Vulnerability | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In Brief The famous '60 Minutes' television show shocked some viewers Sunday evening when a team of German hackers demonstrated how they spied on an iPhone used by U.S. Congressman, then recorded his phone calls and tracked his movement through Los Angeles. Hackers leverage a security flaw in SS7 (Signalling System Seven) protocol that allows hackers to track phone locations, listen in on calls and text messages. The global telecom network SS7 is still vulnerable to several security flaws that could let hackers and spy agencies listen to personal phone calls and intercept SMSes on a potentially massive scale, despite the most advanced encryption used by cellular networks. All one need is the target's phone number to track him/her anywhere on the planet and even eavesdrop on the conversations. SS7 or Signalling System Number 7 is a telephony signaling protocol used by more than 800 telecommunication operators around the world to exchange information with one

Adobe has been one of the favorite picks of the Hackers to mess with any systems devoid of any operating systems, as Flash Player is a front runner in all the browsers. Hackers have already been targeting Flash Player for long by exploiting known vulnerabilities roaming in the wild. Despite Adobe's efforts, Flash is not safe anymore for Internet security, as one more critical vulnerability had been discovered in the Flash Player that could crash the affected system and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the system. Discovered by a French Researcher Kafeine , FireEye's Genwei Jiang , and Google's Clement Lecigne, the flaw affects Adobe Flash Player 21.0.0.197 and its earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS. The vulnerability, assigned under CVE-2016-1019, also expands back to Windows 7 and even towards Windows XP. Adobe had also confirmed that the newly discovered vulnerability in its Flash Player is being exploit

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Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was ordered to reveal the complete source code for the TOR exploit it used to hack visitors of the world's largest dark web child pornography site, PlayPen. Robert J. Bryan, the federal judge, ordered the FBI to hand over the TOR browser exploit code so that defence could better understand how the agency hacked over 1,000 computers and if the evidence gathered was covered under the scope of the warrant. Now, the FBI is pushing back against the federal judge's order. On Monday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI filed a sealed motion asking the judge to reconsider its ruling, saying revealing the exploit used to bypass the Tor Browser protections is not necessary for the defense and other cases. In previous filings, the defence has argued that the offensive operation used in the case was " gross misconduct by government and law enforcement agencies, " and that the Network Investigative Technique (NIT)

Security researchers have discovered a remotely exploitable vulnerability in Called ID app " Truecaller " that could expose personal details of Millions of its users. Truecaller is a popular service that claims to "search and identify any phone number," as well as helps users block incoming calls or SMSes from phone numbers categorized as spammers and telemarketers. The service has mobile apps for Android, iOS, Windows, Symbian devices and BlackBerry phones. The vulnerability, discovered by Cheetah Mobile Security Research Lab , affects Truecaller Android version of the app that has been downloaded more than 100 Million times. The actual problem resides in the way Truecaller identify users in its systems. While installation, Truecaller Android app asks users to enter their phone number, email address, and other personal details, which is verified by phone call or SMS message. After this, whenever users open the app, no login screen is ever

Police have arrested and charged six people with crimes linked to hacking Connecticut state lottery terminals in order to produce more winning tickets than usual. Prosecutors say all the six suspects are either owners or employees of retail stores that produced a much higher number of winning tickets than the state average, according to the Hartford Courant . Suspects Hacked Lottery Terminal The alleged group set up machines to process a flood of tickets at once that caused a temporary display freeze, allowing operators to see which of the tickets about to be dispensed would be winning tickets, cancel the duff ones, and print the good ones. The hack appears to have exploited some  software weaknesses in lottery terminals  that not only caused ticket requests to be delayed but also allowed operators to know ahead of time whether a given request would produce a winning ticket. The actual culprit, in this case, was a game dubbed " 5 Card Cash ." The a

A critical zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in all versions of Apple's OS X operating system that allows hackers to exploit the company's newest protection feature and steal sensitive data from affected devices. With the release of OS X El Capitan, Apple introduced a security protection feature to the OS X kernel called System Integrity Protection ( SIP ). The feature is designed to prevent potentially malicious or bad software from modifying protected files and folders on your Mac. The purpose of SIP is to restrict the root account of OS X devices and limit the actions a root user can perform on protected parts of the system in an effort to reduce the chance of malicious code hijacking a device or performing privilege escalation. However, SentinelOne security researcher Pedro Vilaça has uncovered a critical vulnerability in both OS X and iOS that allows for local privilege escalation as well as bypasses SIP without kernel exploit, impacting all versions

