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Google catches Indian Government Agency with Fake Digital Certificates

Google catches Indian Government Agency with Fake Digital Certificates
Jul 09, 2014
Google has identified and blocked unauthorized digital certificates for a number of its domains issued by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) of India, a unit of India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. National Informatics Center (NIC) holds several intermediate Certification Authority (CA) certs trusted by the Indian government's top CA, Indian Controller of Certifying Authorities (India CCA), which are included in the Microsoft Root Store and so are trusted by a large number of applications running on Windows, including Internet Explorer and Chrome. The use of rogue digital certificates could result in a potentially serious security and privacy threat that could allow an attacker to spy on an encrypted communication between a user's device and a secure HTTPS website, which is thought to be secure. Google became aware of the fake certificates last Wednesday on July 2 and within 24 hours, the Indian Controller of Certifying Authorities (Ind

Iranian Hackers Pose as Journalists to Spy on US Government Officials and Diplomats

Iranian Hackers Pose as Journalists to Spy on US Government Officials and Diplomats
May 29, 2014
The Iranian hackers may have spent years in running a creative and most dedicated cyber espionage campaign to steal government credentials with the help of Social Media including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Blogger. A Dallas-based computer-security firm, iSIGHT Partners, has exposed today a three-year old cyber espionage campaign which they believe to have originated in Iran, targeting a number of military and political leaders in the United States, Israel and other countries by creating false social networking accounts and a fake news website. The security firm dubbed the cyber espionage operation as ' Newscaster ', under which the iranian hackers are using more than a dozen social-media accounts of fake personas on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and targeted at least 2,000 people. Since 2011, the Iranian hackers group has targeted current and former senior U.S. military officials, including a four-star U.S. Navy ad

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future
Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu

DDoS Attacks originated from thousands of .EDU and .GOV WordPress Blogs

DDoS Attacks originated from thousands of .EDU and .GOV WordPress Blogs
Dec 04, 2013
In a recent cyber attack on a Forum site, thousands of outdated legitimate WordPress blogs were abused to perform DDOS attacks using previously known vulnerabilities . After analyzing the Log file from the victim's server, we have noticed many Wordpress CMS based educational (.EDU) and Government (.GOV) websites from where the attack was originated. In the past we have reported about many such cyber attacks, where attackers hacked into the Wordpress blogs using password brute-force attack or they used the  PINGBACK  vulnerability in older versions of Wordpress without compromising the server. WordPress has a built in functionality called Pingback , which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site and it can be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations. We have seen more than 100,000 IP addresses involved in the recent DDOS attack and the victim's Forum website received more than 40,000 requests in 7 mi

Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

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websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.

Rise in website Defacement attacks by Hackers around the World

Rise in website Defacement attacks by Hackers around the World
Nov 05, 2013
Last week we noticed a rise in cyber attacks particularly - website Defacement attacks on many governments and organizations of different countries by the hackers around the world. Targeted countries include Singapore, Mexico, Philippines, Australia, Egypt, United States, Syria and many more. Out of all these targets, most controversial were Philippines and Australia, hacked by Activist group Anonymous. Last Sunday, Anonymous hackers from Indonesia defaced hundreds of websites belonging to the Australian Government , saying the action was in response to reports of spying by Australia. The websites, defaced with a message reading " Stop Spying on Indonesia ". We have shared the list of all targeted website on a pastebin note . In a separate incident, Anonymous hackers defaced more than 38 Philippine Government websites, and called on the public to support an anti-corruption protest " Million Mask March " at the Batasang Pambansa on November 5. " The government,

12-year-old Boy admits to hacking major Government sites for aiding Anonymous Hackers

12-year-old Boy admits to hacking major Government sites for aiding Anonymous Hackers
Oct 27, 2013
12-year-old Canadian has pleaded guilty to breaking into multiple major government and police websites in the name of the hacker collective Anonymous . Surprisingly, this Fifth Grade student wreaked computer havoc during the Quebec student uprising in 2012, traded pirated information to Anonymous for video games. He had not just participated in  DDoS attacks , but also stole information belonging to users and administrators. The court estimates he did $60,000 worth of damage by attacking major government websites included those of Montreal police, the Quebec Institute of Public Health, the Chilean government and some non-public sites. His lawyer also described in the Court that buy saw it as a challenge, he was only 12 years old and was no political purpose. According to Montreal police, the boy also taught others how to hack. The 12 year old was among the several hackers arrested over the Anonymous protest. While others have been arrested in connection with t

Pakistan Government servers messed up after security breach

Pakistan Government servers messed up after security breach
Mar 11, 2013
Today a cyber attack on Pakistan Government servers crash many Government departments's official websites including Ministry of Information Technology, Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Economic Affairs & Statistics, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Environment and many more. Indian Hacker ' Godzilla ' continue to strike Pakistan Government because of their support to terrorism activities. Hacker said," all network owned including switches because they deserve it, I have not touched any innocent website because target is only Government " While Pakistani official are already aware about the risk from the newest viruses, worms and cyber attacks, so they having their servers running through a proxy server located at  https://202.83.164.6/ , but flawed cyber security practices once again results to messed up whole setup and hacker successfully breach into centralized local server locat

