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Sanmay Ved – the man who actually managed to buy Google.com got a huge reward from Google, but he donated all money to charity. Last week, an ex-Google employee and now-Amazon employee managed to buy the world's most-visited domain Google.com via Google's own Domains service for only $12 . However, Ved owned Google.com for one whole minute before the Mountain View company realized it was a mistake and cancelled the transaction. After acknowledging the mistake, Google rewarded Ved with some unknown amount of cash, but when Ved generously suggested donating his prize money to charity instead, Google just doubled the reward. Google Rewarded Ved with More than $10,000 Ved believed that his real reward was just being the person who bought Google.com for a whole minute. "I do not care about the money," Ved told in an interview with Business Insider. "It was never about the money. I also want to set an example that [there are] people who [wi

Facebook bounty hunter Laxman Muthiyah from India has recently discovered his third bug of this year in the widely popular social network website that just made a new record by touching 1 Billion users in a single day. At the beginning of the year, Laxman discovered a serious flaw in Facebook graphs that allowed him to view or probably delete others photo album on Facebook, even without having authentication. Just after a month, Laxman uncovered another critical vulnerability in the social network platform that resided in the Facebook Photo Sync feature , that automatically uploads photos from your mobile device to a private Facebook album, which isn't visible to any of your Facebook friends or other Facebook users. However, the flaw discovered by Laxman could allowed any third-party app to access and steal your personal photographs from the hidden Facebook Photo Sync album. Hacking Any Facebook Page Now, the latest bug in Laxman's list could allow atta

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A group of China-backed hackers believed to be responsible for high-profile data breaches, including the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and the insurance giant Anthem , has now hit another high-profile target –  United Airlines . United detected a cyber attack into its computer systems in May or early June; Bloomberg reported , citing some unnamed sources familiar with the matter. The same sources say that the hackers responsible for the data breach in United's systems are the same group of China-backed hackers that successfully carried out several other large heists, including the United States' Office of Personnel Management and the health insurer Anthem Inc. Dangerous Intentions: United Airlines Data Breach The stolen data includes manifests, which contain information on flights' passengers and their origins and destinations, meaning that the hackers have " data on the movements of Millions of Americans ." Since United Airlines

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the official Apple's App Store and iTunes Store, affecting millions of Apple users. Vulnerability-Lab Founder and security researcher Benjamin Kunz Mejri discovered an Application-Side input validation web vulnerability that actually resides in the Apple App Store invoice module and is remotely exploitable by both sender as well as the receiver. The vulnerability, estimated as high in severity, has been reported to Apple Security team on June 9, 2015 and the company patched the issue within a month. How the vulnerability works? By exploiting the flaw, a remote hacker can manipulate the name value ( device cell name ) by replacing it with a malicious script code. Now, if the attacker buys any product in the App Store or iTunes Store, the internal app store service takes the device value ( which is actually the malicious code ) and generates the invoice which is then sends to the seller account. This results in

What if you get 1 Million Frequent Flyer Miles for Free? Yes, 1 Million Air Miles… …I think that would be enough for several first-class trips to Europe or up to 20 round-trips in the United States. Two Computer Hackers have earned more than 1 Million frequent-flyer miles each from United Airlines for finding multiple security vulnerabilities in the Airline's website. Back in May this year, Chicago-based ' United Airlines ' launched a bug bounty program and invited security researchers and bug hunters to find and report security vulnerabilities in its websites, software, apps and web portals. Jordan Wiens , a security researcher from Florida and one of two bounty winners, tweeted last week that he earned United Airlines' top reward of 1 Million Miles for finding a flaw that could have allowed a hacker to seize control of one of the airline's websites. Wiens is not allowed to disclose the technical details regarding the vulnerabilities, but

If you are a security researcher and fond of traveling from one conference to another, then United Airlines' bug bounty program would be of great interest for you. United Airlines has launched a new bug bounty program inviting security researchers and bug hunters to report vulnerabilities in its websites, apps and web portals. Bug bounty programs are very common among technology firms, including Google and Facebook, who offer you hundreds of thousands of dollars as rewards for exposing security flaws and errors in their products. So, what's different in United Airlines new bug bounty? The most interesting part of this bug bounty program is – Instead of offering cold, hard cash, United Airlines is offering air miles as the reward for yours . Let's see what United Airlines says about its bug bounty program: " At United, we take your safety, security and privacy seriously. We utilize best practices and are confident that our systems are secure ,"

If you're a bug hunter and love playing with codes than you could grab as much as US$15,000 from Microsoft for finding out vulnerabilities in its latest Project Spartan browser . Yes, $15,000! It seems like Redmond don't want to take a chance to let hackers and cyber criminals get their hands on the company's latest Windows 10 operating system. On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that the company will be expanding its bug bounty program ahead of the release of Windows 10, which will include a two-month hunt for vulnerabilities in its new web browser, Project Spartan. So, it's time for security researchers and hackers to earn extra cash from Microsoft. For those who are unaware… What's Project Spartan? Project Spartan is Microsoft's project for its new web browser to replace the oldest Internet Explorer from its Windows operating system. Though the project is still very much under the developmental stage, Microsoft is making every effort to make Spartan

