encryption | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Unlike desktops, your mobile devices carry all sorts of information from your personal emails to your sensitive financial details. And due to this, the hackers have shifted their interest to the mobile platform. Every week new exploits are discovered for iOS and Android platform, most of the times separately, but the recently discovered exploit targets both Android as well as iOS devices. A team of security researchers from Tel Aviv University , Technion and The University of Adelaide has devised an attack to steal cryptographic keys used to protect Bitcoin wallets, Apple Pay accounts, and other highly sensitive services from Android and iOS devices. The team is the same group of researchers who had experimented a number of different hacks to extract data from computers. Last month, the team demonstrated how to steal sensitive data from a target air-gapped computer located in another room. Past years, the team also demonstrated how to extract secret decryption key

And the Winners of this year's Turing Award are: Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman . The former chief security officer at Sun Microsystems Whitfield Diffie and the professor at Stanford University Martin E. Hellman won the 2015 ACM Turing Award, which is frequently described as the "Nobel Prize of Computing" . Turing Award named after  Alan M. Turing , the British mathematician and computer scientist who was a key contributor to the Allied cryptanalysis of the German Enigma cipher and the German "Tunny" encoding machine in World War II. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced the Turing Award the same day when FBI Director  James Comey  appeared before a congressional committee to discuss how  encryption has become Threat  to law enforcement. The ACM  announced the award on Tuesday, which includes the top prize of $1 Million that has been awarded to two men who invented the "public-key cryptography" – a technique that

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

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

There are several encrypted messaging apps for mobile and desktop platforms that shipped with "The Most Secure" tagline but ends up in de-anonymizing the real identity of its users in some or the other way. In fact, very few encrypted messaging apps available today deal with the core problem of Metadata .  The majority of apps offer end-to-end encryption that kept the content of your messages away from prying eyes, but your metadata will still be accessible to them, which is enough to know who you really are, and who you're talking to. But, one messenger app stands out of the crowd by providing superb anonymity to its users, and it is dubbed as " Ricochet ." Ricochet is a peer-to-peer instant messaging system available for Windows, Mac, and Linux and you can trust it as the app has already cleared its first professional security audit carried out by cyber security company NCC Group . What's so Promising about Ricochet? Unlike

Ransomware has seriously turned on to a noxious game of Hackers to get paid effortlessly. Once again the heat was felt by the Los Angeles-based Presbyterian Medical Center when a group of hackers had sealed all its sensitive files and demanded $17,000 USD to regain the access to those compromised data. The devastation of the compromised files can be pitched as: Compromised emails Lockout Electronic Medical Record System [EMR] Encrypted patient data Unable to carry CT Scans of the admitted patients Ferried risky patients to nearby hospitals ...and much more unexplained outcomes. The hospital had confirmed that the Ransomware malware had hit its core heart a week before, potentially affecting the situation to grow much worse. Hospital End up Paying $17,000 As the situation was grown out of wild, the hospital paid 40 Bitcoins (Roughly US $17,000) to the Ransomware Criminals to resume their medical operations after gaining the decryption keys. "T

In the escalating battle between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Apple over iPhone encryption, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai just sided with Apple's refusal to unlock iPhone . Yesterday, Apple CEO Tim Cook refused to comply with a federal court order to help the FBI unlock an iPhone owned by one of the terrorists in the mass shootings in San Bernardino , California, in December. Here's What the FBI is Demanding: The federal officials have asked Apple to make a less secure version of its iOS that can be used by the officials to brute force the 4-6 digits passcode on the dead shooter's iPhone without getting the device's data self-destructed. Cook called the court order a "chilling" demand that "would undermine the very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect." He argued that to help the FBI unlock the iPhone would basically

Over the last few years, we have seen several types of Ransomware malware that demand a whopping amount of money from users for the retrieval of their locked, compromised sensitive files. We have also witnessed the birth of decryption solution for some of the Ransomware like Cryptolocker (partial), Coinvault , Rescue Kit . One more solution has recently been released for decryption of newly emerging ransomware, dubbed as Hydracrypt and Umbrecrypt that are propagated through Angler Exploit Kit. Both of the malware belong to CrypBoss ransomware family. The source code of CrypBoss Ransomware was leaked last year on Pastebin, which was later analyzed by Fabian Wosar, a security researcher at Emsisoft. With the help of CrypBoss Source code, Wosar was successfully able to crack the encryption algorithm of the ransomware and quickly made the decryption tool for CrypBoss and its variants ( Hydracrypt and Umbrecrypt ). It is found that both Hydracrypt and Umbrec

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has admitted that it used controversial cell phone spying tool " Stingrays " more than 1,000 times since 2008 without warrants. In the documents obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) , the NYPD acknowledged that the department has used Stingrays to intercept personal communications and track the locations of nearby mobile phone users. What are Stingrays? In my previous article , I have explained the scope of Stingrays along with its working, how it cracks encryption and how the police agencies are using these cell phone spying devices equipped in its military surveillance technology DRTBox  in order to: Track people Intercept thousands of cellphone calls Quietly eavesdrop on conversations Eavesdrop on emails and text messages Stingrays are small cell phone surveillance devices that work by imitating cellphone towers, forcing all nearby phones to connect to them and revealing the owners' locat

