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At the beginning of the month, we have reported about the new surge of a Stuxnet-like malware "Havex" , which was previously targeting organizations in the energy sector, had been used to carry out industrial espionage against a number of companies in Europe and compromised over 1,000 European and North American energy firms. Recently, researchers at security firm FireEye have discovered a new variant of Havex remote access Trojan that has capability to actively scan OPC ( Object linking and embedding for Process Control ) servers, used for controlling SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems in critical infrastructure, energy, and manufacturing sectors. OPC is a communications standard that allows interaction between Windows-based SCADA or other industrial control systems (ICS) applications and process control hardware. New Havex variant gathers system information and data stored on a compromised client or server using the OPC standard. OPC is pervasive and

The 31-year-old former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has warned that during surveillance, among other things, NSA system administrators also intercepted and routinely passed the photos of people in "sexually compromising" situations among other NSA employees. In a video interview, NSA whistleblower speaks with the Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and reporter Ewen MacAskill in Moscow, which was then published by the Guardian on Thursday. WOOOH!! ATTRACTIVE NUDIE PICS - PASS IT ON TO BILL TOO " You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old. They've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records, " he said in the video interview. " During the course of their daily work they stumble upon something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense – for example, an intimate photo of someone o

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

One of the oldest active malware families, Pushdo, is again making its way onto the Internet and has recently infected more than 11,000 computers in just 24 hours. Pushdo, a multipurpose Trojan, is primarily known for delivering financial malware such as ZeuS and SpyEye onto infected computers or to deliver spam campaigns through a commonly associated components called Cutwail that are frequently installed on compromised PCs. Pushdo was first seen over 7 years ago and was a very prolific virus in 2007. Now, a new variant of the malware is being updated to leverage a new domain-generation algorithm (DGA) as a fallback mechanism to its normal command-and-control (C&C) communication methods. DGAs are used to dynamically generating a list of domain names based on an algorithm and only making one live at a time, blocking on 'seen' Command & Control domain names becomes nearly impossible. With the help of a DGA, cyber criminals could have a series of advantages

Botnets - a secretly compromised networks of ordinary home and office computers with rogue software or "malware" that are controlled by an individual criminal or a group - has dramatically increased over the past several years and are considered to pose the biggest threat to the Internet. Cyber criminals have brushed-up their hacking skills and are using Botnets as a cyber weapon to carry out multiple crimes like DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service), mass spamming, page rank and advertising revenue manipulation, mining bitcoins, cyber espionage and surveillance etc. 18 BOTNET INFECTIONS PER SECOND According to the director of FBI's cyber division, Joseph Demarest, Botnet has become one of the biggest enemies of the Internet today, and therefore its impact has been significant. Yesterday during a hearing before a U.S. Senate committee, he says that every second 18 computers worldwide are part of botnet armies, which amounts to over 500 million comp

Multiple Cisco Wireless Residential Gateway products have a security vulnerability in the web server that could allow a remote attacker to hijack the devices remotely. Cisco announced that a number of its Wireless Residential Gateway products are vulnerable to a remote-code execution attack , which is exploited by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to the web server running on the affected device. According to Cisco, the flaw is due to the incorrect input validation for HTTP requests, which could allow an attacker to exploit a buffer overflow and run arbitrary code on the device. The bug is about as serious as they come, giving remote, unauthenticated attackers access to the affected machines. " Successful exploitation of the vulnerability may cause the embedded web server to crash and allow the attacker to inject arbitrary commands and execute arbitrary code with elevated privileges, " the Cisco advisory says, and until now, " There are currently no known workarou

So far we have heard that using privacy tools by every individual and offering encrypted communication by every company is the only solution to Mass Surveillance conducted by the government and law enforcement authorities. But, Germany says the only solution to guard against surveillance is - Stop using Computers!! Ohh Please!! Is it a joke? No, it does not mean that they are going to completely throw out all of their computer systems, but rather they would use it preposterous. A year ago, when it came to light that German Chancellor Angela Merkel's own personal mobile phone had been spied by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for years, Surveillance has become a big issue for Germany. Such a big that prominent politicians are seriously considering using manual typewriters for sensitive documents instead of computers. The head of the Germany's NSA Inquiry Committee, Patrick Sensburg said in an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV show on Monday night, th

Today, Oracle has released its quarterly Critical Patch Update (CPU) for the month of July, as part of its monthly security bulletin, in which it fixes a total of 113 new security vulnerabilities for hundreds of the company's products. The security update for Oracle's popular browser plug-in Java addresses 20 vulnerabilities in the software, all of which are remotely exploitable without authentication, that means an attacker wouldn't need a username and password to exploit them over a network. MOST CRITICAL ONE TO PATCH FIRST Oracle uses the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to provide an open and standardized rating of the security holes it finds in its products. One or more of the Java vulnerabilities received the most "critical" rating according to Oracle's Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), i.e. base score of 10 or near. Although, numerous other Oracle products and software components addressed in the latest security updates, which address