The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: Hacker News

Intelligence agencies in the US have released information about a new variant of 12-year-old computer virus used by China's state-sponsored hackers targeting governments, corporations, and think tanks. Named " Taidoor, " the malware has done an 'excellent' job of compromising systems as early as 2008 , with the actors deploying it on victim networks for stealthy remote access. "[The] FBI has high confidence that Chinese government actors are using malware variants in conjunction with proxy servers to maintain a presence on victim networks and to further network exploitation," the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Defense (DoD) said in a joint advisory . The US Cyber Command has also uploaded four samples of the Taidoor RAT on the public malware repository VirusTotal to let 50+ Antivirus companies check the virus's involvement in other unattributed cam

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

OurMine is in headlines once again—this time for defacing WikiLeaks website. The notorious hacking group, OurMine, is known for breaching into high-profile figures and companies' social media accounts, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey , Google CEO Sundar Pichai , HBO , Game of Thrones and Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN). According to screenshots circulating on Twitter , the official website of WikiLeaks has reportedly been defaced by the OurMine hacking group, who left a message on the site, as shown above. WikiLeaks is a whistleblowing website that since March, has been revealing top CIA hacking secrets under Vault 7 , including the agency's ability to break into different mobile and desktop platforms , security camera live video streams , air-gap computers and many more. There is no indication of WikiLeaks servers and website been compromised, instead it seems their website has been redirected to a hacker-controlled server

Can you believe that it's been 6 years since we first launched The Hacker News? Yes, The Hacker News is celebrating its sixth anniversary today on 1st November. We started this site on this same day back in 2010 with the purpose of providing a dedicated platform to deliver latest infosec news and threat updates for Hackers, Security researchers, technologists, and nerds. Times flies when you are having fun! The Hacker News has become one of the World's popular and trusted Hacking News channel that went from ~100,000 readers to more than 10 million monthly readers — all because of THN readers high enthusiasm. In this short span of time, The Hacker News has achieved a series of milestone: The Hacker News Facebook page is going to hit 1.5 Million Followers, More than 1.6 Million followers on Google Plus+ , Over 200,000 Email Subscribers , And around 307,000 Twitter Followers. What's more? The Twitter Account of The Hacker News became officially verified (

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

We are back with our last week's top cyber security threats and challenges, just in case you missed any of them ( ICYMI ). THN Weekly Round Up is The Hacker News efforts to help you provide all important stories of last week in one shot. We recommend you read the full story ( just click 'Read More' because there's some valuable advice in there as well ). Here's the list: 1. Quantum Teleportation — Scientists Teleported Quantum Data over 60 Miles While the world is battling between Quantum computers and Encryption , the NIST Scientists have set a new record in the field of " Quantum Teleportation "... …by successfully Teleporting a small amount of data (qubit) inside light particles over a distance of 60 Miles (100 km) through a network of optical fiber – the record which is four times faster than previous one. To know how the Quantum Teleportation works and how the researchers able to reach this record, Read More … 2. Pirate Bay co-fo

To make the last week's top cyber security threats and challenges available to you in one shot, we are once again here with our weekly round up. Last week, we came across lots of cyber security threats like the XCodeGhost malware in Apple's App Store and lockscreen bypass bug in iOS 9 and iOS 9.0.1 that made us sad, but… …we were also thrilled by latest developments such as Microsoft's new Linux-based operating system  Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) , unhackable MicroKernel " SeL4 ", and Facebook ' Dislike or Empathy Button '. I recommend you to read the entire thing (just click ' Read More ' because there's some valuable advice in there as well). Here's the list: 1. Microsoft Developed its Own Linux Operating System One of the trending news of last week. Microsoft built its own Linux-based operating system known as Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) . The company described ACS as a "cross-platform, modular operating system for data center n

My usual bed routine is to check comments under my articles before I go to sleep. The same I was doing last night, but something weird happened to me. Someone posted a mysterious short link without any text below one of my articles on our  official 'The Hacker News' Facebook Page , and with the curiosity to check that link I visited that website. And what I saw… One by one my every single account I logged in into my web browser got automatically logged out just in few seconds in front of my eyes. This is exactly what Super Logout does. Log Out All Your Accounts in Just One Click Yes, Super Logout – a website that logs you out of over 30 major Internet services just in one click. You can visit 'Super Logout' here . ( Note : Once clicked, this will log you out instantly from all your online accounts and don't worry it is neither harmful, nor malicious ) This is a great tool for people who: Usually visit Internet Cafes for surfing In

