Innehållsförteckning för November 2023 från Hackercool Magazine

David Tuffley Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University A serious cyberattack has disrupted operations at several of Australia’s largest ports, causing delays and congestion. Late on Friday, port operator DP World detected an IT breach that affected critical systems used to coordinate shipping activity. DP World is one of Australia’s largest port operators, handling approximately 40% of the nation ’s container trade across terminals in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle. DP World reacted quickly to contain the breach, including shutting down access to their port networks on land, to prevent further unauthorised access. This means they essentially “pulled the plug” on their internet connection to limit possible further harm. DP World senior director Blake Tierney said it is still possible to unload containers from ships, but the…

Fiona Carroll Reader in Human Computer Interaction, Cardiff Metropolitan University Do you know what the padlock symbol in your internet browser’s address bar means? If not, you’re not alone. New research by my colleagues and I shows that only 5% of UK adults understand the padlock’s significance. This is a threat to our online safety. The padlock symbol on a web browser simply means that the data being sent between the web server and the user’s computer is encrypted and cannot be read by others. But when we asked people what they thought it meant, we received an array of incorrect answers. In our study, we asked a cross section of 528 web users, aged between 18 and 86 years of age, a number of questions about the internet. Some…

After a long time, welcome back to Metasploit This Month. Let us learn about the latest exploit modules of Metasploit and how they fare in our tests. Apache Airflow RCE Module TARGET: Apache Airflow <1.10.11 MODULE : Exploit TYPE: Remote ANTI-MALWARE : NA CVE-ID: CVE-2020-11978 + CVE-2020-13927 Apache Airflow is an open-source tool that is used for orchestration of data pipelines or workflows. Workflows and data pipelines are useful in creating visualizations of sales numbers of the previous day for example. It is used by Adobe, Adgen, Snapp etc. The above-mentioned versions of Apache Airflow software have an unauthenticated command injection vulnerability. This vulnerability is a result of two critical vulnerabilities. The first one is CVE-2020-1 1 978 which is an authenticated command injection vulnerability in the “example_trigger_target_dag”. The second…

Thembekile Olivia Mayayise Senior Lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand Recently, one of my acquaintances, Frank, received an email late on a Monday afternoon with the subject line, “Are you still in the office?” It appeared to come from his manager, who claimed to be stuck in a long meeting without the means to urgently purchase online gift vouchers for clients. He asked for help and shared a link to an online platform, from which Frank bought R6,000 (about US$325) worth of gift vouchers. Once he’d sent the codes he received a second email from the “boss” requesting one more voucher. At that point, Frank reached out to his boss through WhatsApp and discovered he’d been duped. Frank had fallen prey to a phishing scam. This is just one example of…