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Security researchers have discovered a new type of "Man-in-the-Middle" (MitM) attack in the wild targeting smartphone and tablets users on devices running either iOS or Android around the world. The MitM attack, dubbed DoubleDirect , enables an attacker to redirect a victim's traffic of major websites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to a device controlled by the attacker. Once done, cyber crooks can steal victims' valuable personal data, such as email IDs, login credentials and banking information as well as can deliver malware to the targeted mobile device. San Francisco-based mobile security firm Zimperium detailed the threat in a Thursday blog post , revealing that the DoubleDirect technique is being used by attackers in the wild in attacks against the users of web giants including Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Live.com and Twitter, across 31 countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. DoubleDirect makes use of ICMP (Internet Control Message P

Unless we are a human supercomputer, remembering password is not an easy task and that too, if you have a different password for every different site. But luckily to make the whole process easy, there is a growing market for password managers which provides an extra layer of protection. Wait! Wait! Seriously?? Security researchers have discovered a new variant of data-stealing Citadel Trojan program used by cybercriminals to slurp up users' master passwords for a number of password management applications and other authentication programs, which will let you think twice before using one. Citadel Trojan malware program has typically been used to steal online banking credentials and other financial information by masquerading itself as legitimate banking sites when victims open it in their local browser, which is also known as a man-in-the-browser attack . The malware has previously targeted users' credentials stored in the password management applications included

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

Human rights experts and Privacy International have launched a free tool allowing users to scan their computers for surveillance spyware, typically used by governments and other organizations to spy on human rights activists and journalists around the world. This free-of-charge anti-surveillance tool, called Detekt , is an open source software app released in partnership with Human rights charity Amnesty International, Germany's Digitale Gesellschaft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation ( EFF ) and Privacy International, in order to combat government surveillance. NEED AN EYE FOR AN EYE The global surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies recently disclosed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shed light on just how far our own government can go to keep track of citizens, whether innocent or otherwise. Therefore, such tool will help them see if their devices have been infected by any spyware. Detekt was dev

Thanks to recent events involving certain celebrities' stolen pictures, "brute-force attack" is now one of the hot buzz words making its rounds. As an IT professional - do you know what a brute force attack is, how to spot one when it happens, and how to prevent it? A brute-force attack is, simply, an attack on a username, password, etc. that systematically checks all possible combinations until the correct one is found. Scripts are usually used in these attacks to automate the process of arriving at the correct username/password combination. This is why time is of the essence when it comes to detecting and stopping a brute force attack – the more time the attacker has, the more passwords can be tried. Brute force attacks are one of the few hacks detectable by their volume, rather than their type. In your web (or proprietary app) logs, you'll usually see a crazy amount of failed login attempts, usually originating from the same IP address. You might even see the same accoun

Google on Tuesday launched a Security testing tool "Firing Range" , which aimed at improving the efficiency of automated Web application security scanners by evaluating them with a wide range of cross-site scripting (XSS) and a few other web vulnerabilities seen in the wild. Firing Range basically provides a synthetic testing environment mostly for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that are seen most frequently in web apps. According to Google security engineer Claudio Criscione, 70 percent of the bugs in Google's Vulnerability Reward Program are cross-site scripting flaws . In addition to XSS vulnerabilities , the new web app scanner also scans for other types of vulnerabilities including reverse clickjacking , Flash injection , mixed content, and cross-origin resource sharing vulnerabilities. Firing Range was developed by Google with the help of security researchers at Politecnico di Milano in an effort to build a test ground for automated scanners

A security weakness in Android mobile operating system versions below 5.0 that puts potentially every Android device at risk for privilege escalation attacks, has been patched in  Android 5.0 Lollipop  – the latest version of the mobile operating system. The security vulnerability ( CVE-2014-7911 ), discovered by a security researcher named Jann Horn , could allow any potential attacker to bypass the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) defense and execute arbitrary code of their choice on a target device under certain circumstances. ASLR is a technique involved in protection from buffer overflow attacks. The flaw resides in java.io.ObjectInputStream , which fails to check whether an Object that is being deserialized is actually a serializable object. The vulnerability was reported by the researcher to Google security team earlier this year. According to the security researcher, android apps can communicate with system_service, which runs under admin privileges