account hacking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Meta Platforms is said to have fired or disciplined over two dozen employees and contractors over the past year for allegedly compromising and taking over user accounts, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Some of these cases involved bribery, the publication said, citing sources and documents. Included among those fired were contractors who worked as security guards at the social media firm's facilities and were given access to an internal tool that allowed employees to help "users they know" gain access to accounts after forgetting their passwords, or had their accounts locked out. The system, called "Oops" and short for Online Operations, is off limits to a vast majority of the platform's users, leading to the rise of a "cottage industry of intermediaries" who charge users thousands of dollars and reach out to insiders who are willing to reset the accounts. "You really have to have someone on the inside who will actually do it

Following vulnerability disclosure in the Mitron app , another viral TikTok clone in India has now been found vulnerable to a critical but easy-to-exploit authentication bypass vulnerability, allowing anyone to hijack any user account and tamper with their information, content, and even upload unauthorized videos. The Indian video sharing app, called Chingari, is available for Android and iOS smartphones through official app stores, designed to let users record short-form videos, catch up on the news, and connect with other users via a direct message feature. Originally launched in November 2018, Chingari has witnessed a huge surge in popularity over the past few days in the wake of India's ban on Chinese-owned apps late last month, crossing 10 million downloads on the Google Play Store in under a month. The Indian government recently banned 59 apps and services , including ByteDance's TikTok, Alibaba Group's UC Browser and UC News, and Tencent's WeChat over priv

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

TikTok , the 3rd most downloaded app in 2019, is under intense scrutiny over users' privacy, censoring politically controversial content and on national-security grounds—but it's not over yet, as the security of billions of TikTok users would be now under question. The famous Chinese viral video-sharing app contained potentially dangerous vulnerabilities that could have allowed remote attackers to hijack any user account just by knowing the mobile number of targeted victims. In a report privately shared with The Hacker News, cybersecurity researchers at Check Point revealed that chaining multiple vulnerabilities allowed them to remotely execute malicious code and perform unwanted actions on behalf of the victims without their consent. The reported vulnerabilities include low severity issues like SMS link spoofing, open redirection, and cross-site scripting (XSS) that when combined could allow a remote attacker to perform high impact attacks, including: delete any videos

Check Point researchers have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in Fortnite, a massively popular online battle game, one of which could have allowed remote attackers to completely takeover player accounts just by tricking users into clicking an unsuspectable link. The reported Fortnite flaws include a SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS) bug, a web application firewall bypass issue, and most importantly an OAuth account takeover vulnerability. Full account takeover could be a nightmare, especially for players of such a hugely popular online game that has been played by 80 million users worldwide, and when a good Fortnite account has been sold on eBay for over $50,000. The Fortnite game lets its players log in to their accounts using third-party Single Sign-On (SSO) providers, such as Facebook, Google, Xbox, and PlayStation accounts. According to the researchers, the combination of cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw and a malicious redirect issue on the Epic Games&

Twitter account of another high-profile CEO has been hacked! This time, it's Niantic CEO John Hanke , the developer behind the world's most popular game Pokémon GO . And it seems like Hanke is so busy with its newly launched game Pokémon GO that he hasn't noticed or took any measures against it even after over 12 hours of the hack, as the tweets made by hackers are still displaying on his Twitter timeline (at the time of writing). OurMine claimed responsibility for the hack, which was spotted after the hacking group managed to post a series of messages on Hanke's Twitter timeline. OurMine is the same group of Saudi Arabian hackers that previously compromised social media accounts of other CEOs including: Google's CEO Sundar Pichai Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Twitter's ex-CEO Dick Costolo Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe It appears that OurMine managed to post on Hanke's Twi

Do you know that you can access your WeChat, Line and WhatsApp chats on your desktop as well using an entirely different, but fastest authentication system? It's SQRL , or Secure Quick Response Login, a QR-code-based authentication system that allows users to quickly sign into a website without having to memorize or type in any username or password. QR codes are two-dimensional barcodes that contain a significant amount of information such as a shared key or session cookie. A website that implements QR-code-based authentication system would display a QR code on a computer screen and anyone who wants to log-in would scan that code with a mobile phone app. Once scanned, the site would log the user in without typing in any username or password. Since passwords can be stolen using a keylogger, a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, or even brute force attack, QR codes have been considered secure as it randomly generates a secret code, which is never revealed to anybody else.