Security researchers have discovered a nasty security vulnerability that is said to affect almost every version of Windows and Samba and will be patched on April 12, 2016, the Samba development team announced Tuesday. So, Save the Date if you are a Windows or Samba file server administrator. Samba is a free, open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS network file sharing protocol that runs on the majority of operating systems available today, including Windows, UNIX, Linux, IBM System 390, and OpenVMS. Samba allows non-Windows operating systems, like GNU/Linux or Mac OS X, to communicate with the same networking protocol as the Windows products, thus enabling users to access network shared folders and files from Windows OS. Dubbed Badlock , the vulnerability has been discovered by Stefan Metzmacher, a developer of Samba Core Team. Details about the Badlock vulnerability will be disclosed on April 12, when the developers of Microsoft and Samba release security p

A new deadly security vulnerability has been discovered in OpenSSL that affects more than 11 Million modern websites and e-mail services protected by an ancient, long deprecated transport layer security protocol, Secure Sockets Layer (SSLv2). Dubbed DROWN , the highly critical security hole in OpenSSL was disclosed today as a low-cost attack that could decrypt your sensitive, secure HTTPS communications, including passwords and credit card details… ...and that too in a matter of hours or in some cases almost immediately, a team of 15 security researchers from various universities and the infosec community warned Tuesday. Here's what the security researchers said: "We've been able to execute the attack against OpenSSL versions that are vulnerable to CVE-2016-0703 in under a minute using a single PC. Even for servers that do not have these particular bugs, the general variant of the attack, which works against any SSLv2 server, can be conducted in under 8 hour

If you are using a SimpliSafe wireless home alarm system to improve your home security smartly, just throw it up and buy a new one. It is useless. The so-called 'Smart' Technology, which is designed to make your Home Safer, is actually opening your house doors for hackers. The latest in this field is SimpliSafe Alarm . SimpliSafe wireless home alarm systems – used by more than 300,000 customers in the United States – are Hell Easy to Hack , allowing an attacker to easily gain full access to the alarm and disable the security system, facilitating unauthorized intrusions and thefts. …and the most interesting reality is: You Can Not Patch it! As the Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at a great pace, it continues to widen the attack surface at the same time. Just last month, a similar hack was discovered in Ring – a Smart doorbell that connects to the user's home WiFi network – that allowed researchers to hack WiFi password of the home user. How

A highly critical vulnerability has been uncovered in the GNU C Library (glibc) , a key component of most Linux distributions, that leaves nearly all Linux machines, thousands of apps and electronic devices vulnerable to hackers that can take full control over them. Just clicking on a link or connecting to a server can result in remote code execution (RCE), allowing hackers to steal credentials, spy on users, seize control of computers, and many more. The vulnerability is similar to the last year's  GHOST vulnerability (CVE-2015-0235) that left countless machines vulnerable to remote code execution (RCE) attacks , representing a major Internet threat. GNU C Library (glibc) is a collection of open source code that powers thousands of standalone apps and most Linux distributions, including those distributed to routers and other types of hardware. The recent flaw, which is indexed as CVE-2015-7547 , is a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in glibc's D

A pair of new security vulnerabilities has been discovered in the framework used by a wide variety of Mac apps leaves them open to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks. The framework in question is Sparkle that a large number of third-party OS X apps, including Camtasia, uTorrent, Duet Display and Sketch, use to facilitate automatic updates in the background. Sparkle is an open source software available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license by the Sparkle Project with the help of numerous of valuable contributors. The framework supports Mac OS X versions 10.7 through 10.11 and Xcode 5.0 through 7.0. The Sparkle vulnerabilities, discovered by Radek, a security researcher, in late January and reported by Ars reporter, affect Apple Mac apps that use: An outdated and vulnerable version of the Sparkle updater framework. An unencrypted HTTP channel to receive info from update servers. What's the Issue? The first loophole is due to the improper implemen

The same "Vigilante-style Hacker," who previously hacked more than 10,000 routers to make them more secure, has once again made headlines by compromising more than 70,000 home routers and apparently forcing their owners to make them secure against flaws and weak passwords. Just like the infamous hacking group Lizard Squad , the group of white hat hackers, dubbed the White Team , is building up a sizeable botnet consisting of hundreds of thousands of home routers, but for a good purpose. Lizard Squad , the same group responsible for Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft Xbox Live outages , uses their botnets to launch DDoS ( Distributed Denial of Service ) attacks against target websites to flood them with traffic and knock them offline. Hacking Routers to Make them More Secure Challenged by Lizard Squad's maliocus work, the White Team of vigilante hackers built their own peer-to-peer botnet that infects routers to close off vulnerabilities , such

