The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) has discovered two linked local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws.
The first (CVE-2025-6018) resides in the PAM configuration of openSUSE Leap 15 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15. Using this vulnerability, an unprivileged local attacker—for example, via SSH—can elevate to the “allow_active” user and invoke polkit actions normally reserved for a physically present user.
The second (CVE-2025-6019) affects libblockdev, is exploitable via the udisks daemon included by default on most Linux distributions, and allows an “allow_active” user to gain full root privileges. Although CVE-2025-6019 on its own requires existing allow_active context, chaining it with CVE-2025-6018 enables a purely unprivileged attacker to achieve full root access.
This libblockdev/udisks flaw is extremely significant. Although it nominally requires “allow_active” privileges, udisks ships by default on almost all Linux distributions, so nearly any system is vulnerable. Techniques to gain “allow_active”, including the PAM issue disclosed here, further negate that barrier. An attacker can chain these vulnerabilities for immediate root compromise with minimal effort. Given the ubiquity of udisks and the simplicity of the exploit, organizations must treat this as a critical, universal risk and deploy patches without delay.
The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) has developed proof-of-concept exploits to validate these vulnerabilities on various operating systems, successfully targeting the libblockdev/udisks flaw on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE Leap 15.
A new attack technique named Policy Puppetry can break the protections of major gen-AI models to produce harmful outputs.
The Sysdig Threat Research Team (TRT) has discovered CVE-2025-32955, a now-patched vulnerability in Harden-Runner, one of the most popular GitHub Action CI/CD security tools. Exploiting this vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass Harden-Runner’s disable-sudo security mechanism, effectively evading detection within the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline under certain conditions. To mitigate this risk, users are strongly advised to update to the latest version.
The CVE has been assigned a CVSS v3.1 base score of 6.0.
Next.js is an open-source web framework built by Vercel that powers React-based apps with features like server-side and static rendering. Recently, a critical vulnerability (CVE) was disclosed that lets attackers bypass middleware-based authorization checks. The issue was originally discovered and analyzed by Rachid Allam (zhero). In this blog, we’ll break down the vulnerability and walk through their research and will create a Nuclei template to help you detect it across your assets.
Cisco recently released an advisory for CVE-2024-20439 here. (nvd) Please note I did not discover this vulnerability, I just reverse engineered the vulnerability from the advisory
On Wednesday, March 19, 2025, backup and recovery software provider Veeam published a security advisory for a critical remote code execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-23120. The vulnerability affects Backup & Replication systems that are domain joined. Veeam explicitly mentions that domain-joined backup servers are against security and compliance best practices, but in reality, we believe this is likely to be a relatively common configuration
It affected (before patching) all currently-maintained branches, and recently was highlighted by CISA as being exploited-in-the-wild.
This must be the first time real-world attackers have reversed a patch, and reproduced a vulnerability, before some dastardly researchers released a detection artefact generator tool of their own. /s
At watchTowr's core, we're all about identifying and validating ways into organisations - sometimes through vulnerabilities in network border appliances - without requiring such luxuries as credentials or asset lists.