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Snapchat , a Smartphone application that lets users share snapshots with friends is catching fire among teenagers. It was first hacked in December when 4.6 million Snapchat users were exposed in a database breach. Later, the denial-of-service attack and CAPTCHA Security bypass were discovered by other researchers within last two-three weeks. Snapchat has no Vulnerability Reward Program, but still many penetration testers are working hard and free of cost to make the application more secure by disclosing flaws. Interestingly, this is not the end of vulnerabilities, Mohamed Ramadan , a security researcher with Attack-Secure from Egypt, has spotted a new vulnerability on Snapchat that allow an attacker to brute-force login credentials of the users. Brute-force is a process of trying multiple passwords against a username until you get a correct password. " This vulnerability allows anyone who knows your SnapChat email to brute force your account's password without any

A really bad year for the world's second-largest email service provider, Yahoo Mail ! The company announced today, ' we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts ', user names and passwords of its email customers have been stolen and are used to access multiple accounts. Yahoo did not say how many accounts have been affected, and neither they are sure about the source of the leaked users' credentials. It appears to have come from a third party database being compromised, and not an infiltration of Yahoo's own servers. " We have no evidence that they were obtained directly from Yahoo's systems. Our ongoing investigation shows that malicious computer software used the list of usernames and passwords to access Yahoo Mail accounts. The information sought in the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected accounts' most recent sent emails. " For now, Yahoo is taking proactive actions t

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

Tor is one of the best and freely available privacy software that lets people communicate anonymously online through a series of nodes that is designed to provide anonymity for users and bypass Internet censorship. When you use the Tor software, your IP address remains hidden and it appears that your connection is coming from the IP address of a Tor exit relay or nodes , which can be anywhere in the world. An exit relay is the final relay that Tor traffic passes through before it reaches its destination. According to a recent report ' Spoiled Onions: Exposing Malicious Tor Exit Relays ', published by security researchers Phillip Winter and Stefan Lindskog revealed that almost 20 exit relays in the Tor anonymity network that attempted to spy on users' encrypted traffic using man-in-the-middle techniques. Both Researchers spent more than four months studying on the Tor exit nodes using their own scanning software called " exitmap " and detected su

Watch out, coffee drinkers. If you are one of those 10 million Starbucks customers, who purchases drinks and food directly from their Smartphones, this news is for you! If you use Starbucks' official iOS app, you should know that the company is not encrypting any of your information, including your password. The app allows the Starbucks customers to check their balance, transaction history, fund transfer, and store location, etc. A Security researcher Daniel E. Wood found a vulnerability (CVE-2014-0647) in STARTBUCKS v2.6.1. iOS mobile application, that stores your credential details and GPS locations in plain text format into the file system. To extract the information from the mobile, an attacker just needs to connect the device to a computer and accessing ' session . clslog ' file from the location given below: /Library/Caches/ com . crashlytics . data/ com . starbucks . mystarbucks /session . clslog The vulnerability , however, requires that the hacker has physical

More than 15.2% of the Algerian population use Internet service which is provided by around 30 Internet Service Providers and one of the largest shares is served by Algerie Telecom .  Algerie Telecom provides  TP-LINK TD-W8951ND  Router to most of their home customers who Opt-In for Internet services and each of which has ZYXEL embedded firmware installed in it. ABDELLI Nassereddine, penetration tester and Algerian Computer Science Student has reported highly critical unauthorized access and password disclosure vulnerabilities in the Routers provided by Algerie Telecom. He told ' The Hacker News ' that the vulnerabilities can be exploited by any remote hacker just by exploiting a very simple loophole in the firmware. First, he found that an unauthorized access is available to ' Firmware/Romfile Upgrade'  Section on the Router's panel that can be accessed without any login password i.e. https://IP//rpFWUpload.html This page actually allows a user to upgrade

When you visit a website, it stores some information on your system through a web browser for later use i.e. Login information, so you do not have to re-login to your website every time you visit the same website on the same browser. Cookies are usually stored as plain text or in the database by the browser and if a computer is accessed by multiple people, one person might scan another's cookie folder and look for things like passwords or long-life session IDs. If an attacker has the physical access to your system, can steal all your cookies easily to hijack accounts. There are many tools available on the Internet that can make it quicker and easier for an attacker to export all your cookies from the browser. The Google Chrome web browser also saves cookies to a SQLite database file in the user's data folder. One can import that file to SQL Editor software to read all cookies in plain text format. Google's open source project Chromium browser now have a new feature that en

World's largest Bitcoin poker website ' SealsWithClubs ' has been compromised and around 42,000 users' credentials are at risk. Seals With Club  has issued a  Mandatory Password Reset   warning to their users, according to a statement published on the website. The service admitted their database had been compromised and revealed that the data center used until November was breached, resulting 42,020 hashed password theft. " Passwords were salted and hashed per user, but to be safe every user MUST change their password when they next log in. Please do so at your earliest opportunity. If your Seals password was used for any other purpose you should reset those passwords too as a precaution. " and " Transfers may be disabled for a short period of time.". Seals With Clubs used SHA1 hash functions to encrypt the passwords, but SHA1 is outdated and easy to crack if not salted. ' StacyM ', a user then posted the hashed passwords on a web forum o

