Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Millions of websites, users' passwords, credit card numbers and other personal information may be at risk as a result of the Heartbleed security flaw , a vulnerability in widely used cryptographic library ' OpenSSL '. [ READ DETAILS HERE ] Netcraft survey says that about half a million widely trusted active websites on the internet are vulnerable to the heartbleed bug, which means the information transmitting through hundreds of thousands of websites could be vulnerable, despite the protection offered by encryption techniques. According to Netcraft, " the heartbeat extension was enabled on 17.5% of SSL sites, accounting for around half a million certificates issued by trusted certificate authorities. These certificates are consequently vulnerable to being spoofed (through private key disclosure), allowing an attacker to impersonate the affected websites without raising any browser warnings. " Among the trusted names running OpenSSL is Yahoo!, which has been

Are you safe from the critical bug Heartbleed?? OpenSSL- the encryption technology used by millions of websites to encrypt the communication and is also used to protect our sensitive data such as e-mails, passwords or banking information.  But a tiny, but most critical flaw called " Heartbleed " in the widely used OpenSSL opened doors for the cyber criminals to extract sensitive data from the system memory. WHAT IS HEARTBLEED? SSL and TLS are known to provide communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as websites, email, instant messaging (IM), including some virtual private networks (VPNs). Heartbleed is a critical bug ( CVE-2014-0160 ) is in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS (transport layer security protocols) and DTLS ( Datagram TLS ) heartbeat extension (RFC6520). This bug was independently discovered by a team of security enginee

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

It is advised to those who are running their web server with OpenSSL 1.0.1 through 1.0, then it is significantly important that you update to OpenSSL 1.0.1g immediately or as soon as possible.  As this afternoon, an extremely critical programming flaw in the OpenSSL has been discovered that apparently exposed the cryptographic keys and private data from some of the most important sites and services on the Internet. The bug was independently discovered by security firm Codenomicon along with a Google Security engineer. The flaw is in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library and its weakness allows cyber criminals to steal the information protected, under normal conditions, by the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Security Layer) encryption used to secure the Internet. OpenSSL is an open-source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols. The core library implements the basic cryptographic functions that enable SSL and TLS encryption. Mostly every w

Is Air Travel expensive for You?? Of course it's costly for Common people. But, hackers have found a way out of it too. If you have an iPhone then there is no need to buy airline tickets, as a simple iPhone hack can fool any modern airport and get you a seat in first class for free. Anthony Hariton , an 18 year-old computer science student at the University of Crete in Greece, claims he has found a plough to fetch free flight tickets across Europe by generating fake boarding passes designed for Apple's Passbook app. The student prepares to give his presentation entitled " Exploiting Passbook to Fly for Free, " in a hacking conference next month, in which he will theoretically demonstrate on how to generate fake boarding passes using only a computer and an iPhone, then get through all the Security Airport checks and then eventually ending up on your first class seat to the destination of your choice. HACKING iPHONE APP TO GET FREE BOARDING PASSES The iO

Do you know, Why another major company is getting hacked every week? Because of poor policies, Laziness to Incident Response and lack in will-power to put efforts on applying important patches. Some companies are not taking their security more seriously, and best suitable example for this is  TxTag,  an electronic toll collection systems in Texas operated by Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) . 1.2 MILLION CREDIT CARD ARE AT RISK Security researcher, David Longenecker   claimed a serious flaw at  TxTag website that exposes the active Credit Card Details and Personal Information of 1.2 Million Drivers including active TxTags (vehicle stickers with microchips, which are scanned by electronic readers on toll roads), Names, phone numbers, full residence addresses, email addresses, along with their complete Credit card numbers and Expiration date. According to David, the account names could be easily predictable by anyone, which is typically an 8-digit number that beg