Microsoft has released 13 security bulletins, six of which are considered to be critical, resolving a total of 41 security vulnerabilities in its software this month. Every Windows version Affected: One of the critical vulnerabilities affects all supported version of Windows , including Microsoft's newest Windows 10 operating system, as well as Windows Server 2016 Tech Preview 4. The memory-corruption flaw ( MS16-013 ) could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code as the logged-in user by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted Journal file. This vulnerability would let the attacker run malicious programs on victim's machine, even delete data and create new accounts with full user rights. Administrator accounts are at the greatest risk than users with a fewer user rights account on the system. However, the good news is the vulnerability has not been spotted in the wild. List of All Critical Vulnerabilities Other Critical Secur

The US-based software maker Oracle delivered an unusual out-of-box emergency patch for Java in an effort to fix a during-installation flaw on the Windows platforms. The successful exploitation of the critical vulnerability, assigned CVE-2016-0603 , could allow an attacker to trick an unsuspecting user into visiting a malicious website and downloading files to the victim's system before installing Java 6, 7 or 8. Although the vulnerability is considered relatively complex to exploit, a successful attack results in " complete compromise " of the target's machine. What You Need to Know About the Java Exploit The successful attack requires an attacker to trick a suitably unskilled user for opening a Java release even though the user is nowhere near the Java Website. Since the existence of the loophole is only during the installation process, users are not required to upgrade their existing Java installations in order to address the vulnerability.

Netgear, one of the most popular router manufacturers, has been vulnerable to two different flaws that could allow hackers to compromise your corporate network and connected devices. Reported critical vulnerabilities reside in the Netgear's ProSafe NMS300 Model ( Network Management System ) – a centralized and comprehensive management application for network administrators that enables them to discover, monitor, configure, and report on SNMP-based enterprise-class network devices. SNMP ( Simple Network Management Protocol ) is a network management protocol which facilitates Netgear's ProSafe NMS300 application to gather data from various network devices such as servers, printers, hubs, switches, and routers. Remotely collected data includes CPU load, routing tables, and network traffic statistics. Serious Flaws in Network Management System A joint security dug conducted by Pedro Ribeiro ( Security Researcher of UK Based firm Agile Information ) along

Google has released the February Security Update for Android that patches multiple security vulnerabilities discovered in the latest version of Android operating system. In total, there were five "critical" security vulnerabilities fixed in the release along with four "high" severity and one merely "moderate" issues. Remote Code Execution Flaw in WiFi A set of two critical vulnerabilities has been found in the Broadcom WiFi driver that could be exploited by attackers to perform Remote Code Execution (RCE) on affected Android devices when connected to the same network as the attacker. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-0801 and CVE-2016-0802) can be exploited by sending specially crafted wireless control message packets that can corrupt kernel memory, potentially leading to remote code execution at the kernel level. "These vulnerabilities can be triggered when the attacker and the victim are associated with the same network," read

A dangerous backdoor has been discovered in the MediaTek processor that could be exploited to hack Android devices remotely. MediaTek is a Taiwan-based hardware company that manufacture hardware chips and processor used in the smartphones and tablets. The backdoor was discovered by security researcher Justin Case , who already informed MediaTek about the security issue via Twitter, as the chipset manufacturer had no proper vulnerability reporting mechanism in place. The vulnerability is apparently due to a debug tool that was opened up for carriers to test the device on their networks, but unfortunately, it was left open in the shipped devices, thus leaving the serious backdoor open to hackers. If exploited, the debug feature could allow hackers to compromise personal data of an Android device, including user's private contacts, messages, photos, videos and other private data. MediaTek acknowledged the issue, saying "We are aware of this issue, and it has bee

Attention Tor Onion Hosters! A year old loophole in Apache Web Server, uncovered by an unknown Computer Science Student, could potentially unmask the real identity of .onion-domains and servers hidden behind the Tor-network. Although the loophole was reported on Reddit and to the Tor Project months back, it recently came to the limelight soon after a tweet by Alec Muffet , a well-known security enthusiast and current software engineer at Facebook. What is Tor Hidden (.onion) Service? Dark Web websites (generally known as 'onion services') with a special domain name that ends with .onion, are called Tor Hidden Service and reachable only via the Tor network. Tor Hidden Service is a widely popular anonymity network used by Whistleblowers, Underground Markets, Defense Networks and more in order to maintain secrecy over the Internet. An Onion Website can be hosted on the top of any web servers. But, if you are choosing Apache, then you need to rethink.