Cybersecurity Expert

  A roundup of UK focused Cyber and Information Security News, Blog Posts, Reports and general Threat Intelligence from the previous calendar month, February 2021. Serious Linux Vulnerability Last month  a newly discovered critical vulnerability in 'sudo', a fundamental program present in all Linux and Unix operating systems caught my eye. The sudo vulnerability aka  CVE-2001-3156 , seemed to go under the radar after it was announced and patches were released on 26th January 2021. I  wrote a blog post  about my concerns given Linux is embedded everywhere, yet many of these systems are rarely, and even never updated with security updates. From IoT devices to internet-based services, the security of countless devices and web-based services' are dependant upon a secure Linux account privilege model. While these Linux operating systems remain unpatched to prevent exploitation of the CVE-2021-3156 vulnerability, there are waiting to be hacked. Npower App Hack Npowe...

Linux and Unix operating systems require regular patching like any IT system, but as security professionals, ethical hackers, and criminal hackers will tell you, regular Linux and Unix patching is often neglected. CVE-2021-3156 sudo Vulnerability Last week (26th January 2021) a new critical rated Linux\Unix vulnerability was made public under  CVE-2021-3156 . Specifically, the vulnerability is within the 'sudo' program, which is an abbreviation of ' superuser do ', well that's how I remember it. Sudo is a powerful and fundamental program found within all Linux and Unix distributions, allowing users to execute programs with the security privileges of another user. A typical use of sudo is where you need to run a program with privilege level (i.e. administrator) access rights. The sudo 'heap overflow' vulnerability was discovered by Qualys researchers, the exploit  allows any unprivileged user to gain root level (i.e. administrative) privileges.   Qualys has p...