A recent run of attacks against Linux servers called Fairware has been traced to insecure internet-facing Redis installations that hackers have abused to delete web folders and, in some cases, install malicious code. Redis is an open source tool used by web application developers for the purpose of quickly caching data. The tool’s developers configured Redis...

Eight out of 10 Android devices are affected by a critical Linux vulnerability disclosed last week that allows attackers to identify hosts communicating over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and either terminate connections or attack traffic. The flaw has been present in the TCP implementation in Linux systems since 2012 (version 3.6 of the kernel),...

A serious vulnerability in the TCP implementation in Linux systems deployed since 2012 (version 3.6 of the Linux kernel) can be used by attackers to identify hosts communicating over the protocol and ultimately attack that traffic. Researchers from the University of California, Riverside and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory are expected today at the USENIX...

Microsoft’s release of Windows Anniversary Update last week included an optional feature called Windows Subsystem for Linux that allows native support for Linux binaries. That has some security experts concerned the Windows 10 attack surface has been expanded. The threat, according to Alex Ionescu, vice president of endpoint detection and response strategy at Crowdstrike, centers...

Developers with Android’s Security Team peeled back some of the layers on the mobile operating system this week; describing the lengths Google goes to protect the Linux kernel. In a post to Google’s Security Blog, Jeff Vander Stoep clarified several mitigations slated for inclusion in Nougat, the next stable Android build, and steps they’ve taken...

Several vulnerabilities in Ubuntu’s implementation of the Linux kernel, including a use-after-free vulnerability and a timing side-channel vulnerability, were patched today. An advisory issued by Ubuntu Wednesday morning urges users to patch if they’re running 14.04 LTS or any derivative builds. The update fixes a use-after-free vulnerability in the kernel’s CXGB3 driver that an attacker could...

Google has patched a vulnerability being exploited in the wild to root Nexus 5 Android devices. The public exploit—a rooting application—was privately disclosed to Google on March 15 by Zimperium researchers, and a less than a month after CORE Team researchers reported that CVE-2015-1805, which was patched in 2014 in the Linux kernel, also affects...

A rooting application has been found in the wild targeting Nexus mobile devices using a local privilege escalation vulnerability patched two years ago in the Linux kernel that remains unpatched in Android. Researchers at Zimperium, the same company that discovered last summer’s Stagefright flaws affecting Android, privately disclosed to Google last Tuesday they found an...

Attackers managed to hijack the website of the Linux Mint operating system to push a backdoored ISO image of the software to users over the weekend. The developers behind the software, one of, if not the most popular Linux distribution, are unsure what the hackers are aiming to achieve by the move but acknowledge that...

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the week in news, including the iPhone encryption debacle, the glibc Linux vulnerability, and the latest ransomware headlines. Download: Threatpost_News_Wrap_February_19_2016.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves