| Dozens of Severe Flaws Found in 4 Popular Open Source VNC Software | | Four popular open-source VNC remote desktop applications have been found vulnerable to a total of 37 security vulnerabilities, many of which went unnoticed for the last 20 years and most severe could allow remote attackers to compromise a targeted system. | There are numerous VNC applications, both free and commercial, compatible with widely used operating systems like Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android. Considering that there are currently over 600,000 VNC servers accessible remotely over the Internet and nearly 32% of which are connected to industrial automation systems, cybersecurity researchers at Kaspersky audited four widely used open source implementation of VNC, including LibVNC, UltraVNC, TightVNC and TurboVNC. | But, exploiting this flaw requires authentication credentials to connect to the VNC server or control over the client before the connection is established. Therefore, as a safeguard against attacks exploiting server-side vulnerabilities, clients are recommended not to connect to untrusted or untested VNC servers, and administrators are required to protect their VNC servers with a unique, strong password. Kaspersky reported the vulnerabilities to the affected developers, all of which have issued patches for their supported products, except TightVNC 1.x that is no longer supported by its creators. So, users are recommended to switch to version 2.x. | |
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