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A security researcher has discovered a critical vulnerability in Google-owned YouTube that could allow anyone to make the comment posted by any celebrity or public figure on some YouTube video appear on his or her own YouTube video, impersonating that celeb. Just a few weeks ago we reported about a simple logical vulnerability in YouTube that could have been exploited by anyone to delete any video from YouTube in just one shot . Now: Again a small trick in the popular video sharing website could allow anyone to play with the comments posted by users on YouTube videos. Ahmed Aboul-Ela and  Ibrahim M. El-Sayed , two Egyptian security researcher, found a simple trick that allowed him to copy any comments from any video on the popular video sharing website to his video, even without any user-interaction. Not only this, but also: This vulnerability allows you to spoof, duplicate or copy the comments on discussion boards from any YouTube channel and make it appe

A security researcher has discovered a simple but critical vulnerability in Google-owned YouTube that could be exploited by anyone to knock down the whole business of the popular video sharing website. Kamil Hismatullin , a Russian security bod, found a simple logical vulnerability that allowed him to delete any video from YouTube in one shot . While looking for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) or Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) flaws in YouTube Creator Studio, Hismatullin came across a simple logical bug that could wipe up any video by just sending an identity number of any video in a post request against any session token. The bug was simple but critical as it could be exploited by an attacker to fool YouTube easily into deleting any video on its system. "I've fought the urge to [delete] Bieber's channel," Hismatullin wrote in his blog post . "Luckily no Bieber videos were harmed." Citing the consequences of the issue, Hismatullin said "this vulne

The  ransomware industry surged in 2023  as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070.  But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture.  While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure 1: Victims per quarter There could be several reasons for this significant drop.  Reason 1: The Law Enforcement Intervention Firstly, law enforcement has upped the ante in 2024 with actions against both LockBit and ALPHV. The LockBit Arrests In February, an international operation named "Operation Cronos" culminated in the arrest of at least three associates of the infamous LockBit ransomware syndicate in Poland and Ukraine.  Law enforcement from multiple countries collaborated to take down LockBit's infrastructure. This included seizing their dark web domains and gaining access to their backend sys

Yahoo! has offered $24,000 to a security researcher for finding out and reporting three critical security vulnerabilities in its products including Yahoo! Stores and Yahoo!-hosted websites. While testing all the company's application, Mark Litchfield , a bug bounty hunter who often works with different companies, discovered three critical vulnerabilities in Yahoo!'s products. All the three vulnerabilities have now been fixed by Yahoo!. THREE CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITIES The first and most critical vulnerability gives hackers full administrator access to Yahoo!'s e-commerce platform, Yahoo! Small Business , a portal that allows small business owners to create their own web stores through Yahoo! and sell merchandise. According to the researcher, the flaw in the service allowed him to fully administrator any Yahoo store and thereby gain access to customers' personally identifiable information, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers.

A Serious vulnerability in Facebook has recently been reported that could allow anyone to delete your complete Facebook photo album without having authentication. Security Researcher Laxman Muthiyah told The Hacker News that the vulnerability actually resides in Facebook Graph API mechanism, which allows "a hacker to delete any photo album on Facebook . Any photo album owned by an user or a page or a group could be deleted." DELETING FACEBOOK PHOTO ALBUMS According to Facebook developers documentation, its not possible to delete albums using the Graph API, but Indian security researcher has found a way to delete not just his own, but also others Facebook photo albums within few seconds. " I decided to try it with Facebook for mobile access token because we can see delete option for all photo albums in Facebook mobile application isn't it? Yeah and also it uses the same Graph API ," he said. In general, Facebook Graph API requires an access tok

A critical cross-site scripting ( XSS ) vulnerability in the Google Apps administrator console allowed cyber criminals to force a Google Apps admins to execute just about any request on the https://admin.google.com/ domain. The Google Apps admin console allows administrators to manage their organization's account. Administrators can use the console to add new users, configure permissions, manage security settings and enable Google services for your domain. The feature is primarily used by many businesses, especially those using Gmail as the e-mail service for their domain. The XSS flaw allowed attackers to force the admin to do the following actions: Creating new users with "super admin" rights Disabling two-factor authentication ( 2FA ) and other security measures from existing accounts or from multiple domains Modifying domain settings so that all incoming e-mails are redirected to addresses controlled by the attacker Hijack an account/email by resett

Along with a dream to make Internet access available to everyone across the world, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is working to make the Internet a more secure place as well. Till now, a number of large technology companies have bug bounty programs to reward researchers and cyber enthusiast who contribute in the security of Internet by finding out security holes in software or web platforms, and the social networking giant Facebook is the latest one to do so. Facebook and Usenix have together implemented the Internet Defense Prize — an award recognizing superior quality research that combines a working prototype with great contributions to securing the Internet, Facebook announced Thursday at the annual USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego. Also, Facebook announced the first award under its Internet Defense Prize, and crowned a pair of German researchers for their paper , " Static Detection of Second-Order Vulnerabilities in Web Applications " — a seemingly viabl

Another privacy issue has been discovered in Google Drive which could have led sensitive and personal information stored on the cloud service exposed to unauthorized parties. The security flaw has now patched by Google, but its discovery indicates that the vulnerability of cloud data when accessed via a link can allow " anyone who has the link " to access your private data without any further authentication. HOW THE SECURITY FLAW WORKS The security hole addressed a risk to files that included a clickable URL on your cloud file sharing service. When someone opens the file and clicks on an embedded hyperlink, then they get sent to the website of a third-party website owner. Upon accessing this URL, unfortunately the external Internet user - an unauthorized party - could potentially access your sensitive information by accessing the original documents that included the URL. GOOGLE EXPLANATION Google explained the actual nature of the security flaw in a blog p

