BlackShades Remote Administration Tool | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A Swedish man who was the mastermind behind the $40 BlackShades Remote Access Tool (RAT) that infected over half a million systems around the world was sentenced to almost five years in a U.S. prison on Tuesday. Alex Yücel , 25, owned and operated an organization called "BlackShades" that sold a sophisticated and notorious form of software, called RAT, to several thousands of hackers and other people in more than 100 countries for prices ranging from $40 to $50. BlackShades malware was designed to capture keystrokes, steal usernames and passwords for victims' email and Web services, FTP clients, instant messaging applications, and lots more. In the worst case, the malicious software even allowed hackers to take remote control of victim's computer and webcam to pilfer photos or videos without the knowledge of the computer owner. Yucel (a.k.a. " marjinz ") was sentenced to four and three-quarter years in prison by U.S. District Judge Kev

The United Kingdom's National Crime Agency (NCA) has arrested 56 suspected hackers in a campaign against cybercrime called "strike week." Law-enforcement officials conducted, in total, 25 separate operations across England, Scotland and Wales, and those arrested were suspected in a wide range of cyber crimes including: Network intrusion and data theft from multinational companies and government agencies Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks Cyber-enabled fraud Malicious software and virus development The raids conducted by NCA were coordinated by its National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) , special officers Metropolitan Police and Regional Organised Crime Unit's (ROCUs) , associated with local forces around the UK. The arrested hackers also include alleged hackers suspected of being behind attacks on Yahoo, the US Department of Defence (DoD) , and PlayStation. The list of hackers arrested in the operation is given below: A 23-year-old man w

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