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A vulnerability in the free version of Bitdefender Antivirus could be exploited by an attacker to get SYSTEM-level permissions, reserved for the most privileged account on a Windows machine. Privilege escalation vulnerabilities are used in a later stage of an attack after the threat actor already compromised the target host and needs elevated permissions to establish persistence or execute code with the privileges of the most powerful user. Identified as CVE-2019-15295, the vulnerability is owed to lack of verification that loaded binaries are signed and come from a trusted location. Peleg Hadar of SafeBreach Labs says that Bitdefender's security service (vsserv.exe) and the updater service (updatesrv.exe) started assigned processes with SYSTEM authority. However, they tried to load a missing DLL file ('RestartWatchDog.dll') from various locations in the PATH environment variable. One of the locations is 'c:/python27,' which comes with an access control list (ACL) open to any authenticated user. This makes privilege escalation trivial because a user to normal permissions could write the missing DLL and have it loaded by Bitdefender's signed processes. Hadar tested the theory with an unsigned DLL that wrote to a text file the name of the process loading it, the name of the user executing it, and the name of the DLL file. His assumption was confirmed, and his 'RestartWatchDog.dll' file was loaded without a hitch. The root of the issue is the ServiceInstance.dll library that attempts to load the missing DLL. SafeBreach disclosed the vulnerability responsibly to Bitdefender on July 17 and on August 14 received validation from the antivirus maker. On Monday, Bitdefender rolled out a patch for its Antivirus Free 2020 product. Users with an internet connection received the update automatically. Get better informed by stopping by OUR FORUM.

Contractors working for Microsoft have listened to the audio of Xbox users speaking in their homes in order to improve the console’s voice command features, Motherboard has learned. The audio was supposed to be captured following a voice command like “Xbox” or “Hey Cortana,” but contractors said that recordings were sometimes triggered and recorded by mistake. The news is the latest in a string of revelations that show contractors working on behalf of Microsoft listen to audio captured by several of its products. Motherboard previously reported that human contractors were listening to some Skype calls as well as audio recorded by Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri-like virtual assistant. "Xbox commands came up first as a bit of an outlier and then became about half of what we did before becoming most of what we did," one former contractor who worked on behalf of Microsoft told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources in this story anonymity as they had signed non-disclosure agreements. The former contractor said they worked on Xbox audio data from 2014 to 2015 before Cortana was implemented into the console in 2016. When it launched in November 2013, the Xbox One had the capability to be controlled via voice commands with the Kinect system. Straight away, some users and commentators were concerned with the idea of Kinect listening to Xbox users, waiting for commands such as "Xbox on." Microsoft said in a statement at the time "Kinect for Xbox 360 was designed and built with strong privacy protections in place and the new Kinect will continue this commitment."  For further details please visit OUR FORUM.

The attackers who previously breached and abused the website of free multimedia editor VSDC to distribute the Win32.Bolik.2 banking Trojan have now switched their tactics. While previously they hacked legitimate websites to hijack download links infected with malware, the hackers are now creating website clones to deliver banking Trojans onto unsuspecting victims' computers. This allows them to focus on adding capabilities to their malicious tools instead of wasting time by trying to infiltrate the servers and websites of legitimate businesses. More to the point, they are actively distributing the bank Win32.Bolik.2 banking Trojan via the nord-vpn[.]club website, an almost perfect clone of the official nordvpn.com site used by the popular NordVPN VPN service. The cloned website also has a valid SSL certificate issued by open certificate authority Let’s Encrypt on August 3, with an expiration date of November 1. "Win32.Bolik.2 trojan is an improved version of Win32.Bolik.1 and has qualities of a multicomponent polymorphic file virus," state the Doctor Web researchers who spotted the campaign. "Using this malware, hackers can perform web injections, traffic intercepts, keylogging and steal information from different bank-client systems." The operators behind this malicious campaign have launched their attacks on August 8, they are focusing on English-speaking targets and, according to the researchers, thousands have already visited the nord-vpn[.]club website in search of a download link for the NordVPN client. "The actor is interested in English speaking victims (US/CA/UK/AU). However, he can make exceptions if the victim is valuable," Doctor Web malware analyst Ivan Korolev told BleepingComputer.  To learn more please visit OUR FORUM.