Uncle Sam's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued two warnings in a single day to VMware users, as it believes the virtualization giant's products can be exploited by miscreants to gain control of systems.
The agency rates this threat as sufficiently serious to demand US government agencies pull the plug on their VMware products if patches can’t be applied.
Of the two warnings, one highlights a critical authentication bypass vulnerability – CVE-2022-22972, rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale – that VMware revealed on Wednesday.
The flaw impacts five products: Workspace ONE Access, VMware Identity Manager, VMware vRealize Automation, vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager and VMware Cloud Foundation. We're told "a malicious actor with network access to the UI may be able to obtain administrative access without the need to authenticate."
The vulnerability in Cloud Foundation is terrifying, as that product is VMware’s tool for building and managing hybrid multi-cloud rigs running virtual machines and containers. That means an unauthorized user may be able to gain admin-level privileges and drive those resources on-prem, and potentially also on VMware-powered public clouds, of which there are over 4,000 run by VMware partners, plus partnerships with AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.
The impact on the other products is also significant, as Identity Manager and Workspace ONE Access control can grant access to apps and SaaS services through VMware’s application publishing tools, while vRealize has wide automation abilities that could touch on many aspects of hybrid cloud operations.
A second flaw, CVE-2022-22973, also revealed Wednesday allows attackers to become root in VMware Workspace ONE Access and VMware Identity Manager. The flaw is rated 7.8 out of 10.
The threat posed by the two security holes is so significant that CISA issued an emergency directive requiring US civilian government agencies to pull any internet-exposed implementations of Virtzilla’s vulnerable wares from production by May 23 as they should be considered compromised. US government agencies must also enumerate all use of the impacted products and patch them by the same deadline. If patching isn’t possible, CISA wants the products removed from agency networks whether they are internet-facing or not.
VMware is very widely used by US government agencies. If its products are turned off, considerable productivity and service disruption will likely follow.
CISA’s other warning to VMware users regards the flaws the IT giant revealed in early April 2022. The cybersecurity agency says attackers it feels are probably advanced persistent threat actors are exploiting CVE-2022-22954 and CVE-2022-22960 separately and in combination to gain “full system control.” The flaws disclosed in April impact the same products as those hit by today’s disclosure.
A CISA incident response team is already working at a “large organization where the threat actors exploited CVE-2022-22954,” the agency’s advisory states. Indicators of exploitation and compromise have been spotted “at multiple other large organizations from trusted third parties.”
VMware’s FAQ about today’s disclosure asks, “Why is there a second VMSA for these software components?”
Yet as the CISA advice suggests, VMware customers are not getting ahead of these attacks. Instead, they’re on a patching treadmill. ®
Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.
According to a warning issued on Thursday, these stolen credentials sell for thousands of dollars on both dark web and public internet forums, and could lead to subsequent cyberattacks against individual employees or the schools themselves.
"The exposure of usernames and passwords can lead to brute force credential stuffing computer network attacks, whereby attackers attempt logins across various internet sites or exploit them for subsequent cyber attacks as criminal actors take advantage of users recycling the same credentials across multiple accounts, internet sites, and services," the Feds' alert [PDF] said.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.
That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.
The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.
America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance.
A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. The letter is dated April 4, and was shared this week by the regulator.
Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.
Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.
A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."
The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.
A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.
The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.
Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.
Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.
"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.
Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.
HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.
Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.
Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.
HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.
The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.
However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.
This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.
The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.
Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.
According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.
During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."
Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.
This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.
"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.
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