In Part I of this  two-part series from The Hacker News , the First Four list of Top Brutal Cyber Attacks shows that whoever you are, Security can never be perfect. As attackers employ innovative hacking techniques and zero-day exploits, the demand for increased threat protection grows. In this article, I have listed another three cyber attacks, as following: #5 Car Hacking Driving a car is a network's game now! ' Everything is hackable ,' but is your car also vulnerable to Hackers ? General Motors' OnStar application and cars like Jeep Cherokee, Cadillac Escalade, Toyota Prius, Dodge Viper, Audi A8 and many more come equipped with more advanced technology features. These cars are now part of the technology very well known as the " Internet of Things ". Recently two Security researchers, Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller demonstrated that Jeep Cherokee could be hacked wirelessly over the internet to hijack its steering, brakes, and transmi

If you believe that your organization is not at real risk of cyber attack, then you are absolutely wrong. Incidents of massive data breaches, advanced cyber attacks coming from China , groups like Syrian Electronic Army , Hacking Point of Sale machines at retailers such as Target have splashed across the news in the last one year. Whether a Government Agency or Private Company, Small or a Large Tech Company.... ...It's no secret that No one is Immune to Cyber Attacks . This article is the first in a two-part series from The Hacker News , listing first four out of  Top 7 Brutal Cyber Attacks. And here we go... #1 "Hacking Team" Data Breach Hacking Team , the controversial spyware company, recently been hacked by some unidentified hackers that exposed over 400 gigabytes of its internal sensitive data on the Internet. Milan (Italy) based IT firm 'Hacking Team' sells intrusion and surveillance software solutions to Governments and Law Enforcement agen

Do you own a Smartwatch ? If yes, then how safe it is? There are almost 100 percent chances that you own a vulnerable Smartwatch. Computer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard is warning users of smartwatches including Apple Watch and Samsung Gear that their wearable devices are vulnerable to cyber attacks. In a study, HP's Fortify tested today's top 10 smartwatches for security features, such as basic data encryption, password protection and privacy concerns. The most shocking part of the study was that –  Not even a Single Smartwatch Found to be 100 percent Safe Security experts found that 100 percent of wearable devices contained at least one serious security vulnerability that could make the devices vulnerable to hackers. With the increase in the adoption of smartwatches, manufacturers need to pay closer attention to the customers' security because these wearable devices could potentially open doors to new threats to personal and sensitive informat

We all have been receiving spam phone calls and messages on almost daily basis from scammers who want to pilfer your money and personal information, but a new type of social engineering hack that makes use of just your mobile number to trick you is a little scarier. Security firm Symantec is warning people about a new password recovery scam that tricks users into handing over their webmail account access to the attackers. In order to get into your email account, an attacker does not need any coding or technical skills. All an attacker needs your email address in question and your cell phone number. Since the process to reset the password is almost similar to all mail services, this new password recovery scam affects all popular webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook among others. Symantec has provided a video explanation of how this new hack attack works. The trick is as simple as it sounds: if you want to reset someone's email account password, all y

I hope you all still remember the famous and powerful Remote Administration Tool (RAT) called ' Dark Comet ', developed by a French computer geek ' Jean-Pierre Lesueur ', also known as ' DarkCoderSc '. However, He had closed the Dark Comet project, when the Syrian government found to be using it to track down and to spy on their people. After that  DarkCoderSc  started working under a new banner ' Phrozen Software ' to develop many new security softwares and penetration testing tools. Just yesterday, Jean-Pierre and his team-mate Fabio Pinto  from French University, have released a new tool called ' Rakabulle ', a file binder with some cool features for penetration testers and malware researchers. File binder is an application that allows a user to bind multiple files together, resulting in a single executable file. When you execute that single application, all previous merged files will be extracted to a temporary location, and will be exe

There's an extraordinary malware making rock-n-roll over the Internet and if you are one of the unlucky folks to cross its path, then it could make your computer unusable and you have to pay a few hundred Dollars to retrieve your important data back. We have warned our readers in many  previous articles about a nasty piece of Ransomware malware called ' CryptoLocker ', which is targeting computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. The CryptoLocker  Ransomware encrypts the files on a victim's computer and issues an ultimatum - Pay up or lose your data . Users who are getting infected with CryptoLocker can see a message informing them that their computer is locked up and their files encrypted. It then asks them to make a ransom payment, which typically ranges between $100 and $700 or 2 Bitcoins , to get their files back. Just yesterday I noticed on a forum that the criminals behind the CryptoLocker malware has recently launched a dedicated  Cry