On passed Thursday, Microsoft has released an advance advisory alert for upcoming Patch Tuesday which will address Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities in several Microsoft's products. Microsoft came across a limited targeted attacks directed at their Microsoft Word 2010 because of the vulnerability in the older versions of Microsoft Word. This Tuesday Microsoft will release Security Updates to address four major vulnerabilities, out of which two are labeled as critical and remaining two are Important to patch as the flaws are affecting various Microsoft software such as, Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft web apps, Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer etc. VULNERABILITY THAT YOU  MUST PATCH Google Security Team has reported a critical Remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Word 2010 ( CVE-2014-1761 ) which could be exploited by an attacker to execute the malicious code remotely via a specially crafted RTF file , if opened by a user with an affected vers

iOS devices have a feature called ' Find My iPhone ', allows device owner to locate their stolen devices using linked Apple ID with iCloud Account. Unfortunately, a security flaw in iOS make it possible to turn off Find My iPhone without a password and enabled thieves to bypass the protection which makes the iPhone  untraceable if lost or stolen. To Set-Up ' Find My iPhone ' feature, users need to link their Apple ID with it and this will not only helps in locating the device but also gives permission to its user to remove all the data, drive direction to the lost device, lock the device by a passcode and displays a custom message on the locked screen. KILL 'Find My iPhone' WITHOUT APPLE PASSWORD Normally, disabling Find My iPhone requires Apple ID password, but according to the vulnerability reported by  Miguel Alvarado,  a thief can bypass all of this security feature without knowing your Apple account's password . In a video demons

A 5-year-old San Diego boy managed to hack one of the most popular gaming systems in the world, Xbox and has now been acknowledged as a security researcher by Microsoft. Kristoffer Von Hassel uncovered a vulnerability in Xbox Live's password system, that would allow someone to log into a Xbox player's account without their password. Kristoffer's parents noticed he was logging into his father's Xbox Live account simply by tapping the space bar. YES, BACKDOOR ENTRY WITH JUST SPACE-BAR His father noticed that Kristoffer logged in as his Xbox Live account to play video games that he wasn't meant to be playing and asked how he had done it.  Kristoffer revealed that by typing in the wrong password and then by pressing the spacebar, he bypassed the password verification through a backdoor, and it was pretty simple! HIS FEELING, "was like yeah!" 5-year-old gamer actually hacked the authentication system of a multi-billion dollar company,

An application layer or 'layer 7' distributed denial of service ( DDoS ) attacks is one of the most complicated web attack that disguised to look like legitimate traffic but targets specific areas of a website, making it even more difficult to detect and mitigate. Just Yesterday Cloud-based security service provider ' Incapsula ' detected a unique application layer DDoS attack, carried out using traffic hijacking techniques. DDoS attack flooded one of their client with over 20 million GET requests, originating from browsers of over 22,000 Internet users. What makes this case especially interesting is the fact that the attack was enabled by persistent XSS vulnerability in one of the world's largest and most popular site - one of the domains on Alexa's " Top 50 " list. XSS  vulnerability  to Large-Scale DDoS Attack Incapsula has not disclosed the name of vulnerable website for security reasons, but mentioned it as a high profile video content provider

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is becoming more sophisticated and complex with the increase in the skills of attackers and so, has become one of favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend or crash the services of a host connected to the Internet and till now nearly every big site had been a victim of this attack. Since 2013, Hackers have adopted new tactics to boost the sizes of Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack known as ' Amplification Attack ', leveraging the weakness in the UDP protocols. One of the commonly used by hacker is (Domain Name System) DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS). WHAT IS DrDoS ATTACK? The DNS Reflection Denial of Service (DrDoS) technique exploits security weaknesses in the Domain Name System (DNS) Internet protocol. Using Internet protocol spoofing, the source address is set to that of the targeted victim, which means all the replies will go to the target and the target of the attack receives re

So, is your Safari Web Browser Updated?? Make sure you have the latest web browser updated for your Apple Macintosh systems, as Apple released Safari 6.1.3 and Safari 7.0.3 with new security updates. These Security updates addresses multiple vulnerabilities in its Safari web browser, which has always been the standard browser for Mac users. This times not five or ten, in fact about two dozen. Apple issued a security update to patch a total of 27 vulnerabilities in Safari web browser, including the one which was highlighted at Pwn2Own 2014 hacking competition. The available updates replace the browser running OSX 10.7 and 10.8 with the latest versions of browser 6.1.3, and OSX 10.9 with 7.0.3. Among the 27 vulnerabilities, the most remarkable vulnerability addressed in the update is CVE-2014-1303 , a heap-based buffer overflow that can be remotely exploited and could lead to bypass a sandbox protection mechanism via unspecified vector. This vulnerability is