Just like other Web Browsers, The Google Chrome also offers a password manager feature that can save your logins and basic information for automatic form-filling. The Google Chrome browser stores all your passwords in the plain text format and is available for access by opening the following URL in your Chrome browser – " chrome : //settings/passwords ". Unlike Firefox , till now Google Chrome was not offering any Master Protection. Finally Google has implemented a Master Password protection on Chrome password manager in Windows and Mac. Now you have to enter your Windows account password to reveal the saved passwords. The protection will be lifted for a minute, after entering the password, and after that user need to re-login. Previously, Google was criticized many times for such bad password storage Practice because there is no master password, no security, not even a prompt that " these passwords are visible " and this allows anyone with access to a user's c

In a recent cyber attack on a Forum site, thousands of outdated legitimate WordPress blogs were abused to perform DDOS attacks using previously known vulnerabilities . After analyzing the Log file from the victim's server, we have noticed many Wordpress CMS based educational (.EDU) and Government (.GOV) websites from where the attack was originated. In the past we have reported about many such cyber attacks, where attackers hacked into the Wordpress blogs using password brute-force attack or they used the  PINGBACK  vulnerability in older versions of Wordpress without compromising the server. WordPress has a built in functionality called Pingback , which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site and it can be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations. We have seen more than 100,000 IP addresses involved in the recent DDOS attack and the victim's Forum website received more than 40,000 requests in 7 mi

Security researchers at Trustwave's SpiderLabs found a Netherlands-based Pony Botnet Controller Server with almost two Million usernames and passwords, stolen by cybercriminals from users of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and other websites. In a blog post, the researchers mentioned that after the Pony Version 1.9  Source code was made public and they found a way to get into the Botnet 's Admin area, from where they collected stolen database and statistics. The Pony Control panel, written in Russian language, indicated Facebook was the worst impacted and two Russian Social Media sites i.e. vk.com and odnoklassniki.ru, credentials were also included in the database. It is not clear at this time that how exactly the login credentials were originally obtained, but one possibility is that, they were captured using some keyloggers or similar malware. Statistics of stolen login credentials: 1,580,000 website login credentials stolen (including 318,121 Facebook login credentia

In October, A Security researcher ' Craig Heffner ' discovered a backdoor vulnerability ( CVE-2013-6027 ) with certain D-Link routers that allow cyber criminals to alter a router setting without a username or password. Last week, D-Link has released new version of Firmware for various vulnerable router models, that patches the unauthorized administrator access backdoor. Heffner  found that the web interface for some D-Link routers could be accessed if the browser's user agent string is set to xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide . From last month, D-Link was working with Heffner and other security researchers, to find out more about the backdoor and now the Company has released the updates for the following models: DIR-100 DIR-120 DI-524 DI-524UP DI-604UP DI-604+ DI-624S TM-G5240 The company advised users to do not enable the Remote Management feature, since this will allow malicious users to use this exploit from the internet and also warned t

Popular source code repository service GitHub has recently been hit by a massive Password Brute-Force attack that successfully compromised some accounts,  GitHub has urged users to set up two-factor authentication for their accounts and has already reset passwords for compromised accounts. " We sent an email to users with compromised accounts letting them know what to do ," " Their passwords have been reset and personal access tokens, OAuth authorizations, and SSH keys have all been revoked. "  However, GitHub uses the  bcrypt  algorithm to hash the passwords , which is extremely resilient against brute force attacks because it takes an inordinate amount of time to encrypt each password. In a blog post , GitHub engineer Shawn Davenport said that a brute force attack from around 40,000 IP addresses revealed some commonly used passwords . These addresses were used to slowly brute force weak passwords. In addition to normal strength requirements like length or cha

In 2013 we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of hack attacks attempted against banks, credit unions and utility companies using various techniques including  DDoS attack , SQL injection, DNS Hijacking and Zero-Day Flaws. SQL Injection is one of the most common security vulnerabilities on the web and is successful only when the web application is not sufficiently secured. Recently a hacking Group named ' TeamBerserk ' claimed on Twitter that, they have stolen $100,000 by leveraging user names and passwords taken from a California ISP Sebastian (Sebastiancorp.com)to access victims' bank accounts. A video proof was uploaded on the Internet, shows that how hackers used a SQL injection attack against the California ISP Sebastian to access their customers' database includes  e-mail addresses, user names and clear text passwords and then using the same data to steal money from those customers. Let's see what SQL Injection is and how ser

