In a first-of-its-kind report, the US government has revealed that it disclosed 39 zero-day software vulnerabilities to vendors or the public in 2023 for the purpose of getting the vulnerabilities patched or mitigated, as opposed to retaining them to use in hacking operations.
It’s the first time the government has revealed specific numbers about its controversial Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP) — the process it uses to adjudicate decisions about whether zero-day vulnerabilities it discovers should be kept secret so law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the military can exploit them in hacking operations or be disclosed to vendors to fix them. Zero-day vulnerabilities are security holes in software that are unknown to the software maker and are therefore unpatched at the time of discovery, making systems that use the software at risk of being hacked by anyone who discovers the flaw.
Habib Mohammadi reports:
A group of unidentified hackers has breached the Taliban’s databases, leaking documents from 21 ministries and government agencies, some of which appear to be classified, according to reports circulating online.
The leaked files reportedly include documents from the Taliban-controlled ministries of finance, justice, foreign affairs, information and culture, telecommunications, and mining, as well as the Supreme Court and the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
The hackers have published hundreds of these documents on a website called “Talibleaks.”
Microsoft Threat Intelligence observed limited activity by an unattributed threat actor using a publicly available, static ASP.NET machine key to inject malicious code and deliver the Godzilla post-exploitation framework. In the course of investigating, remediating, and building protections against this activity, we observed an insecure practice whereby developers have incorporated various publicly disclosed ASP.NET machine keys from publicly accessible resources, such as code documentation and repositories, which threat actors have used to launch ViewState code injection attacks and perform malicious actions on target servers.