"Over the past 30 years, the American political landscape has been characterized by a growing divide between rural and urban voters, almost as if they're on two opposing teams [...] But the divide is confined largely to white Americans, Mettler and collaborators have found in an examination of the racial and ethnic facets of the trend." (The original study is behind a paywall, but the LSE had a write up as well.)

As per recent reports, cybersecurity experts uncovered a troubling development on the Python Package Index (PyPI) – a platform used widely by developers to find and distribute Python packages. A malicious package named ‘crytic-compilers‘ was discovered, mimicking the legitimate ‘crytic-compile’ library developed by Trail of Bits. This fraudulent package was designed with sinister intent: to […]

The post Python Developers Targeted Via Fake Crytic-Compilers Package appeared first on TuxCare.

The post Python Developers Targeted Via Fake Crytic-Compilers Package appeared first on Security Boulevard.

In heat waves, chemicals like formaldehyde and ozone can form more readily in the air, according to researchers driving mobile labs in New York City this week.

© Blacki Migliozzi/The New York Times

As artificial intelligence guzzles water supplies and jacks up consumers' electricity rates, why isn't anyone tracking the resources being consumed?

In early May, Google announced it would be adding artificial intelligence to its search engine. When the new feature rolled out, AI Overviews began offering summaries to the top of queries, whether you wanted them or not — and they came at an invisible cost. Investigative journalist Lois Parshley explores this topic for The Lever. Archive.org link.

Somebody is having a very bad day! Fortunately, gelato has been saved.

Come for the picture of an infrastructure surprise, stay for the heartwarming gelato paragraphs. Transpower are working on it. Meanwhile, have some appropriate music. I'm being flippant but I am in the region affected by this; all is well here. Remember to check in on your neighbours!

Hollywood's Brief Cocaine Binge On '87-'88's Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, and Clean and Sober (Scott Tobias for The Reveal)

The Oklahoma City Council (NPR) voted this week (NYT gift) to clear the way for the 1,907 foot (Popular Science) Legends Tower (Master Design Statement .pdf), which would be the tallest building in the US. It may be 'impropable' (Architectural Record), a 'PR stunt' (NPR station KOSU), or even 'sheer fantasy' (OKC Free Press), especially (The Oklahoman) in a state that has seen 103 tornadoes (National Weather Service) in 2024. It would definitely be expensive--developers (developers' site) say they have $1b in financing lined up.

The American Cancer Society hopes to enroll 100,000 women and follow them for three decades to discover what’s causing higher case and death rates.

© Travis Dove for The Washington Post, via Getty Images

The annual event brings New Yorkers together to celebrate longer days, warmer weather and epic summer sunsets.

© Bing Guan/Reuters

Top students can benefit greatly by being offered the subject early. But many districts offer few Black and Latino eighth graders a chance to study it.

© Andrew Mangum for The New York Times

Edward Dwight was among the first pilots that the United States was training to send to space in 1961, but he was passed over. On Sunday, he finally made it on a Blue Origin flight.

© Blue Origin, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A bioethicist, she pioneered bedside methods for helping patients, their families and doctors deal with anguishing life-and-death decisions in a high-tech age.

© James Estrin/The New York Times

A psychiatrist, he ran New York-Presbyterian after a landmark merger, improving its patient care and finances and raising money to expand its footprint across the region.

© Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

New research finds that the death rate among Black youths soared by 37 percent, and among Native American youths by 22 percent, between 2014 and 2020, compared with less than 5 percent for white youths.

© Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

A high school athletic director in the Baltimore area was arrested after he used A.I., the police said, to make a racist and antisemitic audio clip.

© Kim Hairston/The Baltimore Sun

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• Patch now! VMWare escape flaws are so serious even end-of-life software gets a fix
• Update now! JetBrains TeamCity vulnerability abused at scale
• PetSmart warns customers of credential stuffing attack
• Predator spyware vendor banned in US
• ALPHV ransomware gang fakes own death, fools no one
• Update your iPhones and iPads now: Apple patches security vulnerabilities in iOS and iPadOS
• Check your DNS! Abandoned domains used to bypass spam checks
• American Express warns customers about third party data breach
• No “Apple magic” as 11% of macOS detections last year came from malware
• Pegasus spyware creator ordered to reveal code used to spy on WhatsApp users

Stay safe!

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JetBrains issued a warning on March 4, 2024 about two serious vulnerabilities in TeamCity server. The flaws can be used by a remote, unauthenticated attacker with HTTP(S) access to a TeamCity on-premises server to bypass authentication checks and gain administrative control of the TeamCity server.

TeamCity is a build management and continuous integration and deployment server from JetBrains that allows developers to commit code changes into a shared repository several times a day. Each commit is followed by an automated build to ensure that the new changes integrate well into the existing code base and as such can be used to detect problems early.

Compromising a TeamCity server allows an attacker full control over all TeamCity projects, builds, agents and artifacts. Which, depending on the use-case of your projects, could make for a suitable attack vector leading to a supply chain attack.

The two vulnerabilities are CVE-2024-27198, an authentication bypass vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.8, and CVE-2024-27199, a path traversal issue with a CVSS score of 7.3. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added CVE-2024-27198 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. This means that Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies need to remediate this vulnerability by March 28, 2024 in order to protect their devices against active threats.

These two vulnerabilities allow an attacker to create new administrator accounts on the TeamCity server which have full control over all TeamCity projects, builds, agents and artifacts.

Exploitation code is readily available online and has already been integrated in offensive security tools like the MetaSploit framework.

So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that researchers are now reporting abuse of the vulnerabilities.

Bleeping Computer reports that attackers have already compromised more than 1,440 instances, while a scan for vulnerable instances by Shadowserver showed that the US and Germany are the most affected countries.

If running JetBrains TeamCity on-prem – make sure to patch for latest CVE-2024-27198 (remote auth bypass) & CVE-2024-27199 vulns NOW!

We started seeing exploitation activity for CVE-2024-27198 around Mar 4th 22:00 UTC. 16 IPs seen scanning so far.https://t.co/zZ0iU5MD8S

— Shadowserver (@Shadowserver) March 5, 2024

The vulnerabilities affect all TeamCity on-premises versions through 2023.11.3 and were fixed in version 2023.11.4. Customers of TeamCity Cloud have already had their servers patched, and according to JetBrains they weren’t attacked.

To update your server, download the latest version (2023.11.4) or use the automatic update option within TeamCity. 

JetBrains has also made a security patch plugin available for customers who are unable to upgrade to version 2023.11.4. There are two security patch plugins, one for TeamCity 2018.2 and newer and one for TeamCity 2018.1 and older. See the TeamCity plugin installation instructions for information on installing the plugin.

If your server is publicly accessible over the internet, and you are unable to immediately mitigate the issue you should probably make your server inaccessible until you can.

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