Privacy | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google has been involved in several controversies including among the companies that was claimed to cooperate with US surveillance agencies on their global data-mining programmes, and just yesterday the popular Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch labeled Google worse than the NSA , saying " NSA privacy invasion bad, but nothing compared to Google. " Now another, but already known controversy over the Internet giant has raised many concerns over privacy of users who carry their smartphones with them. We all have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go i.e. Smartphones. GOOGLE TRACKS YOU EVERYWHERE YOU GO - LOCATION HISTORY Today, with the help of these sensors, Google is tracking our every foot steps and placing a red dot on its map to keep track of users' records, Junkee.com reports. " You can yourself check your every move from here. You just need to log in with the same account you use on your Smartphone, that's it. The map will display all the records of everyw

Majority of my articles are related to government spying, privacy and security issues of your online stuffs and also measures that you can adopt in protecting yourself from being spied on. But, your all efforts will soon be of no use - someone is about to secretly track your every footstep. Google will soon get an eye in the space that will be enough powerful to see your face, thanks to the new satellite, WorldView-3 satellite, which is scheduled to launch later today (11:30 a.m. PST) from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base atop an Atlas 5 rocket by Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services, according to Motherboard . DIGITAL EYE IN SPACE WorldView-3 satellite is developed by a US-based company DigitalGlobe , one of the world's leading global content providers of high-resolution earth imagery, supplying most online mapping services to the US government and NASA. The satellite contains : Exelis-built 1.1 meter aperture telescope  Primary visible/SWIR sensor B

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

A critical vulnerability in Tor — an encrypted anonymizing network considered to be one of the most privacy oriented service, which is used by online users in order to hide their activities from law enforcement, government censors and others — was probably being used to de-anonymize the identity of Tor users, Tor project warned on Wednesday. 115 MALICIOUS ToR RELAYS WERE DE-ANONYMIZING USERS According to a security advisory , Tor Team has found a group of 115 malicious fast non-exit relays (6.4% of whole Tor network), those were actively monitoring the relays on both ends of a Tor circuit in an effort to de-anonymize users. " While we don't know when they started doing the attack, users who operated or accessed hidden services from early February through July 4 should assume they were affected, " Tor said. When you use Tor anonymizing network, your IP address remains hidden and it appears that your connection is coming from the IP address of a Tor exit rela

The 31-year-old former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has warned that during surveillance, among other things, NSA system administrators also intercepted and routinely passed the photos of people in "sexually compromising" situations among other NSA employees. In a video interview, NSA whistleblower speaks with the Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and reporter Ewen MacAskill in Moscow, which was then published by the Guardian on Thursday. WOOOH!! ATTRACTIVE NUDIE PICS - PASS IT ON TO BILL TOO " You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old. They've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records, " he said in the video interview. " During the course of their daily work they stumble upon something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense – for example, an intimate photo of someone o

We all are aware of the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance program to track non-Americans. Thanks to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who provided confidential documents about the widely spread surveillance programs conducted by the government intelligence agency such as NSA and GCHQ. A recent story about NSA surveillance broke when a German public broadcaster ARD published that the Agency is using its surveillance program XKeyScore to target users who use encryption and traffic anonymizing software, including Tor Network for anonymous Web browsing and Linux-based Tails operating system in an effort to keep tracks of people outside the US. XKeyScore is a powerful NSA surveillance program that collects and sorts intercepted data, which came to limelight in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last summer, but the greater detail in an investigation conducted by American security expert and Tor Project member Jacob Appelbaum , Aaron Gibsom, and

Death is always painful, but its pains compounded considerably if its cause is suicide. When a suicide occurs, we aren't just left with the loss of a person, but we're also left with a legacy of anger, second-guessing, and fearful anxiety. Like in the case of the great Internet Activist Aaron Swartz. Aaron Hillel Swartz , an eclectic persona, was a self-taught programmer, Internet activist, co-founder of the popular social news website Reddit, founder of the organization Demand Progress and an activist who helped create the RSS feed format. In Fact, this isn't enough to define The Internet's Own Boy Aaron Swartz , who crafted the Internet we know today. Aaron Swartz committed suicide last year (when he was just a 26-year-old) after being threatened with the possibility of at least 35-year prison sentence and $4 million in fines by the Court for downloading millions of academic journal articles illegally over the digital library Jstor from MIT, with no bad intention ot

Just a few hours ago, the Official website of the  Tails Operating System  has been hacked and it appears that a self-proclaimed 17-year old hacker breached and defaced it. Tails is a Linux-based highly secure Operating System, specially designed and optimized to preserve users' anonymity and privacy. Hacker, who named himself " Sum guy ", managed to access the website as administrator and edited the homepage content with the following message: You has been haxoredeszed by sum dumb 17 year old by accident... Sorry about that please forgive me! I accidentally logged myself in as someone important and changed the site, not knowing that what I was changing would save! So sorry about that... I hope you have a backup, Oh and btw I love your OS! Yours sincerely, Sum guy And before I leave, Hi ed... and zoin Defaced Link:  https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html . However, all other pages on the Tails website are working just fine, but at this moment it is not clear

In this era of mass surveillance, we have always learned from security folks to protect and encrypt our communication and networks, especially widely open private Wi-Fi networks. It is always recommended to use a strong password and encryption on Wireless Routers in an effort to safeguard the privacy and security of our web communication and personal data. Quite the contrary, a group of activists says opening up your home Wi-Fi network could not only enhance your privacy, but actually increase it in the process. A new movement dubbed as " Open Wireless Movement " is encouraging the users to open-up their private network or at least a small portion of the available bandwidth to strangers. It really sounds quite annoying! Isn't it? In this case any unknown can consume a large part of your network bandwidth or can use your network to perform illicit activities, and it will come as a great boon for those cyber thieves who are in wake of finding such open networks to carr

