Cyber Attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Magecart strikes again, one of the most notorious hacking groups specializes in stealing credit card details from poorly-secured e-commerce websites. According to security researchers from RiskIQ and Trend Micro, cybercriminals of a new subgroup of Magecart, labeled as "Magecart Group 12," recently successfully compromised nearly 277 e-commerce websites by using supply-chain attacks. Magecart is the same group of digital credit card skimmers which made headlines last year for carrying out attacks against some big businesses including Ticketmaster , British Airways , and Newegg . Typically, the Magecart hackers compromise e-commerce sites and insert malicious JavaScript code into their checkout pages that silently captures payment information of customers making purchasing on the sites and then send it to the attacker's remote server. However, the researchers from the two firms today revealed that instead of directly compromising targeted websites, the Magecart G

If you are responsible for the cybersecurity of a medium-sized company , you may assume your organization is too small to be targeted. Well, think again. While the major headlines tend to focus on large enterprises getting breached – such as Sony, Equifax, or Target the actual reality is that small and mid-sized companies are experiencing similar threats. According to Verizon's 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, fifty-eight percent of malware attack victims are SMBs. Added to this is the fact that attack vectors that target small and medium-sized businesses are growing increasingly sophisticated, which makes securing them respectively challenging, and the trend of targeting ransomware campaigns on smaller organizations, as attackers assume smaller outfits are more likely to quickly pay in order to avoid damage to their business and reputation. Cisco's 2018 Security Capabilities Benchmark Study states that 44 percent of cyber attacks cost organizations over $500,000 i

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

A simple DDoS attack could land you in jail for 10 years or even more. A Massachusetts man has been sentenced to over 10 years in prison for launching DDoS attacks against the computer network of two healthcare organizations in 2014 to protest the treatment of a teenager at the centers. Beyond serving 121 months in prison, Martin Gottesfeld , 34, was also ordered by U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton to pay nearly $443,000 in restitution for damages he caused to the targeted facilities. Gottesfeld carried out the DDoS attacks on behalf of the Anonymous hacker collective against Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) and Wayside Youth & Family Support Network—a nonprofit home treatment facility that provides a range of mental health counselings to children, young adults, and families in Massachusetts. In April 2014, the hacker used a botnet of over 40,000 network routers that he infected with customized malicious software to carry out the DDoS attacks that not only knocke

Popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has suspended all transactions of Ethereum Classic (ETC)—the original unforked version of the Ethereum network—on their trading platforms, other products and services after detecting a potential attack on the cryptocurrency network that let someone spend the same digital coins twice. Why is this attack concerning? The heist resulted in the loss of $1.1 million worth of the Ethereum Classic digital currency. The digital currency immediately fell in price after the news came out. Coinbase revealed Monday that it identified "a deep chain reorganization" of the Ethereum Classic blockchain (or 51 percent attack of the network), which means that someone controlling the majority of miners on the network (over 50%) had modified the transaction history. After reorganizing the Ethereum blockchain, the attackers were able to what's called "double spend" about 219,500 ETC by recovering previously spent coins from the rightfu

Germany has been hit with the biggest hack in its history. A group of unknown hackers has leaked highly-sensitive personal data from more than 100 German politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Brandenburg's prime minister Dietmar Woidke, along with some German artists, journalists, and YouTube celebrities. The leaked data that was published on a Twitter account ( @_0rbit ) and dated back to before October 2018 includes phone numbers, email addresses, private chats, bills, credit card information and photos of victims' IDs. Although it is yet unclear who perpetrated this mass hack and how they managed to perform it, the leaked data appears to be collected unauthorizedly by hacking into their smartphones. The hack targeted all of Germany's political parties currently represented in the federal parliament, including the CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP, Left party (Die Linke) and Greens, except for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). While Justice Minister

Microsoft today issued an out-of-band security update to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that attackers are already exploiting in the wild to hack into Windows computers. Discovered by security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8653, is a remote code execution (RCE) flaw in the IE browser's scripting engine. According to the advisory, an unspecified memory corruption vulnerability resides in the scripting engine JScript component of Microsoft Internet Explorer that handles execution of scripting languages. If exploited successfully, the vulnerability could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user. "If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change,

Security researchers have discovered yet another example of how cybercriminals disguise their malware activities as regular traffic by using legitimate cloud-based services. Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a new piece of malware that retrieves commands from memes posted on a Twitter account controlled by the attackers. Most malware relies on communication with their command-and-control server to receive instructions from attackers and perform various tasks on infected computers. Since security tools keep an eye on the network traffic to detect malicious IP addresses, attackers are increasingly using legitimate websites and servers as infrastructure in their attacks to make the malicious software more difficult to detect. In the recently spotted malicious scheme, which according to the researchers is in its early stage, the hackers uses Steganography —a technique of hiding contents within a digital graphic image in such a way that's invisible to an observer—to hid

