupt or replay encrypted memory. The team says the technique can bypass protections such as SGX and SEV-SNP, and that meaningful mitigation would require architectural redesign of memory encryption.

⚠ CISA warns that a critical sudo vulnerability (CVE-2025-32463) is being actively exploited to gain root privileges on Linux systems. The flaw affects sudo versions 1.9.14 through 1.9.17 and can be abused via the -R (--chroot) option to run arbitrary commands as root even for users not listed in sudoers. A proof-of-concept was published in early July and CISA has added the issue to its KEV catalog, requiring federal mitigations by October 20 or discontinuation of sudo.