Man-in-the-Middle | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

I was watching my favorite show on the television and it was just half over when I saw something which was definitely not a part of the show I was watching. My television screen gone blank for a couple of seconds and then what I saw was totally unbelievable for my eyes. It was my friend ' Rahul Sasi ' on the television and I was still wondering that how did he interrupted in between a television show like happens in Sci-Fi movies, someone hijacks television or computer to deliver some kind of message or warning. Also like in some horror movies in which sometime ghostly images interrupts between the television and suddenly comes out. Oh my god! But, nothing happened like that in my case, my friend didn't came out. Just few minutes later I was again redirected to the same show I was watching, only a part of it I missed, but never mind I'll watch it on the YouTube later. I think you might be thinking as if I am kidding, but it's true. My friend Rahul Sasi is a well kn

A Dutch-Moroccan team of hackers calling itself " Team DoulCi " have reportedly claimed to hack a protective feature on Apple 's iCloud system, that could leverage an attacker to remove security measures on lost or stolen iPhone devices. According to a report from Dutch news organization De Telegraaf , the hackers purchased locked iPhone devices for $50 to $150 each and then bypassed Apple's iCloud activation lock through a serious security vulnerability Apple has failed to patch with its most recent updates. The critical vulnerability in the Apple's iCloud allowed them to unlock stolen iPhones in an instant, which could then be sold for a large profit in the Blackmarket. This is the first time when any hacker group has managed to compromise the highly secured Apple's iCloud service. iCloud is a cloud storage and cloud computing service provided by the Apple Inc. to its users since October 2011 with more than 320 million users across the world. The service all

The need for vCISO services is growing. SMBs and SMEs are dealing with more third-party risks, tightening regulatory demands and stringent cyber insurance requirements than ever before. However, they often lack the resources and expertise to hire an in-house security executive team. By outsourcing security and compliance leadership to a vCISO, these organizations can more easily obtain cybersecurity expertise specialized for their industry and strengthen their cybersecurity posture. MSPs and MSSPs looking to meet this growing vCISO demand are often faced with the same challenge. The demand for cybersecurity talent far exceeds the supply. This has led to a competitive market where the costs of hiring and retaining skilled professionals can be prohibitive for MSSPs/MSPs as well. The need to maintain expertise of both security and compliance further exacerbates this challenge. Cynomi, the first AI-driven vCISO platform , can help. Cynomi enables you - MSPs, MSSPs and consulting firms

In March this year, we reported that the major card distributor companies, VISA and Mastercard are migrating to EMV chip cards , also known as PIN-and-Chip cards. Unlike traditional magnetic stripe payment cards, EMV chip cards generates a unique code for every transaction, making it nearly* impossible for criminals to use the card for counterfeit fraud. But Nothing is perfectly secure, even not the PIN-and-Chip based payment cards. All anti-cloning theories were already proven wrong, when a group of researchers found a way to hack the Credit and Debit cards based on the latest Chip-and-Pin technology. Back in 2012, we reported about a research paper entitled " Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack " published ( old paper ) by team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, UK, who demonstrated that Chip and PIN payment card systems are also vulnerable to Card Cloning. The same team of researchers presented their EVM related research last Mond

Last week we reported a critical vulnerability in the world's most popular messaging application WhatsApp, that could expose users' GPS location data to hackers  and was discovered by the researchers at UNH Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group. Same Group of researchers reported new set of vulnerabilities in another most popular messaging application ' VIber '. They claimed that Viber's poor data security practices threaten privacy of its more than 150 million active users. Cross Platform messaging app Viber allows registered users to share text messages, images, doodles, GPS Location and videos with each other, along with its popular free voice calling feature which is available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry and Desktops as well. The researchers found that users' data stored on the Viber Amazon Servers including images and videos are stored in an unencrypted form that could be easily accessed without any authentication i.e.which giv

If you are using WhatsApp to chit-chat with your friends or relatives, then you should be careful about sharing your location with them using WhatsApp 'Location Share' feature. No doubt, WhatsApp communication between your phone and company's server is now encrypted with SSL, which means whatever you are sharing with your friends, is secured from the man-in-the-middle attacks . But the extremely popular instant messaging service for Smartphones that delivers more than 1 billion messages per day has another serious security issue. According to Researchers at UNH Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group , WhatsApp location sharing service could expose your location to hackers or Spy Agencies. While sharing the location on WhatsApp users need to first locate themselves on Google Map within the app window, as shown:  Once selected, WhatsApp fetches the location and thumbnail (an image) from the Google Map service to share it as the message icon, but unfortunately Wh