A phishing attack is a complex combination of technology and psychology. There are numerous ways in which people are being made fools and they can be conned by hitting on unsecured website links. Sophos experts detected this week an intriguing case of phishing against the Italian postal service Poste Italiane , the scheme attracted the researcher's attention due the reuse of an old social engineering trick. The brand Poste Italiane includes postal, Financial and payment services in its product portfolio and was considered top brand victims by recent F-Secure Threat report. The number of attacks against Poste Italiane is remarkable, the purpose is always to induce its customers into unwittingly submitting their credentials to fake login sites. In the recent attack criminals sent the classic email containing an HTML attachment which the recipient is enticed into opening. " To activate the "Security web Postepay " you need to : - Downlo

Do you think, because you're using an Apple Mac , your data is safe from hackers ? Well, it is not true, there are dozens of security weaknesses and today Researchers have made it easier to exploit Apple Mac OS X, that allows penetration testers and hackers to gain root access. The flaw remained unmatched by Apple for the last five months, dubbed CVE-2013-1775 , the flaw allowed attackers to bypass normal password authentication procedures by resetting the computer clock to January 1, 1970. The reason that specific date is required is because it represents the beginning of time to the operating system and some applications that run on it. When the SUDO command is used in combination with a clock reset, the computer can be tracked into providing root access without a password. Metasploit authors have come up with a brand new module that makes the bug even easier to exploit , renewing interest in the problem. The module gains a session with root permissions as long as the use

Anonymous hackers claimed yesterday that they have broken into a server used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and leaked the database  ( password : fema ) includes - names, addresses and other information of FEMA contractors, private defense contractors, federal agents and local authorities. Hack was performed in response to Homeland Security training exercises that centered on a fictional version of the hacker collective.FEMA, under the Department of Homeland Security, conducts an National Level Exercise (NLE) each year. " This is a message from some of us, to FEMA, to various world governments and to their complicit corporate lackeys who dwell in the shadows as well as to the 2.5 billion regular people who use the internet and have found that their right to privacy has been utterly destroyed. " hackers said. The dump contains a table of user IDs and MD5 hashes of corresponding passwords and leaked mailing addresses connected to some of the

Tumblr posted a blog post Tuesday night warning users to change their passwords and released a very important security update for iOS users after identifying a breach that compromised their passwords. It seems that, under certain circumstances, the prior versions of the iPhone and iPad apps would allow an individual with malicious intent to sniff or intercept passwords as they are in transit across a local network. The problem arose because the iPad and iPhone apps fail to log users in through a secure server.  The vulnerability does not seem to have affected Tumblr's Android app. The company urged users to download the latest version of the Tumblr app, which is available in the Apple iTunes Store. The company did not provide further details on the breach. It's also good practice to use different passwords across different services by using an app like 1Password or LastPass. It doesn't appear that any passwords got in the hands of malicious individuals, though you

Japanese video game maker Nintendo recently revealed that one of its main fan sites Club Nintendo got hacked and Out of 15.5 million login attempts in brute-force process, almost 24,000 user accounts have been hijacked early last month. Nintendo said it first became aware of the illicit logins on Tuesday evening after a large number of access errors on the site. However the security team believe that the hackers obtained the logins and passwords from an outside resource. The fan site, Club Nintendo, allows 3DS and Wii owners, as well as other fans of Nintendo games and hardware to answer survey questions and register their products. Members can do all this in exchange for "coins" or points. These can later be traded for other goods or services on the site. The site is open to users from all over the world, about four million of which are located in Japan. These accounts contain secure data of users' real names, addresses, phone numbers and email information. " The

The ability to turn your iPhone into a Wi-Fi hotspot is a fantastically useful little tool in and of itself. When setting up a personal hotspot on their iPad or iPhone, users have the option of allowing iOS to automatically generate a password. According to a new study by Researchers at the University of Erlangen in Germany, iOS-generated passwords use a very specific formula one which the experienced hacker can crack in less than a minute. Using an iOS app written in Apple's own Xcode programming environment, the team set to work analyzing the words that Apple uses to generate its security keys . Apple's hotspot uses a standard WPA2 -type process, which includes the creation and passing of pre-shared keys (PSK). They found that the default passwords are made up of a combination of a short dictionary words followed by a series of random numbers and this method actually leaves them vulnerable to  brute force attack . The word list Apple uses contains approximately 52,500

Another day, Another verified twitter account with over 900,000 followers hacked by 'Colin'. Hacker hacked into a Sky News Twitter account earlier today, and left a semi-permanent mark on the internet's consciousness. The mysterious Colin soon began to trend on Twitter as #ColinWasHere hashtag. However, the tweet which simply said " Colin was here " - has now been deleted, with Sky blaming the tweet on a hack. The post was retweeted more than 7,500 times before it was removed half an hour later. The Syrian Electronic Army in the recent past has been accused of hacking social media feeds of a number of well known Twitter handles, such as AP , The Guardian and even for some bizarre reason, the satire news agency ' The Onion ' UPDATE:  The Sky News press office has informed that Colin was, in fact, " a 'disaster recovery' test message which accidently went live " and that "no Colin was harmed in the making of this message".