vulnerability assessment tools | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Did you ever try extracting any information from any website? Well, if you have then you have surely enacted web scraping functions without even knowing it! To put in simpler terms, Web scraping, or also known as web data extraction, is the process of recouping or sweeping data from web-pages. It is a much faster and easier process of retrieving data without undergoing the time-consuming hassle of manual data extraction methods. Web scraping uses advanced automatic tools to reclaim data from millions and billions of websites. The Basics of Web Scraping First, some common terms you'll need to know: The Crawler: The web crawler or popularly known as a 'spider,' is an automated website scraping tool that skims through the internet for information. The spider usually surfs the internet and follows links, and explores various web pages to gather or "scrape" up any information. The Scraper: A scraper or web scraper is a comprehensive website scraper

You can relate this: While working on my laptop, I usually prefer sitting at a corner in the room from where no one should be able to easily stare at my screen, and if you're a hacker, you must have more reasons to be paranoid. Let's go undercover: If you're in love with the Kali Linux operating system for hacking and penetration testing, here we have pretty awesome news for you. Offensive Security today released a new and the final version of Kali Linux for 2019 that includes a special theme to transform your Xfce desktop environment into a Windows look-a-like desktop. Dubbed ' Kali Undercover ,' the theme has been designed for those who work in public places or office environments and don't want people to spot that you're working on Kali Linux, an operating system popular among hackers, penetration testers, and cybersecurity researchers. As shown in the demo below, simply enabling "Kali Undercover Mode" from the menu would immediat

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Protection from cyberattacks begins way before attackers launch their weapons on an organization. Continuously monitoring the environment for security weaknesses and addressing such, if found, is a proven way to provide organizations with immunity to a large portion of attacks. Among the common weaknesses that expose organizations to cyberattacks, the most prominent are software vulnerabilities in systems and applications that attackers relentlessly take advantage of. To assist in the discovery of such vulnerabilities, Cynet now offers organizations a 14 days free access to its Cynet 360 platform in which they can leverage its built-in vulnerability assessment tools. A vulnerability is a bug in the software that enables a threat actor to manipulate it for malicious purposes. For example, a vulnerability in Word enables attackers to craft a Word document in such a manner that when a user double clicks to open it, it transparently opens a connection between the user computer an

Data loss and theft continues to rise, and hardly a day goes by without significant data breaches hit the headlines. In January 2019 alone, 1.76 billion records were leaked, and according to IBM's Data Breach study, the average cost of each lost or stolen record has reached about $148. Most of these data leaks are because of malicious attacks, where exploitation of web application vulnerabilities is one of the most common cyber attack vectors. An application security breach is a problem facing one and all, and no matter what's the size of your company, your web applications are prone to cyber attacks. Hackers breach sites for a variety of reasons—some do it for fame, some to get competitive information, whereas some do it just for financial gains. No matter what the reason is, the cost of a security breach is always higher than the cost of protection, leading to loss of data, substantial financial losses, and most importantly, loss of customers' trust. If you a

A new powerful hacking tool recently introduced in an underground forum is making rounds these days, allowing anyone to rapidly conduct website scans for SQL injection flaws on a massive scale — all controlled from a smartphone using the Telegram messaging application. Dubbed Katyusha Scanner , the fully automated powerful SQLi vulnerability scanner was first surfaced in April this year when a Russian-speaking individual published it on a popular hacking forum. Researchers at Recorded Future's Insikt Group threat intelligence division found this tool for sale on an underground hacking forum for just $500. Users can even rent the Katyusha Scanner tool for $200. According to the researchers, Katyusha Scanner is a web-based tool that's a combination of Arachni Scanner and a basic SQL Injection exploitation tool that allows users to automatically identify SQLi vulnerable sites and then exploits it to take over its databases. Arachni is an open source vulnerability scann

Why we can't detect all security loopholes and patch them before hackers exploit them? Because... we know that humans are too slow at finding and fixing security bugs, which is why vulnerabilities like Heartbleed , POODLE and GHOST remained undetected for decades and rendered almost half of the Internet vulnerable to theft by the time patches were rolled out. Now to solve this hurdle, DARPA has come up with an idea: To build a smart Artificial Intelligence System that will automatically detect and even patch security flaws in a system. Isn't it a revolutionary idea for Internet Security? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected seven teams of finalists who will face off in a historic battle, as each tries to defend themselves and find out flaws without any human control. The DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge will be held at the annual DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas next month. Must Read : Artificial Intelligence System that can detec

Yahoo! has open-sourced Gryffin – a Web Application Security Scanner – in an aim to improve the safety of the Web for everyone. Currently in its beta, Project Gryffin has made available on Github under the BSD-style license that Yahoo! has been using for a number of its open-sourced projects. Gryffin is basically a Go & JavaScript platform that helps system administrators scan URLs for malicious web content and common security vulnerabilities, including SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) . Yahoo! describes Gryffin as a large-scale Web security scanning platform, which is more than just a scanner, as it is designed to address two specific problems: Coverage Scale Scale is obviously implied for large Web, while Coverage has two dimensions – Crawl and Fuzzing . Crawl's ability is to find as much of the Web application's footprint as possible, whereas Fuzzing involves testing each part of the application's components for an applied se

I frequently receive emails and messages on how to hack my friend's Facebook account , how to become a hacker, how to penetrate networks , how to break into computers, and how to compromise routers? These are some of the most frequent queries I came across, and in this article I'll attempt to answer these along with a solution on how to get started as a beginner. Before we begin, first let's know… ...What is Ethical Hacking? Most people want to learn hacking just for fun to hack into their friend's Facebook account or Gmail. Remember, Hacking is a skill and if you are here for the same reason, sadly but this platform may not work for you. Ethical hacking is testing the IT resources for a good cause and the betterment of technology. Ethical hackers are none other than computer security experts and researchers who focus on penetration testing and weaknesses in the organization's information systems they associated. A way to become an ethical hacker is to get C

Google on Thursday unleashed its own free web application vulnerability scanner tool, which the search engine giant calls Google Cloud Security Scanner , that will potentially scan developers' applications for common security vulnerabilities on its cloud platform more effectively. SCANNER ADDRESSES TWO MAJOR WEB VULNERABILITIES Google launched the Google Cloud Security Scanner in beta. The New web application vulnerability scanner allows App Engine developers to regularly scan their applications for two common web application vulnerabilities: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Mixed Content Scripts Despite several free web application vulnerability scanner and vulnerability assessment tools are available in the market, Google says these website vulnerability scanners are typically hard to set up and " built for security professionals, " not for web application developers that run the apps on the Google App Engine. While Google Cloud Security Scanner will be ea