Security Leftovers

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Mozilla Releases Security Update for Mozilla VPN
Mozilla has released a security update to address a vulnerability in Mozilla VPN. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take control of an affected system.
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NSA-linked Bvp47 Linux backdoor widely undetected for 10 years
A report released today dives deep into technical aspects of a Linux backdoor now tracked as Bvp47 that is linked to the Equation Group, the advanced persistent threat actor tied to the U.S. National Security Agency.
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Some components in the Shadow Brokers leaks were integrated into the Bvp47 framework - “dewdrop” and “solutionchar_agents” - indicating that the implant covered Unix-based operating systems like mainstream Linux distributions, Juniper’s JunOS, FreeBSD, and Solaris.
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Linux Persistence and Privilege Escalation: Threat Research January 2022 Release
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Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dotnet6.0, kernel, libarchive, libxml2, and wireshark), openSUSE (opera), Oracle (cyrus-sasl), Red Hat (cyrus-sasl, python-pillow, and ruby:2.5), Scientific Linux (cyrus-sasl), and Ubuntu (snapd).
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US winds up team dedicated to stopping Chinese espionage • The Register [Ed: So blame Microsoft too]
The United States' National Security Division will wind up its "China Initiative" – an effort to combat what then-attorney general Jeff Sessions described in 2018 as "systematic and calculated threats" posed by Beijing-backed economic espionage.
"This Initiative will identify priority Chinese trade theft cases, ensure that we have enough resources dedicated to them, and make sure that we bring them to an appropriate conclusion quickly and effectively," Sessions said at the time.
On Wednesday assistant attorney general Matthew Olsen said it's time for the Initiative to be wound up, because it has proven divisive and doesn't represent the most appropriate approach to combating China.
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Olsen also named China as the source of an attack on a flaw in Microsoft Exchange Server, and other cyber attacks that have cost US businesses billions.
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This Week In Security: Updraft, Termux, And Magento | Hackaday
It wouldn’t be surprising to find that many of us use the Termux app on Android. It’s almost as good as installing a real Linux distro for the command line tools, and even running some graphical Linux apps. What you may not know is that the version on the Google Play Store is far out of date, because of a change to Android security policy in Android 10. That was simply annoying, but now it’s a real problem, as a series of vulnerabilities have been announced in the Termux app. The two most serious problems require the Termux:Tasker and Termux:Widget add-ons, respectively. Tasker didn’t have a defined permission for allowing execution via intents, so any other app could trigger a command. On top of this, there was a trivial directory traversal attack, so that command could reference any binary Termux could access.
The Widget problem is similar, but this app at least had an auth token that was checked on incoming intents. The problem there is that with a valid token, any command could be run. On top of that, the third vulnerability was a file permission issue, where any app could read Termux files, including the issued tokens. There’s one more issue to consider, when contemplating the severity of this bug, and that is rooted phones. If you’re running an su binary, and you’ve given Termux root permissions, then the above vulnerabilities are suddenly much more serious.
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Linus Torvalds prepares to move the Linux kernel to modern C | ZDNet
We all know Linux is written in C. What you may not know is that it's written in a long-outdated C dialect: The 1989 version of the C language standard, C89. This is also known as ANSI X3.159-1989, or ANSI C. Linus Torvalds has decided that enough is enough and will move Linux's official C to 2011's C11 standard.
This isn't as big a transition as it may seem. C89 still has almost universal support. Because any C compiler is backward compatible with earlier versions, you won't have any trouble compiling or running a C89 program. So, a C11 compliant compiler won't have any trouble with any C89 legacy code.
So why bother? The change being made doesn't include useful features that appear in newer versions.
The situation came to Torvald's attention when, in order to patch a potential security problem with the kernel's linked-list primitive speculative-execution functions, another problem was revealed in the patch. While fixing this, Torvalds realized that in C99 the iterator passed to the list-traversal macros must be declared in a scope outside of the loop itself.
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digiKam 7.7.0 is released
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
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Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
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Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech
The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world.
Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility.
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today's howtos
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