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If you came across a Kindle e-book download link from any suspicious sources or somewhere other than Amazon itself, check twice before you proceed download. As downloading an eBook could put your personal information at risk. A security researcher has uncovered a security hole in Amazon's Kindle Library that could lead to cross-site scripting ( XSS ) attacks and account compromises when you upload a malicious ebook. AMAZON CREDENTIALS – BOON FOR HACKERS The flaw affects the " Manage Your Content and Devices " and " Manage your Kindle " services in Amazon's web-based Kindle Library, which could allow a hacker to inject and hide malicious lines of code into into e-book metadata, such as the title text of an eBook, in order to compromise the security of your Amazon account. Gaining access to your Amazon account credentials is one of the biggest boons for hackers, as they can set-up new credit cards in your account or max out the current ones on file with some big

At the beginning of this month, just like other social networks, Twitter also started paying individuals for any flaws they uncover on its service with a fee of $140 or more offered per flaw under its new Bug Bounty program, and here comes the claimant. An Egyptian Security Researcher, Ahmed Mohamed Hassan Aboul-Ela , who have been rewarded by many reputed and popular technology giants including Google, Microsoft and Apple, have discovered a critical vulnerability in Twitter's advertising service that allowed him deleting credit cards from any Twitter account. FIRST VULNERABILITY Initially, Aboul-Ela found two different vulnerabilities in ads.twitter.com, but both the flaws was having the " same effect and impact. " First flaw exists in the Delete function of credit cards in payments method page, https://ads.twitter.com/accounts/[account id]/payment_methods By choosing the Delete this card function, an ajax POST request is sent to the server. The post parameters se

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

The Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack is becoming more sophisticated and complex, and, according to security experts , the next DDoS vector to be concerned about is SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) amplification attacks. Yesterday afternoon, the SANS Internet Storm Center reported SNMP scans spoofed from Google's public recursive DNS server searching for vulnerable routers and other devices that support the protocol with DDoS traffic and are opened to the public Internet. " We are receiving some reports about SNMP scans that claim to originate from 8.8.8.8 (Google's public recursive DNS server), " wrote Johannes Ullrich, dean of research of the SANS Technology Institute and head of the Internet Storm Center. " This is likely part of an attempt to launch a DDoS against Google by using SNMP as an amplifier/reflector. " Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a UDP-based protocol designed to allow the monitoring of network-

The National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ , gained secret access to the German telecom companies' internal networks, including Deutsche Telekom and Netcologne, in an effort to " map the entire Internet — any device, anywhere, all the time. " As reported by German news publication Der Spiegel, citing the new set of leaked documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the five major intelligence agencies including NSA and GCHQ have been collaborating to get near-real-time visualization of the global internet as a part of NSA's ' Treasure Map ' surveillance program , also dubbed as "the Google Earth of the Internet." TREASURE MAP TRACKS YOU 'ANYWHERE AND ALL THE TIME' The data collected by the intelligence agencies doesn't just include information from large traffic channels, such as telecommunications cables. Rather, it also include information from every single device that is connected to the internet somewhere in the w

The informational systems that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) run are loaded with several critical vulnerabilities that could leave it vulnerable to cyber attacks. According to the findings of an audit recently conducted by the Department of Commerce's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the Joint Polar Satellite System's (JPSS) ground system is vulnerable to a large number of high-risk vulnerabilities. The JPSS ground system is used to collect data from several polar-orbiting weather satellites, and distribute the information to users worldwide. This system also provides command, control and data processing for current and future weather satellites. But, the vulnerabilities identified in the system could impair technology controlling the United States' next generation of polar-orbiting environmental satellites. " Our analysis of the JPSS program's assessments of system vulnerabilities found that, since FY 2012, the number of high-ris

The official website of a prominent Israel-based, Middle East foreign policy-focused think tank, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) , has been compromised and abused by attackers to distribute malware . The Israeli think tank website JCPA – an independent research institute focusing on Israeli security, regional diplomacy and international law – was serving the Sweet Orange exploit kit via drive-by downloads to push malware onto the computers of the website's visitors by exploiting software vulnerabilities, researchers from security firm Cyphort reported on Friday. The Sweet Orange is one of the most recently released web malware exploitation kits, available for sale at selected invite-only cyber crime friendly communities and has been around for quite some time. However, Sweet Orange has also disappeared but in October 2013, shortly after the arrest of Paunch, the author of BlackHole , experts observed a major increase in the use of Sweet Orange. The

