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Microsoft warned about a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Word that is being actively exploited in targeted attacks and discovered by the Google security team. " At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks directed at Microsoft Word 2010… " company said. According to Microsoft's security advisory , Microsoft Word is vulnerable to  a remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2014-1761 ) that can be exploited by a specially crafted Rich Text Format (RTF). An Attacker can simply infect the victim's system with malware if a user opens a malicious Rich Text Format (RTF), or merely preview the message in Microsoft Outlook. " The issue is caused when Microsoft Word parses specially crafted RTF-formatted data causing system memory to become corrupted in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code. " Microsoft acknowledged that remote code execution flaw also exists in Microsoft Word 2003, 2007, 2013, Word Viewer and Office for Mac 2011. Micr

Yesterday a new classified NSA document was leaked by Edward Snowden - titled ' Tor Stinks ' in which ideas were being kicked around for identifying Tor users or degrading the user experience to dissuade people from using the Tor browser. The NSA had a very hard time while tracking down all Tor  users and monitoring their traffic, especially since Tor servers are all over the world, but they make tracking easier by adopting  the following techniques: By running their own hostile Tor nodes Using zero-day vulnerability of Firefox browser By tracking user' browser Cookies Tor access node tracking is not new and the Document says that both the NSA and GCHQ run Tor nodes themselves. In order to trace traffic back to a particular Tor user the NSA needs to know the ' entry, relay and exit ' nodes in the anonymizer cloud between the user and the destination website. So for tracking purpose they used self-hosted nodes, that is able to trace a very small number of To

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

Google will release details of any zero-day flaws it finds in software, if the affected vendor fails to issue a patch or disclose the issue itself within a week. Now, Google is shortening that timeline a good bit to just 7 days. " Based on our experience...we believe that more urgent action within 7 days is appropriate for critical vulnerabilities under active exploitation ", wrote Google Security engineers Chris Evans and Drew Hintz in a blog post . " The reason for this special designation is that each day an actively exploited vulnerability remains undisclosed to the public and unpatched, more computers will be compromised. " Right now, companies use either responsible disclosure or full disclosure when dealing with vulnerabilities . Responsible disclosure allows a company as much time as they want to patch an exploit, and the details surrounding the bug aren't revealed to the public until a patch is issued. Full disclosure, on the other hand, means the company and th

Security researchers revealed that series of " Watering Hole " has been conducted exploiting a IE8 zero-day vulnerability to target U.S. Government experts working on nuclear weapons research. The news is not surprising but it is very concerning, the principal targets of the attacks are various groups of research such as the components of U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Department of Energy, the news has been confirmed by principal security firms and by Microsoft corporate. The flaw has been used in a series of "watering hole" attacks, let's remind that "Watering Hole" is a technique of attack realized compromising legitimate websites using a " drive-by " exploit. The attackers restrict their audience to a individuals interested to specific content proposed by targeted website, in this way when the victim visits the page a backdoor Trojan is installed on his computer. The website compromised to exploit the IE8 zero-day is the Dep

Founder and CEO of Security Explorations of Poland,  Adam Gowdiak has reported a new unpatched security vulnerability in JAVA that affects all Java versions, including 7u21 released last Tuesday. Gowdiak claims to have sent to Oracle a report about a reflection API vulnerability in the newly shipped Server Java Runtime Environment (JRE), notifying them of the new security weakness. " It can be used to achieve a complete Java security sandbox bypass on a target system ," Vulnerability allows attackers to completely bypass the language's sandbox to access the underlying system. Gowdiak has not published any further details about the vulnerability in order to give Oracle time to patch the problem. Last week's Oracle patch update repaired many issues plaguing the platform. Java 7 Update 21 contains 42 new security fixes for Oracle Java SE. A majority of these flaws are browse-to–a-hacked-site-and-get-infected vulnerabilities. According to Oracle, " 39 of these

The same ring of hackers that are responsible for hacking into at least 40 companies including Facebook and Twitter are reportedly also infected the computers of some Apple employees, the company acknowledged Tuesday. The purpose of hack considered an effort to steal company secrets, research and intellectual property that they can sell. Investigators tracked at least one server being used by the hacker ring to a hosting company in the Ukraine. " Apple has identified malware which infected a limited number of Mac systems through a vulnerability in the Java plug-in for browsers, " the company said in its statement. " The malware was employed in an attack against Apple and other companies, and was spread through a website for software developers. We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network ." Apple isolated the infected systems from its network and said there was no indication that any data

Facebook operator of the largest social network with more than 1 billion members, said on Friday it had been the target of an unidentified hacker group, but that no user information was compromised during the attack. The attack occurred when a handful of the company's employees visited a developer's compromised website, which led to malware being installed on their laptops. ' Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack ,' read the statement , despite the laptops being ' fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software. ' Reports say Facebook knew about the attacks, which likely exploited a zero-day Java software flaw, well before the announcement. " We are working continuously and closely with our own internal engineering teams, with security teams at other companies, and with law enforcement authorities to learn everything we can about the attack, and how to prevent similar incidents in the

In recent The Hacker News updates, we have reported about some major hacking events and critical vulnerabilities i.e Cyber attack and spying on The New York Times and Wall Street Journal by Chinese Hackers,  Security Flaws in UPnP protocol , Botnet attack hack 16,000 Facebook accounts, 700,000 accounts hacked in Africa and new android malware that infect more that 620,000 users . Today Twitter also announced that they have recorded some unusual access patterns that is identified as unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. Unknown hackers breach Twitter this week and may have gained access to passwords and other information for as many as 250,000 user accounts " the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords " said Bob Lord ,Director of Information Security, at Twitter. For security reasons twitter have reset passwords and revoked session tokens