A security researcher has discovered a critical vulnerability in Google-owned YouTube that could allow anyone to make the comment posted by any celebrity or public figure on some YouTube video appear on his or her own YouTube video, impersonating that celeb. Just a few weeks ago we reported about a simple logical vulnerability in YouTube that could have been exploited by anyone to delete any video from YouTube in just one shot . Now: Again a small trick in the popular video sharing website could allow anyone to play with the comments posted by users on YouTube videos. Ahmed Aboul-Ela and  Ibrahim M. El-Sayed , two Egyptian security researcher, found a simple trick that allowed him to copy any comments from any video on the popular video sharing website to his video, even without any user-interaction. Not only this, but also: This vulnerability allows you to spoof, duplicate or copy the comments on discussion boards from any YouTube channel and make it appe

A security researcher has discovered a simple but critical vulnerability in Google-owned YouTube that could be exploited by anyone to knock down the whole business of the popular video sharing website. Kamil Hismatullin , a Russian security bod, found a simple logical vulnerability that allowed him to delete any video from YouTube in one shot . While looking for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) or Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) flaws in YouTube Creator Studio, Hismatullin came across a simple logical bug that could wipe up any video by just sending an identity number of any video in a post request against any session token. The bug was simple but critical as it could be exploited by an attacker to fool YouTube easily into deleting any video on its system. "I've fought the urge to [delete] Bieber's channel," Hismatullin wrote in his blog post . "Luckily no Bieber videos were harmed." Citing the consequences of the issue, Hismatullin said "this vulne

Yahoo! has offered $24,000 to a security researcher for finding out and reporting three critical security vulnerabilities in its products including Yahoo! Stores and Yahoo!-hosted websites. While testing all the company's application, Mark Litchfield , a bug bounty hunter who often works with different companies, discovered three critical vulnerabilities in Yahoo!'s products. All the three vulnerabilities have now been fixed by Yahoo!. THREE CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITIES The first and most critical vulnerability gives hackers full administrator access to Yahoo!'s e-commerce platform, Yahoo! Small Business , a portal that allows small business owners to create their own web stores through Yahoo! and sell merchandise. According to the researcher, the flaw in the service allowed him to fully administrator any Yahoo store and thereby gain access to customers' personally identifiable information, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers.

A Serious vulnerability in Facebook has recently been reported that could allow anyone to delete your complete Facebook photo album without having authentication. Security Researcher Laxman Muthiyah told The Hacker News that the vulnerability actually resides in Facebook Graph API mechanism, which allows "a hacker to delete any photo album on Facebook . Any photo album owned by an user or a page or a group could be deleted." DELETING FACEBOOK PHOTO ALBUMS According to Facebook developers documentation, its not possible to delete albums using the Graph API, but Indian security researcher has found a way to delete not just his own, but also others Facebook photo albums within few seconds. " I decided to try it with Facebook for mobile access token because we can see delete option for all photo albums in Facebook mobile application isn't it? Yeah and also it uses the same Graph API ," he said. In general, Facebook Graph API requires an access tok

A critical cross-site scripting ( XSS ) vulnerability in the Google Apps administrator console allowed cyber criminals to force a Google Apps admins to execute just about any request on the https://admin.google.com/ domain. The Google Apps admin console allows administrators to manage their organization's account. Administrators can use the console to add new users, configure permissions, manage security settings and enable Google services for your domain. The feature is primarily used by many businesses, especially those using Gmail as the e-mail service for their domain. The XSS flaw allowed attackers to force the admin to do the following actions: Creating new users with "super admin" rights Disabling two-factor authentication ( 2FA ) and other security measures from existing accounts or from multiple domains Modifying domain settings so that all incoming e-mails are redirected to addresses controlled by the attacker Hijack an account/email by resett

Along with a dream to make Internet access available to everyone across the world, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is working to make the Internet a more secure place as well. Till now, a number of large technology companies have bug bounty programs to reward researchers and cyber enthusiast who contribute in the security of Internet by finding out security holes in software or web platforms, and the social networking giant Facebook is the latest one to do so. Facebook and Usenix have together implemented the Internet Defense Prize — an award recognizing superior quality research that combines a working prototype with great contributions to securing the Internet, Facebook announced Thursday at the annual USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego. Also, Facebook announced the first award under its Internet Defense Prize, and crowned a pair of German researchers for their paper , " Static Detection of Second-Order Vulnerabilities in Web Applications " — a seemingly viabl

Another privacy issue has been discovered in Google Drive which could have led sensitive and personal information stored on the cloud service exposed to unauthorized parties. The security flaw has now patched by Google, but its discovery indicates that the vulnerability of cloud data when accessed via a link can allow " anyone who has the link " to access your private data without any further authentication. HOW THE SECURITY FLAW WORKS The security hole addressed a risk to files that included a clickable URL on your cloud file sharing service. When someone opens the file and clicks on an embedded hyperlink, then they get sent to the website of a third-party website owner. Upon accessing this URL, unfortunately the external Internet user - an unauthorized party - could potentially access your sensitive information by accessing the original documents that included the URL. GOOGLE EXPLANATION Google explained the actual nature of the security flaw in a blog p