As far, you have probably heard about the biggest digital exposure of private and very personal nude photographs of as many as 100 female celebrities including Jenny McCarthy, Kristin Dunst, Mary E Winstead, and Oscar winner Lawrence and Kate Upton, that was surfaced on notorious bulletin-board 4chan, and anonymous image board AnonIB over the weekend. It was believed that the group of hackers allegedly taken celebrities photos from their Apple iCloud backups after their iCloud accounts were compromised, but users of devices running Google's Android could have been targeted too. A forum post on anonymous image board AnonIP shows that the group of hackers may have used a cloned Flappy Bird app to steal and collect the naked photos of females from their Android devices and then send them to remote servers. Experts believe that the group may have been stealing and trading nude and very personal photos of more than 100 female celebrities for more than two years, gather

In the wake of the biggest digital exposure of personal nude selfies belonging to as many as 100 high-profile celebrities, Apple said the company plans to add extra security measures to keep hackers out of user accounts. Not just this, the company also plans to extend its two-factor authentication (2FA) feature to account logins to the iCloud service from mobile device in order to avoid future intrusions. APPLE BROADEN SECURITY WITH NEW RELEASE The company's chief executive, Tim Cook told the Wall Street Journal in an interview that the company will introduce more features to tighten up the security of its users' online accounts, but he " aggressively encourage " users to be more alert to the risks posed by cyber criminals, as you can't leave everything on the service providers. " We want to do everything we can do to protect our customers, because we are as outraged if not more so than they are, " Cook told the Journal. Apple will give alerts to users via emails a

Researchers have uncovered a new social engineering trick that leads users to a malicious extension from Google Chrome impersonating to deliver Adobe's Flash Player in order to lure victims in a click fraud campaign. Security experts at TrendMicro believe that the malware is triggered by opening Facebook or Twitter via shortened links provided in any social networking websites. Once clicked, the links may lead victims to a site that automatically downloads the malicious browser extension . MALWARE INVOLVES DOWNLOADING MULTIPLE MALICIOUS FILES The process is quite complicated as the malware drops a downloader file which downloads multiple malicious files on the victim's computer. Moreover, the malicious program also has ability to bypass Google's recent security protection added to Chrome against installation of browser extensions that are not in Chrome Web Store. Researchers came across a baiting tweet that advertises " Facebook Secrets ", claiming to show videos

Till now we have seen a series of different malware targeting Windows operating system and not Mac, thanks to Apple in way it safeguard its devices' security. But with time, cyber criminals and malware authors have found ways to exploit Mac as well. GROUP BEHIND THE MAC VERSION OF BACKDOOR Researchers have unmasked a group of cyber criminals that has recently started using a new variant of XSLCmd backdoor program to target Mac OS X systems. This Mac version of backdoor shares a significant portion of its code with the Windows version of the same backdoor that has been around since at least 2009. According to FireEye researchers, the group, dubbed as GREF , is already infamous for its past cyber espionage attacks against the US Defense Industrial Base (DIB), companies from the electronics and engineering sectors worldwide, foundations and other NGO's as well. " We track this threat group as "GREF" due to their propensity to use a variety of Google references in th

You all won't have forget about the dodgy update released by Microsoft in its last month's Patch Tuesday Updates which was responsible for crippling users' computers - specially users running Windows 7 PCs with the 64bit version - with the infamous " Blue Screens of Death ." The company fixed the issue at the end of last month, and now is planning to release a light edition of Patches. Today Microsoft has released its Advance Notification for the month of September Patch Tuesday Updates. There will be a total of four security Bulletins next Tuesday, September 9, which will address several vulnerabilities in its products, one of them is marked critical and rest are important in severity. CRITICAL PATCH This time also administrators can expect a cumulative patch release for Internet Explorer which will address a number of remote code execution vulnerabilities in the browser. As usual, Internet Explorer (IE) update is rated Critical on Windows client systems and Moder