The Internet is becoming a dangerous place day-by-day and especially for those innocent web users who rely on 3rd party services. The latest bad news is that the World's largest and most widely used Google's free public DNS (Domain name system) resolvers  raised   security red flags yesterday. DNS is the master address list for the Internet, which translates IP addresses into human readable form and vice versa. According to Internet monitoring firm BGPmon , Google's DNS server 8.8.8.8 /32 was hijacked yesterday for 22 minutes. The Google's DNS server handles around 150 billion queries a day and during the 22 minutes of hijacking, millions of Internet users, including Financial institutions , Governments were redirected to BT's (British multinational telecommunications services company) Latin America division in Venezuela and Brazil. It is suspected that Hackers exploited a well-known  vulnerability in the so-called Border Gateway Protocol ( BGP) , which

TWITTER is taking users' privacy and security very seriously and in an effort to prevent Government snooping, the company has secured your Twitter emails with with TLS (Transport Layer Security). Twitter emails were previously using a plain text communication protocol, that now has been upgraded to an encrypted (TLS or SSL) connection using STARTTLS . In a blog post, Twitter announced : " Since mid-January, we have been protecting your emails from Twitter using TLS in the form of StartTLS. StartTLS encrypts emails as they transit between sender and receiver and is designed to prevent snooping. It also ensures that emails you receive from Twitter haven't been read by other parties on the way to your inbox if your email provider supports TLS. " " These email security protocols are part of our commitment to continuous improvement in privacy protections and complement improvements like our securing of web traffic with forward secrecy and always-on HTT

Facebook has several security measures to protect users' account, such as a user " access token " is granted to the Facebook application (like  Candy Crush Saga, Lexulous Word Game ), when the user authorizes it, it provides temporary and secure access to Facebook APIs. To make this possible, users have to ' allow or accep t' the application request so that an app can access your account information with the required permissions. The Access Token stores information about permissions that have been granted as well as information about when the token will expire and which app generated it. Approved Facebook apps can publish or delete content on your behalf using the access tokens, rather than your Facebook password. Access tokens are pretty sensitive, because anyone who knows the access token of a user can access the user's data and can perform any actions on behalf of the user, till the token is valid. In Past years, Many Security Researchers

Just two days before Apple has disclosed a critical Security flaw in the SSL implementation on the iOS software that would allow man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept the SSL data by spoofing SSL servers. Dubbed as CVE-2014-1266 , the so-called ' goto  fail; ' vulnerability in which the secure transport failed to validate the authenticity of the connection has left millions of Apple users vulnerable to Hackers and Spy Agencies, especially like the NSA . Last Friday, Apple had also released updated version iOS 7.0.6 to patch the vulnerability, which was first discovered in Apple's iOS Devices, but later company had acknowledged its presence in Mac OSX also, that could allow hackers to intercept email and other communications that are meant to be encrypted in iPhone, iPad and Mac computer. Affected versions include iOS up to version 7.0.5 and OS X before 10.9.2. Security Researchers confirmed , ' Nearly all encrypted traffic, including usernames, passwords, and

Your LinkedIn profile is your digital resume. Yesterday, LinkedIn launched a new app for for iOS devices called Intro ' LinkedIn Intro '. With this feature an email on your iPhone will display a picture of the sender, with useful profile info from LinkedIn. Basically, to use the service, a LinkedIn user must route all of their emails (any provider i.e. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) through LinkedIn's 'Intro' servers, which will inject fancy business centric HTML profile right in your emails, as shown. But this also means that LinkedIn is now able to read the complete content of your emails and also can store the passwords to users' external email accounts. The feature is enough to destroy the security and privacy of your mails. Another point to be noted that, Apple does not provide any APIs or frameworks for developers that would allow this kind of modification of its interface. Instead, LinkedIn is acting as a ' man in the middle ' by inter

A new hacking technique dubbed BREACH can extract login tokens, session ID numbers and other sensitive information from SSL/TLS encrypted web traffic in just 30 seconds. The technique was demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas ( Presentation PDF  & Paper ) by Gluck along with researchers Neal Harris and Angelo Prado, which allows hackers to decodes encrypted data that online banks and e-commerce sites from an HTTPS channel. Neal, Yoel and Angelo ( From left to right) at BlackHat BREACH ( Browser Reconnaissance and Exfiltration via Adaptive Compression of Hypertext ) is very targeted and don't decrypt the entire channel. BREACH manipulates data compression to pry out doses of information from HTTPS protected data, including email addresses, security tokens, and other plain text strings. Angelo Prado told The Hacker News , " We are using a compression oracle is leveraging the building blocks from CRIME , on a different compression c

