A few days ago , Microsoft issued Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability an emergency patch for Internet Explorer to fix Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability a zero-day vulnerability in the web browser . The problem affects Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability versions of Internet Explorer from 9 to 11 across multiple versions of Windows , but it seems that the patch has been causing problems for many people . Specifically , people with some Lenovo laptops have found that after installing Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability the KB4467691 patch they are unable to start Windows . When the patch was released Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability , it was known that there were a few issues with older versions of Windows 10 -- for example , problems with the .NET framework , and with web links in the Start menu . But since the initial release , Microsoft has updated Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability the patch page to indicate Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability a further potential problem with some Lenovo laptops : After installing KB4467691 , Windows may fail to startup on certain Lenovo laptops that have less than 8 GB of RAM . The company goes on to suggest a couple of possible workarounds for those running into issues : Restart the affected machine using the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) . Disable Secure Boot and then restart . If BitLocker is enabled on your machine , you may have to go through BitLocker recovery after Secure Boot has been disabled . Microsoft says that it is `` working with Lenovo and will provide Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability an update in an upcoming release '' .

Samsung , being a large multinational company , makes a lot of products spread across various spheres of life and marketed to diverse segments in a multitude of countries . Over here on XDA-Developers , Samsung is famously known for their Android smartphones and tablets , given they are some of the top contenders for their respective product categories . Samsung also makes many more interesting electronics , including a few “ smart ” ones that run on its own open-source OS , Tizen OS . Tizen powers Samsung products like smart TVs , smartwatches like the Gear series and even mobile phones like the Samsung Galaxy Z lineup . Samsung is seeking to expand the Tizen offerings to more products and more markets , as is evident from the expansion of the Galaxy Z smartphones and the Gear smartwatches . As security researcher Amihai Neiderman of Equus Software mentioned Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability to Motherboard , Samsung ’ s Tizen OS has as many as 40 zero-day vulnerabilities still active and posing threat to the security of the operating system . These vulnerabilities allow someone to remotely hack “ millions ” of newer Samsung smart TVs , smartwatches and mobile phones , both already on the market as well as ones slated for future release as Samsung does not know Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability and has not fixed Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability these vulnerabilities ( hence , “ zero day ” ) . You can see that nobody with any understanding of security looked at this code or wrote it . It ’ s like taking an undergraduate and letting him program your software ” . All of the vulnerabilities allow remote code execution on a Samsung device . One of these vulnerabilities even exploits a flaw in the design of Samsung ’ s TizenStore app to hijack the software and deliver malicious code to a Samsung TV . Worse , the TizenStore app operates with the highest privileges on a Tizen device , so such a vulnerability is an even bigger cause of worry as Mr. Neiderman says Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability that you can update a Tizen system with any malicious code the hacker wants . The TizenStore does use authentication for making sure only authorized Samsung software gets installed , but a heap-overflow vulnerability allows for gaining control before the authentication kicks in . The researcher mentions that a lot of the Tizen code base is old and borrows from previous projects like Bada . But most of the vulnerabilities he found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability were in new code specifically written for Tizen within the last two years . The vulnerabilities are described as “ mistakes programmers were making twenty years ago ” to indicate Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability that Samsung lacked basic code development and review practices for Tizen . When contacted , Samsung sent the researcher an automated email in response . Samsung ’ s current smartphone lineup is heavily dependent on Android , so these news shouldn ’ t necessarily impact your opinion of their Android smartphones in particular . But Samsung ’ s other avenues that involve Tizen are likely to invite hackers to explore and find Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability more of such zero-day vulnerabilities . There needs to be a higher priority on Tizen ’ s security if Samsung ever wants Tizen to bean OS for the internet of things .

Researchers from several German universities have checked the PHP codebases of over 64,000 projects on GitHub , and found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability 117 vulnerabilities that they believe have been introduced through the use of code from popular but insufficiently reviewed tutorials . The researchers identified popular tutorials by inputing search terms such as “ mysql tutorial ” , “ php search form ” , “ javascript echo user input ” , etc . into Google Search . The first five results for each query were then manually reviewed and evaluated for SQLi and XSS vulnerabilities by following OWASP ’ s guidelines ( Reviewing Code for SQL Injection , Cross Site Scripting Prevention Cheat Sheat ) . This resulted in the discovery Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability of 9 tutorials containing vulnerable code ( 6 with SQLi , 3 with XSS ) . Based on these , they created two types of queries that they used against the aforementioned data set obtained from GitHub . “ We use strict queries to identify known vulnerable patterns in web applications , and normal queries to identify code analogues of tutorial code , ” they explained . The results were , finally , manually reviewed by the researchers . “ Thanks to our framework , we have uncovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability over 100 vulnerabilities in web application code that bear a strong resemblance to vulnerable code patterns found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability in popular tutorials . More alarmingly , we have confirmed Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability that 8 instances of a SQLi vulnerability present in Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability different web applications are an outcome of code copied from a single vulnerable tutorial , ” they noted . “ Our results indicate Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability that there is a substantial , if not causal , link between insecure tutorials and web application vulnerabilities. ” “ [ Our findings ] suggest that there is a pressing need for code audit of widely consumed tutorials , perhaps with as much rigor as for production code , ” they pointed out . In their research , they evaluated only PHP application code , but their approach can be easily used to evaluate codebases in other programming languages , especially because they have made available their crawler ( GithubSpider ) and code analogue detector ( CADetector ) tools . Unfortunately , such a search can be easily replicated – “ even with limited resources such as a standard PC and a broadband DSL connection ” – by individuals or groups intent of discovering Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability vulnerabilities in software for future exploitation .

Apache Struts is an open-source web development framework for Java web applications . On Monday , the Apache Struts developers fixed Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability a high-impact vulnerability in the framework 's Jakarta Multipart parser . The vulnerability is very easy to exploit and allows attackers to execute system commands with the privileges of the user running the web server process . What 's even worse is that the Java web application does n't even need to implement file upload functionality via the Jakarta Multipart parser in order to be vulnerable . According to researchers from Qualys , the simple presence on the web server of this component , which is part of the Apache Struts framework by default , is enough to allow exploitation . `` Needless to say we think this is a high priority issue and the consequence of a successful attack is dire , '' said Amol Sarwate , director of Vulnerability Labs at Qualys , in a blog post . Companies who use Apache Struts on their servers should upgrade Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability the framework to versions 2.3.32 or 2.5.10.1 as soon as possible . Researchers from Cisco Talos have observed `` a high number of exploitation events . '' Some of them only execute the Linux command whoami to determine the privileges of the web server user and are probably used for initial probing . Others go further and stop the Linux firewall and then download an ELF executable that 's executed on the server . `` The payloads have varied but include an IRC bouncer , a DoS bot , and a sample related to the bill gates botnet , '' the Talos researchers said in a blog post . According to researchers from Spanish outfit Hack Players , Google searches indicate Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability 35 million web applications that accept `` filetype : action '' uploads and a high percentage of them are likely vulnerable Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability . It 's somewhat unusual that attacks have started so quickly after the flaw was announced Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability and it 's not yet clear whether an exploit for the vulnerability already existed in Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability closed circles before Monday . Users who ca n't immediately upgrade Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability to the patched Struts versions can apply a workaround that consists of creating a Servlet filter for Content-Type that would discard any requests not matching multipart/form-data . Web application firewall rules to block such requests are also available from various vendors