Kill Switch | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A computer hacker who allegedly helped the terrorist organization ISIS by handing over data for 1,351 US government and military personnel has been sentenced to 20 years in a U.S. prison. Ardit Ferizi , aka Th3Dir3ctorY, from Kosovo was sentenced in federal court in Alexandria, for "providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and accessing a protected computer without authorization and obtaining information in order to provide material support to ISIL," the Department of Justice announced  on Friday. The 21-year-old ISIS-linked hacker obtained the data by hacking into the US web hosting company's servers on June 13, 2015. Ferizi then filtered out over 1,300 US military and government employees' information from the stolen data and then handed them over to Junaid Hussain , according to court filings [ PDF ]. The stolen data contains personally identifiable information (PII), which includes names, email addresses, passwords, lo...

USBkill — A new program that once activated, will instantly disable the laptop or computer if there is any activity on USB port. Hey Wait, don't compare USBkill with the USB Killer stick that destroy sensitive components of a computer when plugged-in. "USBKill" is a new weapon that could be a boon for whistleblowers, journalists, activists, and even cyber criminals who want to keep their information away from police and cyber thieves. It is like, if you are caught, kill yourself. In the same fashion as terrorists do. Here I am not talking about to kill yourself, but to kill the data from your laptop if the law enforcement has caught your laptop. USBkill does exactly this by turning a thumb drive into a kill switch that if unplugged, forces systems to shut down. Hephaestos ( @h3phaestos ), the author of USBkill, reports that the tool will help prevent users from becoming the next Ross Ulbricht , founder of the infamous underground drug marketplace ...

Are you using the cloud or thinking about transitioning? Undoubtedly, multi-cloud and hybrid environments offer numerous benefits for organizations. However, the cloud's flexibility, scalability, and efficiency come with significant risk — an expanded attack surface. The decentralization that comes with utilizing multi-cloud environments can also lead to limited visibility into user activity and poor access management.  Privileged accounts with access to your critical systems and sensitive data are among the most vulnerable elements in cloud setups. When mismanaged, these accounts open the doors to unauthorized access, potential malicious activity, and data breaches. That's why strong privileged access management (PAM) is indispensable. PAM plays an essential role in addressing the security challenges of complex infrastructures by enforcing strict access controls and managing the life cycle of privileged accounts. By employing PAM in hybrid and cloud environments, you're not...

Kill Switch - the ability to render devices non-operational to prevent theft - has become a hot topic nowadays. The ability to remotely destroy data of the device lost or stolen has been available for quite some time now, but Kill switch not only remotely destroy the devices' data but also the device itself, making it useless for the thieves. Just last week, Google and Microsoft signed an agreement with the New York Attorney General to add " kill switches " to the upcoming versions of Android and Windows Phone devices, as a part of the " Secure our Smartphones " initiative. But now, the largest chip manufacturer, Intel will soon going to provide Kill Switches for your laptops as well. The company has been working on a project called Wireless Credential Exchange (WCE) with several partners in an effort to bring Kill switch to other mobile devices, including laptops. The project uses RFID technology to provision, track and monitor devices such as lapt...