Imagine, You Open a Winrar archive of MP3 files, but what if it will install a malware into your system when you play anyone of them. WinRAR, a widely used file archiver and data compression utility helps hackers to distribute malicious code. Israeli security researcher  Danor Cohen (An7i)   discovered the WinRAR file extension spoofing vulnerability. WinRAR file extension spoofing vulnerability allows hackers to modify the filename and extension inside the traditional file archive, that helps them to hide binary malicious code inside an archive, pretending itself as '.jpg' , '.txt' or any other format. Using a Hex editor tool, he analysed a ZIP file and noticed that winrar tool also adds some custom properties to an archive, including two names - First name is the original filename (FAX.png) and second name is the filename (FAX.png) that will appear at the WINRAR GUI window. Danor manipulated the second filename and extension to prepare a special Z

A year back, Security Researchers from the Antivirus firm Kaspersky found a sophisticated piece of malware which they dubbed as ' MiniDuke ', designed specifically to collect and steal strategic insights and highly protected political information, which is a subject to states' security. Now, once again the MiniDuke virus is spreading in wild via an innocent looking but fake PDF documents related to Ukraine , while the researcher at F-Secure were browsing the set of extracted decoy documents from a large batch of potential MiniDuke Samples. " This is interesting considering the current crisis in the area ," Mikko Hypponen, the CTO of security research firm F-Secure, wrote on Tuesday. The Hacker News reported a year ago about the malicious malware that uses an exploit ( CVE-2013-0640 ) of the famous and actively used Adobe Reader . MiniDuke malware written in assembly language with its tiny file size (20KB), and uses hijacked Twitter accounts for Command &a

The Android operating system has hardened its security with application Sandboxing features to ensure that no application can access sensitive information held by another without proper privileges. Android applications communicate with each other through Intents and these intents can be abused by hackers to provide a channel for a malicious application to inject malicious data into a target, potentially vulnerable application. Security Researchers at IBM have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Firefox for Android platform that allow a malicious application to leak the sensitive information related to the user's profile. Android's Firefox app stores the personal data at following location: / data /data/org . mozilla . firefox /files/mozilla/<RANDOM-STRING >. default . Where the random name for user's profile is used to prevent unwanted access to this directory in case of Firefox exploitation. Researchers developed an exploit to brute-force the &

Microsoft warned about a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Word that is being actively exploited in targeted attacks and discovered by the Google security team. " At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks directed at Microsoft Word 2010… " company said. According to Microsoft's security advisory , Microsoft Word is vulnerable to  a remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2014-1761 ) that can be exploited by a specially crafted Rich Text Format (RTF). An Attacker can simply infect the victim's system with malware if a user opens a malicious Rich Text Format (RTF), or merely preview the message in Microsoft Outlook. " The issue is caused when Microsoft Word parses specially crafted RTF-formatted data causing system memory to become corrupted in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code. " Microsoft acknowledged that remote code execution flaw also exists in Microsoft Word 2003, 2007, 2013, Word Viewer and Office for Mac 2011. Micr

Android -  a widely used Smartphone platform offered by Google is once again suspected to affect its users with malicious software that puts their android devices at risk. This time the vulnerabilities occur in the way Android handle the updates to add new flavors to your device. Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft have discovered [ Paper PDF ] a new set of Android vulnerabilities that is capable to carry out privilege escalation attacks because of the weakness in its Package Management Service (PMS) that puts more than one billion Android devices at risk. The researchers dubbed the new set of security-critical vulnerabilities as Pileup flaws which is a short for privilege escalation through updating, that waylays inside the Android PMS and intensifies the permissions offered to malicious apps whenever an android update occurs, without informing users. The research was carried out by Indiana University Bloomington researchers, Luyi Xing, Xiaorui Pan, Ka