It has been months ago since the release of Samsung's latest Smartphone, Galaxy S5 and we have seen a portion of International units receive root, but a couple of the carrier variants including the developer edition of Samsung Galaxy S5 for Verizon and At&T hasn't been in the list, sadly. The Interesting part is that till now no hacker has found a way out to gain the root-rights of the Verizon as well as AT&T version of the Samsung Galaxy S5. Now, the Verizon and AT&T users who own Samsung Galaxy S5 are reportedly itching to get Android rooting technique for their devices, so that they can do tons of things such as customizations, patching apps, installing third-party ROMs etc. This situation is something unacceptable to the developers and Galaxy S5 users, and finally the senior members of XDA developers in collaboration with the group of Verizon and AT&T customers have started a Crowd funded Bounty program for achieving the root on Verizon and AT&

Two months ago, we reported a critical vulnerability on the Yahoo Answers platform that allowed a hacker to delete all the posted thread and comments from Yahoo's Suggestion Board website. Recently, a similar vulnerability has been reported by another Egyptian security researcher ' Ahmed Aboul-Ela ', that allows him to delete any comment from all Yahoo Services, including Yahoo News , Yahoo Sports , Yahoo TV , Yahoo Music , Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Celebrity , Yahoo Voices and more. HOW TO DELETE ANY COMMENT When yahoo users comment on any article or post on any of the Yahoo services, they are allowed to delete their own comment anytime. But the reported vulnerability discovered by Ahmed allows them to delete all the comments, even if they are posted by others. To delete a comment, one can initiate the request by clicking on the delete button and once clicked, the page sends a POST request to the Yahoo server with some variables i.e. comment_id and content_id , where comm

NSS Labs issued the report titled " The Known Unknowns " to explain the dynamics behind the market of zero-day exploits. Last week I discussed about the necessity to define a model for " cyber conflict " to qualify the principal issues related to the use of cyber tools and cyber weapons in an Information Warfare context, today I decided to give more info to the readers on cyber arsenals of governments. Governments consider the use of cyber weapons as a coadiuvant to conventional weapons, these malicious application could be used for sabotage or for cyber espionage, they could be used to hit a specifically designed software (e.g. SCADA within a critical infrastructure ) or they could be used for large scale operations infecting thousand of machines exploiting zero-day in common application ( e.g. Java platform, Adobe software ). The zero-day flaw are the most important component for the design of an efficient cyber weapon, governments have recently created dedic

Indian Security Enthusiast ' Arul Kumar ' recently reported an interesting Facebook vulnerability that allowed him to delete any Facebook image within a minute. Facebook Bug Bounty program rewarded him with  $12,500 USD for helping the Facebook Security team to patch this critical loophole in their own " Support Dashboard ". The flaw is critical because using this exploitation method hacker can also delete Mark Zuckerberg's ( Facebook Founder ) Photos from his Photo Album, or even from wall of any verified page too. Arul posted on his blog, " The Support Dashboard is a portal designed to help you track the progress of the reports you make to Facebook. From your Support Dashboard, you can see if your report has been reviewed by Facebook employees who assess reports 24 hours a day, seven days a week ." That means, if you will report abuse the targeted image and send a Photo Removal Request, Facebook Server Will automatically generate

When coders and online security researchers find errors in websites or software, the companies behind the programs will often pay out a bounty to the person who discovered the issue. The programs are intended to create an incentive for researchers to privately report issues and allow vendors to release fixes before hackers take advantage of flaws. A 17-year-old German student says he found a security flaw in PayPal's website but was denied a reward because he's too young. On PayPal's website, the company lists the terms for rewarding people who find bugs, but mentions nothing about the age of the discoverer.  The details of the vulnerability, i.e cross-site scripting flaw (XSS), is posted on Full Disclosure section. In Past we have seen that many times PayPal tried to cheat with new security researchers by replying various reasons on reporting bugs i.e "already reported by someone else", "domain / sub-domain is not under bounty program", &q

Mohamed Ramadan from Attack-Secure discovered a critical vulnerability in Etsy's iPhone application. Etsy is a social commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies. Any attacker on the same network can sniff traffic (including user password) invisibly without any warning from Etsy app. Its is very similar to the man in the middle attack reported in iPhone Instagram app a few days back. Bug Hunting ! Because Etsy having a Security Bug Bounty Program , so first Mohamed was trying to find a vulnerability in Etsy website , later he found that they have enough good security. Because Etsy mobile apps are eligible in bug bounty program, so next try was on Mobile apps. Mohamed finally  downloaded the latest version 2.2 and installed that on his iPhone 4S with iOS 6 and also on his ipad. Then he configured his Burp Suite proxy 1.5 to listen on all interfaces on port 8080 in invisible mode.  He disabled any firewall and con

Bug Bounty program, where white hat hackers and researchers hunt for serious security vulnerabilities and disclosing them only to the vendor for a patch , In return vendors rewards them with money. Various famous websites like Facebook , Google , Paypal , Mozilla, Barracuda Networks and more other giving away bug bounties in thousands of Dollars to hackers for finding vulnerabilities. Most common vulnerabilities reported maximum time on various sites is Cross site scripting and each month hackers submit lots of such vulnerabilities to companies. In case  your report is duplicate, i.e. Someone else before you submit the same vulnerability - company will reject you from the bug bounty program. But there is no proof or an open Panel where hacker can verify that is someone already reported for same bug before or not. If company reply you - " The bug was already discovered by another researcher" , can you do anything  even after knowing that you are very first per