encryption | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

When I say Ransomware, the first nasty piece of malware strikes in the mind is CryptoLocker . A nasty strain of ransomware malware that threatened most of the people around the world by effectively destroying important files of the victims forever. CRYPTOLOCKER - A DEVASTATING THREAT CryptoLocker is a simple rather a devastating piece of Ransomware that encrypts the files on a victim's computer and issues an ultimatum - Pay up or lose your data. CryptoLocker is particularly designed to extort money from computer users by holding computer files hostage until the computer user pays a ransom fee to get them back. Cryptolocker hijacker sniffs out your personal files and wraps them with strong AES-256-bit encryption before it demands money. HOW TO DECRYPT CRYPTOLOCKER? FREE TOOL RELEASED Thanks to security experts, who created an online service where victims whose systems have been encrypted by the CryptoLocker ransomware can get the decryption keys for free. This o

Data security is a big task for businesses as well as a challenge for IT leaders, whether it be securing networks or devices. Past few months, we often came across various data breaches, the largest among all was Target data breach , which cost a business nearly $50,000 in lost productivity, replacement and data recovery.  Once a bad actor has stolen your hardware or compromised your network, the ability to lock down sensitive data is predominant. To help mitigate these threats in order to protect businesses against data breaches without even damaging performance, Intel has announced its latest enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs) that are self-encrypting, packaged with some powerful security and management features. The New Intel SSD 2500 Pro Series of solid state drives offers significant performance with hardware-based 256-bit self-encryption to reduce the impact on the performance. Intel SSD 2500 Pro Series will be offered in both 2.5-inch SATA and M.2

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

It's the age of surveillance what made the Use of Encryption so widely that it has become a need of law enforcement agencies, cyber criminals as well as every individual. But, encryption is not so easy. To solve this problem, a 23-year old Cryptocat developer Nadim Kobeissi is ready to release a simple solution to deliver strong encryption at the HOPE hacker conference in New York later this month, which may soon come as an extension for Google Chrome web browser, Wired reported . The encryption program is dubbed as miniLock , which is a free and open-source browser plugin designed to let anyone encrypt and decrypt files in seconds using a drag-and-drop interface with practically unbreakable cryptographic protection. " The tagline is that this is file encryption that does more with less, " says Kobeissi, activist and security consultant. " It's super simple, approachable, and it's almost impossible to be confused using it. " Drag-and-drop interface here means, miniL

Unless you are a human supercomputer, remembering password is not so easy, and that too if you have a different password for each site. But luckily to make the whole process very easy, there is a growing market out there for password managers and lockers with extra layers of security. But, if you are using the mobile version of most popular password manager from Password management company RoboForm to manage your passwords then you might be at a risk, claimed a UK based Security researcher. I am personally using RoboForm from last few months, which is a great password manager application developed by Siber Systems Inc. for various platforms that stores your sensitive data all in one place, protected at RoboForm account and encrypted by a secret master password. RoboForm user be able to then quickly access those passwords and notes anytime, anywhere. But a IT security consultant and tech enthusiast Paul Moore discovered one critical vulnerability in its app and one Pri

If a whistleblower discloses an activity to the public, then there should be a trust-based mechanism that ensure the protection of truth-tellers on an international level by hiding their identities. In an effort to provide this kind of service and security, Security experts grouped together to create a stealthy Internet Messenger (IM) and file transfer client, which is especially designed for whistleblowers. Dubbed as " ‪invisible.im " is an anonymous Instant Messenger (IM) that leaves no trace‬. The team behind the project called itself " The Infosec A-Team " which includes Metasploit Founder HD Moore , noted infosec and opsec experts The Grugq , an Australian security analyst Patrick Gray , and Richo . Invisible.im aims to serve the rigid anonymity needs of whistleblowers. The project website states: invisible.im was established to develop an instant messenger and file transfer tool that leaves virtually no evidence of conversations or transfers having occurred. Th

After the wide chain of scandals over US global snooping that seriously damaged the trust on the top U.S. Tech companies, Google and Yahoo! came forward and took initiative to provide more secure, encrypted and NSA-proofed service in an effort to gain their reputation again among its users. Now, Microsoft has also announced several improvements to the encryption used in its online cloud services in order to protect them from cyber criminals, bad actors and prying eyes. The company effort detailed in a blog entry by Matt Thomlinson, Microsoft's Vice President of Trustworthy Computing Security. MICROSOFT'S COMMITMENT Last December, Microsoft promised to protect its users data from government snooping by expanding encryption across its services, reinforcing legal protections for its customers' data and enhancing the transparency of its software code, making it easier for the customers to reassure themselves that its products contain no backdoors. Yesterday's announc