The last year's ISIS-linked terror attacks in Paris and California has sparked debate on Encryption, and the intelligent agencies started reviving their efforts to weaken encryption on various encrypted products and services. But, there is some Good News! California Congressman and Texas Republican are now challenging state-level proposals to restrict US citizens' ability to encrypt their smartphones. On Wednesday, California Congressman Ted Lieu , one of four members of Congress, and Texas Republican Blake Farenthold , a member of the House Oversight and House Judiciary committees, introduced a new bill in Congress that… …attempts to ban states efforts to implement their own anti-encryption policies at a state level while a national debate on Encryption is ongoing. The bill, called " Ensuring National Constitutional Rights for Your Private Telecommunications Act of 2016 " – in short, " ENCRYPT Act of 2016 " – would stop states fr

GCHQ has finally released the solution to their head spinning Xmas Puzzle , after all, the participants failed to reach the final answer. GCHQ had released a crypto puzzle, dubbed Xmas Puzzle , on 9th December in the form of a Christmas Card that went viral online soon after its release. Nearly 600,000 people shot a "Go" for the challenge since early December, but only 30,000 had made it reach the final stage. The puzzle got popped up with a grid-shading Nonogram that resulted in the formation of a QR Code containing a hint to unlock the next level challenges. Xmas Puzzle prolonged to various topics like Web Link Maze, Word & Numeric Puzzle, Graph Theory and other Cipher Dilemmas. Some of the questions also intrigued on entertaining topics like Lord of the Rings, Ducks, Chess, French, and Semaphores. Who Created Crypto 'Xmas Puzzle'? This brainstorming puzzle was created by a small team of GCHQ Cryptographers under the GCHQ director Robert Han

Recently the Facebook-owned messaging app dropped its $1 annual subscription fee to make WhatsApp Free for Lifetime . Now, WhatsApp has plans to introduce a new feature that would allow its users to integrate their Facebook accounts with the most widely used messaging app. So far, the social media giant has been focusing on its own messaging platform, Messenger and both WhatsApp and Facebook have been working separately in terms of adding new features. WhatsApp to Share User Data With Facebook Android developer Javier Santos spotted a new feature in the latest beta build of WhatsApp, which indicates that soon you'll start seeing some features interconnected between WhatsApp and Facebook. The feature (optional, for now), dubbed " Share my account info ," when selected will share your personal WhatsApp account information with Facebook in order "to improve your Facebook experience," according to the description. Although it's uncle

The Anaheim Police Department of California — Home of Disneyland — admitted that they used special Cell Phone surveillance technology, known as DirtBox , mounted on aircraft to track millions of mobile users activities. More than 400 pages of new documents [ PDF ] published Wednesday revealed that Local Police and federal authorities are using, DRTBox , an advanced version of Dirtbox developed by Digital Receiver Technology ( Boeing's  Maryland-based  subsidiary ). DRTBox — Spies in the Sky DRTBox is a military surveillance technology that has capabilities of both Stingray as well as Dirtbox, allowing the police to track, intercept thousands of cellphone calls and quietly eavesdrop on conversations, emails, and text messages. According to the report, DRTBox model is also capable of simultaneously breaking the encryption hundreds of cellphone communications at once, helping Anaheim Police Department track criminals while recording innocent citizens' inform

The OpenSSL Foundation has released the promised patch for a high severity vulnerability in its cryptographic code library that let attackers obtain the key to decrypt HTTPS-based communications and other Transport layer security (TLS) channels. OpenSSL is an open-source library that is the most widely used in applications for secure data transfers. Most websites use it to enable Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption. However, after serious security vulnerabilities were discovered in OpenSSL over the last few years, the crypto library has been under much investigation by security researchers. The latest bugs affect OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2, which has been patched in new releases of OpenSSL, versions 1.0.1r and 1.0.2f . The team has patched two separate vulnerabilities in OpenSSL. The " high severity " bug, identified as CVE-2016-0701 , addresses issues in the implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchang

If you are backing up your data using iCloud Backup , then you need you watch your steps NOW! In government fight against encryption, Apple has positioned itself as a staunch defender of its user privacy by refusing the federal officials to provide encryption backdoors into its products. When it comes to Apple's iMessage service, the company claims that it can't read messages sent between its devices because they use end-to-end encryption, which apparently means that only you and the intended recipient can read it. Moreover, in case, if the federal authorities ask Apple to hand over messages related to any of its users, there is nothing with Apple to offer them. "If the government laid a subpoena to get iMessages, we can't provide it," Apple CEO Tim Cook told Charlie Rose back in 2014. "It is encrypted, and we do not have a key." But Wait! There are still hundreds of Millions of Apple users whose data are stored on Apple'