Old School Hackers spying on European governments

Old School Hackers spying on European governments
Mar 02, 2013
Kaspersky Lab's team of experts recently published a new research report that analyzed that Cyber criminals have targeted government officials in more than 20 countries, including Ireland and Romania with a new piece of malware called ' MiniDuke '. In a recent attack, malware has infected government computers this week in an attempt to steal geopolitical intelligence. The computers were infected via a modified Adobe PDF email attachment, and the perpetrators were operating from servers based in Panama and Turkey. According to Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky," I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. I wonder if these types of malware writers, who have been in hibernation for more than a decade, have suddenly awoken and joined the sophisticated group of threat actors active in the cyber world. " Last week Adobe released an update that patches the Adobe PDF bug (CVE-2013-6040) used in the atta

I hack, reflection on the role of hacker

I hack, reflection on the role of hacker
Jan 25, 2013
The role of hacker is recognized as crucial today in cyber security, these specialists are the nightmare of security experts but their knowledge is fundamental to understand the vulnerabilities of our infrastructures … think like a hacker if you want really protect your system . But hacking is a culture, a way of life that is hard to match ago with the business logic, true hackers don't do this for money, money are fundamental but not all, the must for them is always to put into question their capabilities, try to consistently exceed their limits. Fortunately industry, private business and governments have understood it and have re-evaluated the importance of hackers, these specialists were once seen as shady individuals to avoid, today they are highly sought professionals in both private business and government sectors. Discover vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them is essential, millions of people and devices are connected to the network, a unique oppo

Operation Red October : Cyber Espionage campaign against many Governments

Operation Red October : Cyber Espionage campaign against many Governments
Jan 15, 2013
A new sensational discovered has been announced by Kaspersky Lab's Global Research & Analysis Team result of an investigation after several attacks hit computer networks of various international diplomatic service agencies. A new large scale cyber-espionage operation has been discovered, named Red October , name inspired by famous novel The Hunt For The Red October (ROCRA) and chosen because the investigation started last October. The campaign hit hundreds of machines belonging to following categories: Government Diplomatic / embassies Research institutions Trade and commerce Nuclear / energy research Oil and gas companies Aerospace Military The attackers have targeted various devices such as enterprise network equipment and mobile devices (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Nokia), hijacking files from removable disk drives, stealing e-mail databases from local Outlook storage or remote POP/IMAP server and siphoning files from local network FTP servers. Accordin

Child Porn on Indian Government websites

Child Porn on Indian Government websites
Dec 20, 2012
One of the ' The Hacker News ' reader inform us today about porn content on some Indian Government websites. After analyzing such websites, we came across more than 30 sub domains belongs to ' entegramam.gov.in ' . Where ' entegramam' means "My village" and all sub domains of this website are names of the different cities of Kerala state. The websites are in Malayalam language and most of the sites are powered by Joomla and Drupal (older vulnerable versions) with discussion forums on them. On our further analyze we found that time stamp of the Porn articles posted on forum dated back to " 2012/08/30 16:00 ".  That means, Government websites hosting Child Porn content from last four months and authorities or  the moderators of the website are not aware about the issue. On a simple Google search, one can found all such pages : site:gov.in "nude"  for further reports and analyzing. Google also giving notification " This site ma

#opIsrael - Hackers hit Israel with mass Cyber Attack over Gaza

#opIsrael - Hackers hit Israel with mass Cyber Attack over Gaza
Nov 19, 2012
Protesting against attacks taking place on Gaza, Anonymous hackers attempts to hack most of the Israel websites in the past few days. " government and private websites are under siege from hackers, who have mounted 44 million cyberattacks in less than a week" , the government said. Today Pakistani   Hackers also deface Israeli Bing , MSN, Skype, Live and other big sites and In counter-attack  Israeli Hackers Leak Credit Card  Data from Palestine ISP website. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said just one hacking attempt was successful on a site he did not want to name, but it was up and running after 10 minutes of downtime. Israel said that it generally experiences a few hundred hacking attempts per day. The attacks are reportedly coming from around the world. Defence force sites have been the hardest hit, while the president's site has been hit 10-million times, the foreign ministry seven-million times and the prime minister three-million times. Both sides have been act

Hacker leaks source code of NASA website belongs to US Government computer

Hacker leaks source code of NASA website belongs to US Government computer
Oct 26, 2012
A Hacker going by name - " LegitHacker97 " claiming that he successfully access a NASA subdomain website , that actually belongs to a US Government computer, as mentioned on homepage. ***** WARNING ***** This is a US Government computer Hacker also dump a  82.51 MB (compressed or 337 MB uncompressed) Archive five days ago on internet, includes the complete source code of the website (in ASP). After watching the pastebin note , we tried to contact the hacker for collecting more information about the hack. Hacker describe The Hacker News via mail that," This was hacked by a major LFI vulnerability which allowed me to upload my own shell (backdoor to the site) and I took advantage of it by downloading all off the website ! ". He add ," But now vulnerability is fixed ". I download the dump from the link posetd by hacker in pastebin note and tried to match the files with NASA website and subdomains, and found that these file actually belo
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