Shamoon is back… one of the most destructive malware families that caused damage to Saudi Arabia's largest oil producer in 2012 and this time it has targeted energy sector organizations primarily operating in the Middle East. Earlier this week, Italian oil drilling company Saipem was attacked and sensitive files on about 10 percent of its servers were destroyed, mainly in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, but also in India and Scotland. Saipem admitted Wednesday that the computer virus used in the latest cyber attack against its servers is a variant Shamoon—a disk wiping malware that was used in the most damaging cyber attacks in history against Saudi Aramco and RasGas Co Ltd and destroyed data on more than 30,000 systems. The cyber attack against Saudi Aramco, who is the biggest customer of Saipem, was attributed to Iran, but it is unclear who is behind the latest cyber attacks against Saipem. Meanwhile, Chronicle, Google'

Multinational computer technology company Dell disclosed Wednesday that its online electronics marketplace experienced a "cybersecurity incident" earlier this month when an unknown group of hackers infiltrated its internal network. On November 9, Dell detected and disrupted unauthorized activity on its network attempting to steal customer information, including their names, email addresses and hashed passwords. According to the company, the initial investigation found no conclusive evidence that the hackers succeeded to extract any information, but as a countermeasure Dell has reset passwords for all accounts on Dell.com website whether the data had been stolen or not. Dell did not share any information on how hackers managed to infiltrate its network at the first place or how many user accounts were affected, but the company did confirm that payment information and Social Security numbers were not targeted. "Credit card and other sensitive customer information

The Department of Justice announced Wednesday charges against two Iranian nationals for their involvement in creating and deploying the notorious SamSam ransomware. The alleged hackers, Faramarz Shahi Savandi, 34, and Mohammad Mehdi Shah, 27, have been charged on several counts of computer hacking and fraud charges, the indictment unsealed today at New Jersey court revealed. The duo used SamSam ransomware to extort over $6 million in ransom payments since 2015, and also caused more than $30 million in damages to over 200 victims, including hospitals , municipalities, and public institutions. According to the indictment, Savandi and Mansouri have been charged with a total of six counts, including one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers, two counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, and two counts of transmitting a demand in relation to damaging a protected computer. Si

A widely used third-party NodeJS module with nearly 2 million downloads a week was compromised after one of its open-source contributor gone rogue, who infected it with a malicious code that was programmed to steal funds stored in Bitcoin wallet apps. The Node.js library in question is "Event-Stream," a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to create and work with streams, a collection of data in Node.js — just like arrays or strings. The malicious code detected earlier this week was added to Event-Stream version 3.3.6, published on September 9 via NPM repository , and had since been downloaded by nearly 8 million application programmers. Event-Stream module for Node.js was originally created by Dominic Tarr, who maintained the Event-Stream library for a long time, but handed over the development and maintenance of the project several months ago to an unknown programmer, called "right9ctrl." Apparently, right9ctrl gained Dominic's trust by making

The real identity of Tessa88—the notorious hacker tied to several high-profile cyber attacks including the LinkedIn , DropBox and MySpace mega breaches—has been revealed as Maksim Vladimirovich Donakov (Максим Владимирович Донаков), a resident of Penza, Russian Federation. In early 2016, a hacker with pseudonym Tessa88 emerged online offering stolen databases from some of the biggest social media websites in the world, including LinkedIn, MySpace, VKontakte (vk.com), Dropbox, Rambler , and Twitter , for sale in various underground hacking forums. The stolen data, taken years ago from several social media sites, included more than half a billion username and password combinations, which were then used in phishing, account takeover, and other cyber attacks. Though Tessa88's profile was active for a few months between February and May 2016, the OPSEC analysis revealed that the same person was involved in various cybercriminal activities since as early as 2012 under different

Two hackers have been sent to prison for their roles in hacking TalkTalk , one of the biggest UK-based telecommunications company, in 2015 and stealing personal information, banking, and credit card details belonging to more than 156,000 customers. Matthew Hanley, 23, and Connor Allsopp, 21, both from Tamworth in Staffordshire, were sentenced Monday to 12 months and 8 months in prison, respectively, after they admitted charges relating to the massive breach that cost TalkTalk £77 million in losses. The total cost also included the massive £400,000 fine imposed by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) on TalkTalk for failings to implement the most basic security measures in order to prevent the hack from happening. At the Old Bailey, the judge Anuja Dhir described Hanley as a "dedicated hacker" and sentenced him to 12 months in prison; whereas, Allsopp gets 8-months prison for his lesser role in the cyber attack. The Judge also said that it was a tragedy