It has been months ago since the release of Samsung's latest Smartphone, Galaxy S5 and we have seen a portion of International units receive root, but a couple of the carrier variants including the developer edition of Samsung Galaxy S5 for Verizon and At&T hasn't been in the list, sadly. The Interesting part is that till now no hacker has found a way out to gain the root-rights of the Verizon as well as AT&T version of the Samsung Galaxy S5. Now, the Verizon and AT&T users who own Samsung Galaxy S5 are reportedly itching to get Android rooting technique for their devices, so that they can do tons of things such as customizations, patching apps, installing third-party ROMs etc. This situation is something unacceptable to the developers and Galaxy S5 users, and finally the senior members of XDA developers in collaboration with the group of Verizon and AT&T customers have started a Crowd funded Bounty program for achieving the root on Verizon and AT&

Two months ago, we reported a critical vulnerability on the Yahoo Answers platform that allowed a hacker to delete all the posted thread and comments from Yahoo's Suggestion Board website. Recently, a similar vulnerability has been reported by another Egyptian security researcher ' Ahmed Aboul-Ela ', that allows him to delete any comment from all Yahoo Services, including Yahoo News , Yahoo Sports , Yahoo TV , Yahoo Music , Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Celebrity , Yahoo Voices and more. HOW TO DELETE ANY COMMENT When yahoo users comment on any article or post on any of the Yahoo services, they are allowed to delete their own comment anytime. But the reported vulnerability discovered by Ahmed allows them to delete all the comments, even if they are posted by others. To delete a comment, one can initiate the request by clicking on the delete button and once clicked, the page sends a POST request to the Yahoo server with some variables i.e. comment_id and content_id , where comm

NSS Labs issued the report titled " The Known Unknowns " to explain the dynamics behind the market of zero-day exploits. Last week I discussed about the necessity to define a model for " cyber conflict " to qualify the principal issues related to the use of cyber tools and cyber weapons in an Information Warfare context, today I decided to give more info to the readers on cyber arsenals of governments. Governments consider the use of cyber weapons as a coadiuvant to conventional weapons, these malicious application could be used for sabotage or for cyber espionage, they could be used to hit a specifically designed software (e.g. SCADA within a critical infrastructure ) or they could be used for large scale operations infecting thousand of machines exploiting zero-day in common application ( e.g. Java platform, Adobe software ). The zero-day flaw are the most important component for the design of an efficient cyber weapon, governments have recently created dedic

Indian Security Enthusiast ' Arul Kumar ' recently reported an interesting Facebook vulnerability that allowed him to delete any Facebook image within a minute. Facebook Bug Bounty program rewarded him with  $12,500 USD for helping the Facebook Security team to patch this critical loophole in their own " Support Dashboard ". The flaw is critical because using this exploitation method hacker can also delete Mark Zuckerberg's ( Facebook Founder ) Photos from his Photo Album, or even from wall of any verified page too. Arul posted on his blog, " The Support Dashboard is a portal designed to help you track the progress of the reports you make to Facebook. From your Support Dashboard, you can see if your report has been reviewed by Facebook employees who assess reports 24 hours a day, seven days a week ." That means, if you will report abuse the targeted image and send a Photo Removal Request, Facebook Server Will automatically generate

When coders and online security researchers find errors in websites or software, the companies behind the programs will often pay out a bounty to the person who discovered the issue. The programs are intended to create an incentive for researchers to privately report issues and allow vendors to release fixes before hackers take advantage of flaws. A 17-year-old German student says he found a security flaw in PayPal's website but was denied a reward because he's too young. On PayPal's website, the company lists the terms for rewarding people who find bugs, but mentions nothing about the age of the discoverer.  The details of the vulnerability, i.e cross-site scripting flaw (XSS), is posted on Full Disclosure section. In Past we have seen that many times PayPal tried to cheat with new security researchers by replying various reasons on reporting bugs i.e "already reported by someone else", "domain / sub-domain is not under bounty program", &q

Mohamed Ramadan from Attack-Secure discovered a critical vulnerability in Etsy's iPhone application. Etsy is a social commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies. Any attacker on the same network can sniff traffic (including user password) invisibly without any warning from Etsy app. Its is very similar to the man in the middle attack reported in iPhone Instagram app a few days back. Bug Hunting ! Because Etsy having a Security Bug Bounty Program , so first Mohamed was trying to find a vulnerability in Etsy website , later he found that they have enough good security. Because Etsy mobile apps are eligible in bug bounty program, so next try was on Mobile apps. Mohamed finally  downloaded the latest version 2.2 and installed that on his iPhone 4S with iOS 6 and also on his ipad. Then he configured his Burp Suite proxy 1.5 to listen on all interfaces on port 8080 in invisible mode.  He disabled any firewall and con