A critical code-execution vulnerability almost affecting everyone those are not running the most updated version of Google Android , i.e. Android version 4.4 also known as KitKat. After nine months of vulnerability disclosure to the Android security team, researchers of the Application Security team at IBM have finally revealed all the possible details of a serious code-execution vulnerability that still affects the Android devices running versions 4.3 and earlier, which could allow attackers to exfiltrate sensitive information from the vulnerable devices. " Considering Android's fragmented nature and the fact that this was a code-execution vulnerability, we decided to wait a bit with the public disclosure ," said Roee Hay, a security research group leader at IBM. The researchers found the stack buffer overflow vulnerability that resides in the Android's KeyStore storage service, which according to the Android developers' website is the service code running in Androi

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

The open source encryption protocol, OpenSSL, which is used by several social networks, search engines, banks and other websites to enable secure connections while transmitting data, came to everybody's attention following the Heartbleed vulnerability , a critical bug in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension that allows attackers to read portions of the affected server's memory, potentially revealing users data, that the server did not intend to reveal. Now, the biggest Internet giant Google is launching a new fork of OpenSSL, which they dubbed as BoringSSL, developed by its own independent work with the code. " We have used a number of patches on top of OpenSSL for many years, " Adam Langley, a cryptography engineer and Google employee, wrote in a blog post introducing BoringSSL. " Some of them have been accepted into the main OpenSSL repository, but many of them don't mesh with OpenSSL's guarantee of API and ABI

Ransomware is an emerging threat in the evolution of cybercriminals techniques to part you from your money. Typically, the malicious software either lock victim's computer system or encrypt the documents and files on it, in order to extort money from the victims. Though earlier we saw the samples of Ransomware tended to be simple with dogged determinations to extort money from victims. But with the exponential rise in the samples of Ransomware malwares, the recent ones are more subtle in design, including Cryptolocker , Icepole , PrisonLocker , CryptoDefense and its variants. Now, the ransomware dubbed as Crytowall , a latest variant of the infamous ransomware Cryptolocker is targeting users by forcing them to download the malicious software by through advertising on the high profile domains belonging to Disney, Facebook, The Guardian newspaper and others. Cryptolocker is designed by the same malware developer who created the sophisticated CryptoDefense ( Trojan.Crypt

We have seen cybercriminals targeting PCs with Ransomware malware that encrypts your files or lock down your computer and ask for a ransom amount to be paid in a specified duration of time to unlock it. To deliver the Ransomware malwares to the mobile devices, cyber criminals have already started creating malicious software programs for android devices. Last month, we reported about a new Police Ransomware malware that locks up the devices until the victims pay a ransom to get the keys to unlock the phone. But, the malware just lock the mobile screen and a loophole in the its implementation allowed users to recover their device and data stored on SDcard. Now, in an effort to overcome this, threat actors have adopted encryption in the development of mobile Ransomware malwares. Recently, the security firm ESET has discovered a new Android ransomware, dubbed as Android/Simplocker.A , that has ability to encrypt the files on the device SD card and then demand a ransom from the victim

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

Mozilla is planning to provide a new feature that will allow free audio and video calls between its Firefox web browser , thereby ending the need of any third-party client service or plugin. Mozilla will soon release a new experimental version of Firefox Nightly , which will include an open source and Peer-to-peer communication protocol called WebRTC that enables Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities between two web browsers via simple Javascript APIs. NO PLUGINS REQUIRED WebRTC is not a web browser plugin, and its components run in the browser sandbox. Its components do not require separate installation or any separate process to run and it will receive its updates along with the web browser updates. " No plugins, no downloads. If you have a browser, a camera and a mic, you'll be able to make audio and video calls to anyone else with an enabled browser ." reads the blog post and when the camera or microphone are running, this is clearly shown by the Fire

After Whatsapp, The Chinese WeChat is the second most popular messaging application and currently being targeted by cybercriminals to spread a new Banking Trojan in order to steal the financial information from its users. WeChat is a famous mobile instant messaging app developed by Chinese company Tencent, with more than 355 million users across the world. The app offers people to chit-chat with their friends and relatives, and also allows users to make payments for goods and services on WeChat. The Payment feature of the app requires users' bank account details to their messenger account and this is what tempting cybercriminals to develop new and more sophisticated banking Trojans and malwares. The security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have uncovered such banking Trojan, dubbed as Banker.AndroidOS.Basti.a, which looks exactly like the legitimate WeChat application for Android devices. While installation, it also requires the same permissions such as to access the Int

TrueCrypt , the popular and reputed open source file and disk encryption Software for Windows, OSX and Linux, has abruptly closed down Wednesday recommending its users to use Microsoft's Bitlocker. TrueCrypt is a free, open-source and cross-platform encryption program, thereby one of the world's most-used encryption tool, trusted by tens of millions of users and recommended by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden . TRUECRYPT IS NOT SECURE On Wednesday afternoon, the users of TrueCrypt encryption tool redirected to the project's official SourceForge-hosted page that displays a mysterious security warning message that the popular encryption tool has been discontinued and that users should switch to an alternative. The official website for the TrueCrypt software warns the user that the open source encryption software is no longer secure and informs that the development of the software has been terminated. At the top of TrueCrypt page on SourceForge display