Has Wikileaks founder Julian Assange officially been charged with any unspecified criminal offense in the United States? — YES United States prosecutors have accidentally revealed the existence of criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a recently unsealed court filing in an unrelated ongoing sex crime case in the Eastern District of Virginia. Assistant US Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, who made this disclosure on August 22, urged the judge to keep the indictment [ pdf ] prepared against Assange sealed (secret) "due to the sophistication of the defendant, and the publicity surrounding the case." Dwyer is assigned to the WikiLeaks case. Dwyer also said the charges would "need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges" in the indictment and can, therefore "no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter." WikiLeaks, the website that published thousands of classified U.S. government do

Disclosed earlier this year, potentially dangerous Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected a large family of modern processors proven that speculative execution attacks can be exploited in a trivial way to access highly sensitive information. Since then, several more variants of speculative execution attacks have been discovered, including Spectre-NG , SpectreRSB, Spectre 1.1, Spectre1.2, TLBleed , Lazy FP , NetSpectre and Foreshadow , patches for which were released by affected vendors time-to-time. Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded. Now, the same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have uncovered 7 new transient execution attacks affecting 3 major processor vendors—Intel, AMD, ARM. W

A 23-year-old hacker from Utah pleaded guilty this week to launching a series of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against multiple online services, websites, and online gaming companies between 2013 and 2014. According to a Justice Department (DoJ) press release, Austin Thompson , a.k.a. "DerpTroll," took down servers of several major gaming platforms including Electronic Arts' Origin service, the Sony PlayStation network , and Valve Software's Steam, between December 2013 and January 2014, by flooding them with enough internet traffic. Thompson then typically used the Twitter account the @DerpTrolling handle to announce his attacks, subsequently posting screenshots or other photos of the server being unavailable after launching DDoS attacks. The attacks usually took down game servers and related computers of the victim companies for at least a few hours at a time, causing at least $95,000 in damages to the gaming companies around the world. "Denial-of

Late last week an unknown hacker or a group of hackers successfully targeted a cryptocurrency exchange with an aim to steal Bitcoins by compromising the web analytics service it was using. ESET malware researcher Matthieu Faou this weekend spotted malicious JavaScript code on up to 700,000 websites that were bundled with the traffic tracking code from the leading web analytics platform StatCounter . However, after analyzing the code, the researchers found that hackers managed to compromise StatCounter and successfully replaced its tracking script with malicious JavaScript code primarily designed to target customers of the Gate.io cryptocurrency exchange. Like Google Analytics, StatCounter is also an old, but popular real-time web analytics platform reportedly being used by more than two million websites and generates stats on over 10 billion page views per month. Here's How Hackers Tried to Steal Bitcoins from Crypto Exchange Though the malicious code was also inject

Tumblr today published a report admitting the presence of a security vulnerability in its website that could have allowed hackers to steal login credentials and other private information for users' accounts. The affected information included users email addresses, protected (hashed and salted) account passwords, self-reported location (a feature no longer available), previously used email addresses, last login IP addresses, and names of the blog associated with every account. According to the company, a security researcher discovered a critical vulnerability in the desktop version of its website and responsibly reported it to the Tumblr security team via its bug bounty program. Though the company has not revealed the researcher's name or any technical details about the vulnerability, Tumblr has disclosed that the flaw resided in the "Recommended Blogs" feature of its website. Recommended Blogs has been designed to display a short, rotating list of blogs o

A media report today revealed details of a significant supply chain attack which appears to be one of the largest corporate espionage and hardware hacking programs from a nation-state. According to a lengthy report published today by Bloomberg, a tiny surveillance chip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, has been found hidden in the servers used by nearly 30 American companies, including Apple and Amazon. The malicious chips, which were not part of the original server motherboards designed by the U.S-based company Super Micro, had been inserted during the manufacturing process in China. The report, based on a 3-year-long top-secret investigation in the United States, claims that the Chinese government-affiliated groups managed to infiltrate the supply chain to install tiny surveillance chips to motherboards which ended up in servers deployed by U.S. military, U.S. intelligence agencies, and many U.S. companies like Apple and Amazon. "Apple made its discovery of suspi

The US-CERT has released a joint technical alert from the DHS, the FBI, and Treasury warning about a new ATM scheme being used by the prolific North Korean APT hacking group known as Hidden Cobra . Hidden Cobra, also known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by the North Korean government and has previously launched attacks against a number of media organizations, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The group had also reportedly been associated with the WannaCry ransomware menace that last year shut down hospitals and big businesses worldwide, the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016, as well as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014. Now, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of the Treasury have released details about a new cyber attack, dubbed " FASTCash ," that Hidden Cobra has been using since at least 2016 to cash out ATMs by compromising the bank server. FASTCash Hack