Nintendo's new location-based augmented reality game Pokémon GO has been making rounds since its launch just a few days ago. People are so excited to catch 'em all that brought Nintendo's market-value gains to $7.5 Billion (£5.8 Billion) in just two days – the highest surge since 1983. Due to the huge interest surrounding Pokémon GO, even hackers are using the game's popularity to distribute malicious versions of Pokémon GO that could install DroidJack malware on Android phones, allowing them to compromise user's devices completely. However, the latest threat is related to the privacy concerns raised about the iOS version of the official Pokémon GO app. Pokémon GO – A Huge Security Risk Adam Reeve labeled the game "malware," saying that Pokémon GO is a "huge security risk" as the game, for some reason, grants itself "full account access" to your Google account when you sign into the app via Google on iPhone or iPad. Ye

If you are a torrent lover and have registered on  BitTorrent community forum website, then you may have had your personal details compromised, along with your hashed passwords. The BitTorrent team has announced that its community forums have been hacked, which exposed private information of hundreds of thousands of its users. As of now, BitTorrent is the most visited torrent client around the world with more than 150 Million monthly active users. Besides this, BitTorrent also has a dedicated community forum that has over hundreds of thousands of registered members with tens of thousands of daily visitors. A recent security alert by the team says the forum database has been compromised by hackers who were able to get their hands on its users' passwords, warning its users to update their passwords as soon as possible. The vulnerability is believed to be originated at one of its vendors, who alerted the BitTorrent team about the issue earlier this week. "The vulnera

LinkedIn's 2012 data breach was much worse than anybody first thought. In 2012, LinkedIn suffered a massive data breach in which more than 6 Million users accounts login details, including encrypted passwords, were posted online by a Russian hacker. Now, it turns out that it was not just 6 Million users who got their login details stolen. Latest reports emerged that the 2012's LinkedIn data breach may have resulted in the online sale of sensitive account information, including emails and passwords, of about 117 Million LinkedIn users. Almost after 4 years, a hacker under the nickname "Peace" is offering for sale what he/she claims to be the database of 167 Million emails and hashed passwords, which included 117 Million already cracked passwords, belonging to LinkedIn users. The hacker, who is selling the stolen data on the illegal Dark Web marketplace " The Real Deal " for 5 Bitcoins (roughly $2,200), has spoken to Motherboard, confirming th

There is no doubt that data breaches are on the rise. Hardly a day goes without headlines about any significant data breach. According to the latest ' Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2016 ' report published by UK government, two-thirds of the biggest firm in the UK have experienced at least a cyber attacks or data breaches within the past 12 months. Here's today, I am writing about top 4 data breaches reported in last 24 hours, threatened your data privacy and online security. 1. Kiddicare Hacked! 794,000 Accounts Leaked Kiddicare has admitted that the company has suffered a data breach, which led to the theft of sensitive data belonging to 794,000 users, including phone numbers and residential addresses. Kiddicare, company that sells child toys and accessories across the United Kingdom, became aware of the data breach after its customers started receiving suspicious text messages – most likely part of a phishing campaign – that attempted to pilfer them to click on a li

1. Spotify Hacked! Change your Password ASAP If you are one of the millions of people around the world who love to listen to music on Spotify, you may need to change your password immediately. Has Spotify been hacked? The company says no, but some Spotify users have claimed their profiles were hijacked, and details were changed without knowledge, including passwords and email addresses, TC  reported . Spotify apparently suffered a security breach that leaked hundreds of Spotify accounts details, including emails, usernames, passwords and account type, which was published last week to the popular anonymous file sharing website Pastebin. Spotify is investigating the Pastebin leaks of Spotify user information. 2. Over 1 Million Android Apps Are Coming to Chrome OS Google is ready to integrate millions of Android applications onto its Chrome OS platform by bringing the entire Play Store to it. Redditor 'TheWiseYoda' first spotted a new option to "Enable And

Yes, you heard it correct! First the Password Cracking Team 'CynoSure Prime'  cracked more than 11 Million Ashley Madison's passwords in just 10 days ( quite an achievement, though ), now a member of the team shares the same list of passwords with few calculations. The calculations are... ... What passwords are mostly used and by how many users? Terrible? Out of 11 million passwords, only 4.6 million passwords were unique, and the rest were such weak and horrible ones that one could even think. ArsTechnica to whom CynoSure Prime updated the news published the calculations and say that this is expected to change as they still left with 3.7 million passwords to decrypt. While going through the list of password, top 5 used were: 123456 by 120511 users 12345 by 48452 users password by 39448 users DEFAULT by 34275 users 123456789 by 26620 users for more s ee the list of passwords in above image. AND, Even a 5th grader can literally guess th

Security firm Trend Micro has identified a 20-year-old Brazilian college student responsible for developing and distributing over 100 Banking Trojans selling each for around US$300 . Known online as ' Lordfenix ', ' Hacker's Son ' and ' Filho de Hacker ', the computer science student first began his career by posting in forums, asking for programming help for a Trojan he was developing, researchers said. Developed More than 100 Trojans However, Lordfenix has "grown quite confident in his skills" and began developing and distributing malware tailored to pilfer financial information since at least 2013. "Based on our research, Lordfenix has created more than 100 different banking Trojans , not including his other malicious tools, since April 2013," Trend Micro says . "With each Trojan costing around R$1,000 (roughly $320), this young cybercriminal channeled his talent in programming into a lucrative, illegal venture." Trend Mi