Apple has patched the security flaw in its Find My iPhone online service that may have allowed hackers to get access to a number of celebrities' private pictures leaked online. OVER 100 CELEBRITIES AFFECTED So far, I hope everybody have heard about probably the biggest digital exposure of personal nude photographs belonging to as many as 100 high-profile celebrities, including Jenny McCarthy, Kristin Dunst, Mary E Winstead, and the Oscar winning actress Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. Initial reports suggested that the privacy breach of the celebrities' iCloud accounts was made possible by a vulnerability in Find My iPhone feature that allowed hackers to allegedly take nude photographs of celebrities from their Apple iCloud backups. Anonymous 4chan users who claims to have grabbed images, posted some of the images to the " b " forum on notorious bulletin-board 4chan, where the owners demanded Bitcoin in exchange for a peek of the images. The anonymous 4c

With a need to give more controls in users' hands, LinkedIn has introduced a few new security features that the company says will help users of the social network for professionals keep their accounts and data more secure. SESSION ALERTS Just like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other online services, LinkedIn has added a new option within the settings tab that allows users to see where and on what devices they are logged into their account. From there, users can sign out of various sessions with one click. This will include details about the users' current sessions, the browser name, operating system, carrier and IP address, which is used to give an approximate location of the device through which the session is occurring. Just like the Facebook feature, LinkedIn lets people to approve the devices to be used, and if somebody accesses a user's LinkedIn account from an unapproved device it will alert user. PASSWORD ALERTS LinkedIn has also introduced its password c

Good news for Firefox lovers! The Mozilla Foundation has introduced a bunch of new features in Firefox to improve browser security with the launch of Firefox 32, now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. The new version of Firefox makes the browser even more competitive among others. Firefox version 32 has some notable security improvements, including a new HTTP cache for improved performance, public key pinning - a defense that would help protect its users from man-in-the-middle and other attacks, and easy language switching on Android. PUBLIC KEY PINNING ENABLED BY-DEFAULT In the latest Firefox version 32, Mozilla has enabled Public Key Pinning support by default that will protect its users from man-in-the-middle-attacks and rogue certificate authorities. Public key pinning is a security measure that ensures people that they are connecting to the websites they intend to. Pinning allows users to keep track of certificates in order to specify wh

Microsoft today reissued a security update for Windows to the faulty update that previously caused PCs to suffer Blue Screens of Death (BSoD) . The new security update comes almost two weeks after reports emerged that the dodgy update crippled users' computers with the infamous "Blue Screens of Death." The company later advised people to uninstall the update, but now it has fixed the issue. " This month we had our first roll out with additional non-security updates. A small number of customers experienced problems with a few of the updates ," Tracey Pretorius, director of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, wrote in a blog post .   " As soon as we became aware of some problems, we began a review and then immediately pulled the problematic updates, making these available to download. We then began working on a plan to re-release the affected updates." The offending Microsoft patch identified as MS14-045 , fixes Windows kernel vulnerabilities in 47 of Micro

Hackforums - one of the popular hacking forum in the world - has been hacked and defaced by the famous Egyptian hacker with the online handle Eg-R1z . HackForums is popular among both whitehats and blackhats. On one end of the spectrum, HackForums helps over 110,000 hacking community members to remove dangerous malware off of their computers, as well as promotes research and learning of various malwares. But on the other end, it servers as a great platform for hackers and cyber thieves as well, who posts infected material in order to victimize others. The website is hosted in Europe on a server and expected to be earning an estimated $7,316 USD on a daily basis. Last night, hackforums.net went dark with a defacement message that reads: "[403 Forbidden Error] - You might be blocked by your IP, Country, or ISP." That's really nasty msg guys , don't u think so?! Just sending greets from Egypt i-Hmx , H3ll C0D3 , Egyptian.H4x0rZ ./Eg-R1z Cr3w It i

Routers manufactured and sold by Chinese security vendor have a hard-coded password that leaves users with a wide-open backdoor that could easily be exploited by attackers to monitor the Internet traffic. The routers are sold under the brand name Netcore in China, and Netis in other parts of the world , including South Korea, Taiwan, Israel and United States. According to Trend Micro , the backdoor — a semi-secret way to access the device — allows cybercriminals the possibility to bypass device security and to easily run malicious code on routers and change settings. Netis routers are known for providing the best wireless transfer speed up to 300Mbps, offering a better performance on online gaming, video streaming, and VoIP phone calling. The Netcore and Netis routers have an open UDP port listening at port 53413 , which can be accessed from the Internet side of the router . The password needed to open up this backdoor is hardcoded into the router's firmware.