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Showing posts from February, 2018

Microsoft Won't Patch a Severe Skype Vulnerability Anytime Soon

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A serious vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft-owned most popular free web messaging and voice calling service Skype that could potentially allow attackers to gain full control of the host machine by granting system-level privileges to a local, unprivileged user. The worst part is that this vulnerability will not be patched by Microsoft anytime soon. It's not because the flaw is unpatchable, but because fixing the vulnerability requires a significant software rewrite, which indicates that the company will need to issue an all-new version of Skype rather than just a patch. The vulnerability has been discovered and reported to Microsoft by security researcher Stefan Kanthak and resides in Skype's update installer, which is susceptible to Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) hijacking. According to the researcher, a potential attacker could exploit the "functionality of the Windows DLL loader where the process loading the DLL searches for the DLL to be l

Critical Flaw Hits Popular Windows Apps Built With Electron JS Framework

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A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been reported in Electron—a popular web application framework that powers thousands of widely-used desktop applications including Skype, Signal, Wordpress and Slack—that allows for remote code execution. Electron is an open-source framework that is based on Node.js and Chromium Engine and allows app developers to build cross-platform native desktop applications for Windows, macOS and Linux, without knowledge of programming languages used for each platform. The vulnerability, assigned as the number CVE-2018-1000006, affects only those apps that run on Microsoft Windows and register themselves as the default handler for a protocol like myapp://. "Such apps can be affected regardless of how the protocol is registered, e.g. using native code, the Windows registry, or Electron's app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient API,"  Electron says in an advisory published Monday. The Electron team has also confirmed that applications des

Critical Skype Bug Lets Hackers Remotely Execute Malicious Code

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A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft-owned most popular free web messaging and voice calling service Skype that could allow hackers to remotely execute malicious code and crash systems. Skype is a free online service that allows users to communicate with peers by voice, video, and instant messaging over the Internet. The service was acquired by Microsoft Corporation in May 2011 for US$8.5 Billion due to its worldwide popularity. Security researcher Benjamin Kunz-Mejri from Germany-based security firm Vulnerability Lab discovered the previously unknown stack buffer overflow vulnerability, which is documented in CVE-2017-9948, in Skype Web's messaging and call service during a team conference call. The vulnerability is considered a high-security risk with a 7.2 CVSS score and affects Skype versions 7.2, 7.35, and 7.36 on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8, Mejri said in a public security disclosure published on Monday. "The issue can be exploit