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Yesterday reports revealed that Pavel Durov , the 29-year-old founder of Russia's most popular social networking site VKontakte (VK) - Russia's Facebook, had been fired from his post of general director of Vkontakte. On monday, Durov said that the social networking site VK is now under the complete control of two close allies of President Vladimir Putin. Publicly announcing his firing on his VK page he said, " In this way, today VKontakte goes under the complete control of Igor Sechin and Alisher Usmanov. Probably, in the Russian context, something like this was inevitable, but I'm happy we lasted seven and a half years. We did a lot. And part of what's been done can't be turned back. " Last Month on 21st March, the 29-year-old entrepreneur announced submitted his resignation, but earlier this month that he had rescinded his resignation as the company's CEO because it was an April Fool Prank, but unfortunately he supposedly failed to properly withdraw befor

Constant password breaches and Snowden revelations about Government Surveillance have raised many questions that why don't cloud and email Services encrypt the data stored on their server?  Revelations forced the popular Internet Giants such as Google and Yahoo to contemplate on the privacy and security issues and in response companies started enhancing their encryption standard by enabling HTTPS by default and removed the option to turn it off. A few days back, Google admitted that their automated systems read your content, including incoming and outgoing emails to provide you personally relevant advertisements. That means Internet giants generally do encrypt your data, but they have the key so they can decrypt it any time they want. Encryption is mandatory in Modern Internet and web services should consider Encrypting and decrypting your data locally, so that no one can snoop on. Such cryptographic mechanism is called End-to-End Encryption , that means content of yo

The  ransomware industry surged in 2023  as it saw an alarming 55.5% increase in victims worldwide, reaching a staggering 5,070.  But 2024 is starting off showing a very different picture.  While the numbers skyrocketed in Q4 2023 with 1309 cases, in Q1 2024, the ransomware industry was down to 1,048 cases. This is a 22% decrease in ransomware attacks compared to Q4 2023. Figure 1: Victims per quarter There could be several reasons for this significant drop.  Reason 1: The Law Enforcement Intervention Firstly, law enforcement has upped the ante in 2024 with actions against both LockBit and ALPHV. The LockBit Arrests In February, an international operation named "Operation Cronos" culminated in the arrest of at least three associates of the infamous LockBit ransomware syndicate in Poland and Ukraine.  Law enforcement from multiple countries collaborated to take down LockBit's infrastructure. This included seizing their dark web domains and gaining access to their backend sys

We often talk about Underground communities, illegal websites or black markets, but as they are 'Underground' in nature i.e. Hidden websites running under Onion Network, many of us don't know how to reach the one we are searching for and if hopefully found, then its difficult to figure out a trustworthy vendor. Underground websites offer illegal high quality drugs or rifles, hacking tools, or any illegal services, until now you needed to type long, complex and specific Tor browser URLs directly into the browser which is quite difficult and sometimes the sites change their addresses which makes more difficult to navigate. Not any More! As the first search engine, ' Grams ' ( https://grams7enufi7jmdl.onion ) for online underground Black Markets has been launched in Beta last week, that lets anyone to easily find illegal drugs and other contraband online in an easier way ever and it's pretty fast like Google Search Engine. You don't need to do anything, just li

ZeuS , or Zbot is one of the oldest families of financial malware , it is a Trojan horse capable to carry out various malicious and criminal tasks and is often used to steal banking information. It is distributed to a wide audience, primarily through infected web pages, spam campaigns and drive-by downloads. Earlier this month, Comodo AV labs identified a dangerous variant of ZeuS Banking Trojan which is signed by stolen Digital Certificate belonging to Microsoft Developer to avoid detection from Web browsers and anti-virus systems.  FREE! FREE! ZeuS BRINGS ROOTKIT UPDATE Recently, the security researcher, Kan Chen at Fortinet has found that P2P Zeus botnet is updating its bots/infected systems with updates version that has the capability to drop a rootkit into infected systems and hides the trojan to prevent the removal of malicious files and registry entries. The new variant also double check for the earlier installed version (0x38) of ZeuS trojan on the infecte

Facebook – one of the popular social networking website that connects you worldwide with your friends, families, and many more to your network. Now, Facebook is introducing a new feature named "Nearby Friends" for its Android and iPhone mobile users that will allow them to find their friends when they are nearby. Earlier this month, Facebook added new voice calling feature over Internet functionality for its Messenger app worldwide, that helps its users make free voice calls to their online pals by just tapping the blue phone icon and now Facebook is rolling out its new feature which is completely optional, that means you can turn it ON or OFF at anytime accordingly. LOCATION SHARING TO LIMITED NETWORK If you enable the " Nearby Friends " feature, it's only your friends (friends or close friends or specific friends list) who are able to know your GPS location and nobody else, and that too only if you and your friends both have turned on the 'Nearby Friends' feature on

At the beginning of this year, we reported about the secret backdoor 'TCP 32764' discovered in several routers including, Linksys, Netgear, Cisco and Diamond that allowed an attacker to send commands to the vulnerable routers at TCP port 32764 from a command-line shell without being authenticated as the administrator. The Reverse-engineer from France Eloi Vanderbeken , who discovered this backdoor has found that although the flaw has been patched in the latest firmware release, but SerComm has added the same backdoor again in another way. To verify the released patch, recently he downloaded the patched firmware version 1.1.0.55 of Netgear DGN1000 and unpacked it using binwalk tool. He found that the file 'scfgmgr' which contains the backdoor is still present there with a new option " -l ", that limits it only for a local socket interprocess communication (Unix domain socket), or only for the processes running on the same device. On further investigation via reverse en