T-Mobile devices having a default Wi-Fi Calling feature that keeps you connected in areas with little or no coverage using Wi-Fi connection. But according to new finding by students Jethro Beekman and Christopher Thompson from University of California Berkeley, that this feature lets millions of Android users vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle attack . The simplest way to become a man-in-the-middle would be for the attacker to be on the same open wireless network as the victim, such as at a coffee shop or other public space. In a technical analysis of the exploit, The flaw could potentially allow hackers to access and modify calls and messages made by T-Mobile users on certain Android smartphones. Beekman and Thompson informed T-Mobile, a division of Deutsche Telekom, of the flaw in December and on March 18 T-Mobile was able to resolve the issue for all affected phone models. T-Mobile uses regular VoIP for Wi-Fi Calling instead of a connection that encrypted, somethin

It's time of stocktaking, principal security firm are proposing their analysis to synthesize actual situation on cyber security, 2012 is widely considered a year when the malware has increased significantly thanks to the contributions of various actors that we will analyze shortly. WebSense has published a new interesting study, 2013 Threat Report , that confirms an extraordinary growth of cyber threats, the data that most of all alert the security community is the increasing number of sophisticated attacks able to elude traditional defense mechanisms. The analysis revealed that technologies most exposed to cyber attacks continue to be mobile platforms and social media, internet is confirmed as primary channel for cyber menaces, let's consider in fact that number of malicious web sites grew nearly 600% and 85% are represented by legitimate web hosts. Another concerning phenomenon is the use of Email as vector for cyber menace, attackers consider this carrier as

A Dutch hacker was sentenced to 12 years in a US prison on Friday for trafficking over 100,000 credit card numbers stolen in a computer hacking conspiracy. David Benjamin Schrooten , 22,  known as "Fortezza" in the hacker world, pleaded guilty in November to criminal charges related to hacking, bank fraud, and identity theft, according to Western District of Washington US Attorney Jenny Durkan. At sentencing U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez asked him, " I don't think you would ever consider walking into someone's home, pulling out a gun and robbing them… Did it ever occur to you that you were doing that to all your victims? " Investigators estimate that tens of thousands of people were affected. The damage amounted to more than 63 million dollars. He is Sentenced to 12 years in prison for a computer hacking and credit card fraud scheme that victimized people around the world. A California man is set to go on trial by the middle of the year for his purported rol

It's the news of the day, a fraudulent digital certificate that could be used for active phishing attacks against Google's web properties. Using the certificate it is possible to spoof content in a classic phishing schema or perform a man-in-the-middle attack according Google Chrome Security Team and Microsoft experts. Microsoft has been immediately started the procedure to update its Certificate Trust list (CTL) and all versions of its OSs to revoke the certificate. Microsoft has also decided to revoke other two certificates for the same reason, it seems that some attacks using the first certificate have been already detected, fraudulent digital certificate that was mistakenly issued by a domain registrar run by a Turkish domain registrar. Microsoft has issued a security advisory " Microsoft Security Advisory ( 2798897 ) -Fraudulent Digital Certificates Could Allow Spoofing " that states: "Microsoft is aware of active attacks using one fraudulent digital certificate is

Egypt-based security researcher reported that Facebook Camera App for mobiles are Vulnerable to Man in The Middle Attack , that allow an attacker to tap the network and hijack Camera users accounts and information like email addresses and passwords can be stolen . Mohamed Ramadan trainer with Attack-Secure, who previously reported us about similar vulnerability in Etsy app for iPhone Mohamed explains " The problem is that the app accepts any SSL certification from any source, even evil SSL certifications, and this enables any attacker to perform man in the middle attacks against anyone who uses the Facebook Camera app for IPhone. This means that the application doesn't warn the user if someone in the same (Wi-Fi network) is trying to hijack his or her Facebook account. " Facebook suggest users to upgrade the Camera application To Version 1.1.2. A statement released by the company says " We applaud the security researcher who brought this bug to our attenti

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

This Friday I was working with my co-security researcher " Christy Philip Mathew " in +The Hacker News  Lab for testing the Cookie Handling Vulnerabilities in the most famous email services i.e Hotmail and Outlook. Well, both are merged now and part of the same parent company - Microsoft, the software giant.  Vulnerability allows an attacker to Hijack accounts in a very simple way, by just exporting & importing cookies of an user account from one system to attacker's system, and our results shows that even after logout by victim, the attacker is still able to reuse cookies at his end. There are different way of stealing cookies, that we will discuss below. In May 2012, another Indian security researcher Rishi Narang claimed similar vulnerability in Linkedin website. Vulnerability Details Many websites including Microsoft services uses cookies to store the session information in the user's web browser. Cookies are responsible for maintainin