In cryptography, Block ciphers such as AES or DES are a symmetric key cipher operating on fixed-length groups of bits, called blocks, and typically operate on large input data blocks i.e. 64 or more than 128, 256 bits. Block cipher encrypts Plain-text to Cipher-text by applying cryptographic key and algorithm to a block of data at once as a group rather than to one bit at a time, so that identical blocks of text do not get encrypted the same way. However, some applications need smaller blocks, and possibly non-binary blocks. So, to fulfil this need Cisco is providing a  small block cipher , what it calls "FNR" (Flexible Naor and Reingold), but currently it is an experimental block cipher rather a production software. Sashank Dara , software engineer at the security technology group Cisco , says in a detailed explanation that FNR is a flexible length small domain block cipher for encrypting objects that works without the need for padding, as happens in the traditional

If US has banned its several major government departments, including NASA, Justice and Commerce Departments, from purchasing Chinese products and computer technology due to suspected backdoors, then they are not wrong at all. A popular Chinese Android Smartphone comes pre-installed with a Trojan that could allow manufacturer to spy onto their users' comprising their personal data and conversations without any restrictions and users knowledge. GOOGLE PLAY STORE OR A SPYING APP? According to the researchers at the German security firm G Data , the Star N9500 smartphone, a popular and cheap handset device in China, comes pre-installed with Uupay.D Trojan horse, disguising as a version of the Google Play Store. The trojan camouflage as the Google Play Store , so it enables Chinese Company to secretly install malicious apps, which creates the whole spectrum of abuse. STEALING WITHOUT RESTRICTIONS The nasty Spyware runs in the background and has capability to steal

Surfing the Internet?? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is watching your every move on Web, and this time even more closure. It's not surprising that Facebook collects data of its 1.3 billion users, just like everyone else, which the company has said it only holds onto your data for security and advertisement purposes. But, this would be first time when some company is using people's browsing history to deliver 'targeted Ads' on its service. The biggest social networking giant recently announced it has plans to use information from our Web browsing and app history to deliver more targeted advertisements to us. HOW IT WORKS The move will track you with every site you visit, even its a non-Facebook website. EVERY SITE?? No! No! No! The company can't track your online activity while visiting any website, but only those that have Facebook " LIKE ", " Recommend ", " Share " buttons across the web, and I think almost all have at least one included in it. Yes! Any web

A quiet change in the privacy setting of its forthcoming iOS 8 smartphone Operating System, Apple could effectively block the path for advertisers, marketers, and other snoopers looking to collect data about you and your location from your Smartphone devices. When your mobile device scan for a free Wi-Fi network, whether at the shopping complex, airport, or restaurant, it sends out the MAC address which is a unique identifier of the device that allows devices to distinguish between one another on a network. Routers need this identifier to connect you to a network. Advertisers and retailers have been seeking to track these identifiers to help offer personalized advertisements to customers based on where they've been. Thanks to Apple's upcoming feature which will enhance users privacy to one step higher than other smartphone providers. Apple announced the change during its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in Cupertino last week, revealing that the feature will restrict

Privacy of Internet users is dead somewhere as the Intelligence agencies can watch our every move, hear our every conversation and read our every email and find out anything related to our personal and private life.  Last year, Edward Snowden revealed about the mass surveillance carried out by NSA and other countries intelligence agencies on every citizen of their country. The US Government has allotted a large share of its ' Black Budget ' for secret surveillance programs and to make this happen, NSA has used a number of unethical ways and labelled as legal solutions, harvesting hundreds of millions of Metadata from emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else around the world. The revelations encouraged Internet users think about their privacy and digital rights, and the time came when different organisations started several campaigns to block mass surveillance and fight back against the U.S. National Security Agency ( NSA ). RESET YOU

Everything we do online, whether chatting on phone, talking via video or audio, sending messages on phones or emails are being watched by Governments and Intelligence agencies. However, many Internet giants offer encrypted environment in an effort to protect our online data from prying eyes, but still those companies can read our data stored into their servers. But, there is a great news for Gmail users. On Tuesday, Google has announced two major privacy enhancements in its Gmail and this new push for its email service will even protect our data and communication from Google itself. With the ongoing concerns about privacy and the pervasiveness of email communications, Google already provides encryption for its Gmail called Transit encryption (HTTPS). In which only the transmission of emails sending or receiving is protected by the transit encryption but not the content of the email. Few Months back, Google itself admitted that their automated systems read our email c

It's an era of Mass Surveillance, where Encryption has become more important today for all of us than any other time in the History. But the trouble is that Crypto programs are too hard for Non-Internet-Savvy to implement and use. Time is loudly announcing the need to switch to some alternatives that provide end-to-end encryption for communication between two devices in order to keep your personal data away from NSA's prying eyes and respect your Privacy . But, many services, including Facebook's messaging application, don't support encryption and therefore are weak in providing security of our online data, which could result in data breach either by cyber criminals or by our own Government under surveillance programs. Because Facebook's messaging application doesn't support end-to-end encryption, an Open-source and most popular crypto chat-encryption application called 'Cryptocat' has made it possible to chat with your Facebook friends and rel