We all have been receiving spam phone calls and messages on almost daily basis from scammers who want to pilfer your money and personal information, but a new type of social engineering hack that makes use of just your mobile number to trick you is a little scarier. Security firm Symantec is warning people about a new password recovery scam that tricks users into handing over their webmail account access to the attackers. In order to get into your email account, an attacker does not need any coding or technical skills. All an attacker needs your email address in question and your cell phone number. Since the process to reset the password is almost similar to all mail services, this new password recovery scam affects all popular webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook among others. Symantec has provided a video explanation of how this new hack attack works. The trick is as simple as it sounds: if you want to reset someone's email account password, all y

The very popular Pop star Taylor Swift became the latest celebrity to have their social media accounts hacked on Tuesday. The 25-year-old " Shake It Off " singer, who has the fourth-most popular Twitter account with 51.4 million followers, appeared to be asking her millions of followers to follow @veriuser and @lizzard. Swift confirmed that her Twitter and Instagram accounts were hacked on Tuesday afternoon, and also that the rogue posts were quickly removed from the social media websites. " My Twitter got hacked but don't worry, Twitter is deleting the hacker tweets and locking my account until they can figure out how this happened and get me new passwords ," said a statement posted on Swift's personal Tumblr page. The accounts were taken for just 15 minutes, but when it belongs to Taylor Swift, that makes it a big hit. At the time, a Tweet went out from @TaylorSwift13 to her millions of fans, saying, " go follow my boy, @lizzard :) " Yes Li

A sad reality for gamers all around the world who enjoy playing the very popular game Minecraft on their PCs. If you are one of them, you'll want to pay attention here. A plain text file containing over 1,800 Minecraft account usernames and passwords has just been leaked online, German media reports . The details available in the leak has been posted to Pastebin, which would allow anyone to log into a legitimate user's account in order to play online and download the full version of the game to their own computers. However, the more serious implication of the leaked credentials would be for those affected users who had used the same username and password combination for other online services, like shopping site, banking site, email service or for any social networking site. Minecraft is an incredibly popular online game bought by Microsoft just few months back for $2.5 billion. The game has more than 100 million registered accounts for its PC version alone, and

LA-based domain name registrar and hosting company Namecheap warned its customers on Monday that cybercriminals have begun accessing their accounts by using the list of credentials gathered from third-party websites. The Hosting company confirmed the security breach and informed that the hackers have compromised some of its customers' accounts, probably using the " biggest-ever " password theft via Russian Hackers that disclosed list of 1.2 billion usernames and passwords compiled by Russian CyberVor Gang . RUSSIAN GROUP BEHIND THE ATTACK - CYBERVOR The CyberVor Gang allegedly stolen a vast cache of compromised login credentials for " 1.2 billion " accounts, belonging to over half a billion e-mail addresses, warned Hold Security , a Milwaukee-based security company that tracks stolen data on underground cybercriminal forums. The gang appears to have broken into at least 420,000 websites vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, among other techniques,

Fiverr.com, a global online marketplace which provides a platform for people to sell their services for five dollars per job, is vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that puts its millions of users at risk. Fiverr recently raised $30 million in a third round of institutional funding to continue supporting the new version of its marketplace, but the company ignored the advance warning of the critical bug reported responsibly by a vulnerability hunter and fails to patch up their website before his public release. There are endless numbers of people providing services on Fiverr website, such as graphic design, language translation, illustration, blogging and a lot more that start from just $5 but can go much higher, depending on complexity, seller rating, and type of work. According to a security researcher Mohamed Abdelbaset, an Information Security Evangelist from Egypt, told The Hacker News that Fiverr website is vulnerable to CSRF (Cross-site reque

Scammers have again targeted more than one billion active users of the popular social networking giant Facebook, to infect as many victims as possible. This time, an old Facebook scam is back in action once again! Malicious Facebook "Color Changer" app has resurfaced again on the popular social networking site Facebook, this time compromising more than 10,000 people worldwide. The malicious app promises users to change the characteristic blue colour of Facebook's header and interface to one of nine other colours including pink, purple, green, yellow, orange and black, in order to infect users' phones and computers with malicious software. Researchers at China-based Internet company Cheetah Mobile have detected the " Facebook colour changer " that tricks Facebook users into downloading the app via a malicious phishing site. The phishing website targets users in two ways: First of all, it steals the users' Facebook Access Tokens by asking them

Today, the popular Music streaming service Spotify said the company has suffered a Data breach and warned users of its Android app to upgrade it in the wake of a potential data breach in their servers. Spotify is a commercial music streaming service launched in October 2008 by Swedish start-up Spotify AB and is freely available for Android and iOS devices as well as for desktop computers with more than 40 million active users, out of which about 10 million users are its paid subscribers. It offers offline listening and ad-free playback are also available for Premium subscribers of the service. The company announced that a hacker had allegedly broken into its systems and gained unauthorized access to the internal company data. So far only one of its users' accounts has been accessed in the data breach, but the company believes that there is no harm to the financial information, payment details or password of the affected user. " Our evidence shows that only one Spot