Hello and welcome to the Friday, March 7th, 2025 edition of the Sands and at Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich, and today I'm recording from Baltimore, Maryland.

Well, we all know it's important to keep your browsers up to date.

Last week, Google did release a new update for Google Chrome. Unfortunately, they're

sort of doubling down on getting rid of older extensions that are still using the version

two of their manifest. The problem here is that these older extensions had more privileges

to interact with Chrome, which Google

no longer wants to allow. However, there are also some beneficial extensions that took advantage

of this access. One that's very vocal here is U-block. Uploc origin now in this latest update is automatically

being deactivated and then if a user is trying to manage their extensions, well they're kind of

pushed in the direction of actually uninstalling and removing this extension.

The problem is, well, you don't actually have to remove it. You are able to reactivate it for

now. Just Google doesn't make that very obvious. This has been an ongoing battle between

sort of Uploglock origin and Google,

not have to ensure if U-Block origin could come up with other ways to do its work and block advertisements.

Of course, one of the suspicions here is that Google's reliance on advertisement revenue

makes them more likely to actually prevent users from running

these type of extensions in their browsers. Let me have some critical updates to talk about,

first of all, Kibana. Kibana, of course, is also part of our honeypot seam. It's the popular

dashboard for Elastic Search and it suffers from a

prototype pollution vulnerability that could allow arbitrary code execution in order to exploit

the vulnerability and a hacker would have to have access as viewer to the dashboard.

...