Penetration Testing | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

When we started our brand new THN Deals Store last week on the special occasion of company's 6th Anniversary, we introduced its very first product, Professional Hacking Certification Package, and received great response from our readers. Thank you! If you have not yet, you can still get this deal — Computer Hacker Professional Certification Package — at 96% discount. This Package offers you all the material and training you require to help pass any of five professional hacker certifications, including CISSP, CISM, CISA, Ethical Hacker and Forensics Investigator to become certified penetration tester. It is a very well known fact that nobody can teach you hacking directly. You need to learn some programming languages to get started, as well as to have knowledge of some basic platforms. I frequently receive emails and messages on what programming language should we learn? So the answer is — Python . But, Why Python? Because it is an excellent programming language that ha

Hey readers, guess what? The Hacker News (THN) is about to complete its 6 years as a leading Information Security Channel – attracting over 9 Million readers worldwide – and a trusted source for Hacking, Cyber Security and Infosec News for the enthusiasts, technologists & nerds. In the special occasion of this year's Anniversary, The Hacker News is excited to announce the launch of its THN Deals Store ! THN Deals Store aims to give anything you need to take your potential to the next level, and that too, at amazingly good prices and incredible discounts. In fact, we even have a bunch of freebies and giveaways for our readers. THN Deals Store is packed with great deals on everything from Online Cyber Security and Hacking Courses to gear and gadgets , downloadable Security Products, privacy services, IT Certification Preparation Courses , programming courses and even drones. So, if you are searching for a great deal for anything you need, Welcome to the THN Deals St

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

As promised at the Black Hat and Def Con security and hacking conferences, Offensive Security – the creators of Swiss army knife for researchers, penetration testers, and hackers – has finally released the much awaited Kali Linux 2016.2. Kali Linux is an open-source Debian-based Linux distribution designed to help ethical hackers and security professionals with a wide range of tools for penetration testing, forensics, hacking and reverse engineering together into a single package. Earlier the Kali Linux distribution was known as BackTrack . Kali Linux 2016.2 is an updated Live ISO image of the popular GNU/Linux distribution that includes the latest software versions and enhancements for those who want to deploy the operating system on new systems. What's new? Besides bringing the updated Live ISOs of Kali Linux, the Kali Linux team brings multiple variants of the GNU/Linux distribution with various Desktop Environments, specifically KDE, Xfce, MATE, LXDE, and Enlighten

Offensive Security , the creators of Swiss army knife for Security researchers, Penetration testers and Hackers have finally released the much awaited and most powerful version of  Kali Linux 2.0 . Kali Linux 2.0 (Codename 'Kali Sana') , an open-source penetration testing platform brings hundreds of Penetration Testing, Forensics, Hacking and Reverse Engineering tools together into a Debian-based Linux distribution. Kali Linux 2.0 offers a redesigned user interface for streamlined work experience, along with a new multi-level menus and tool categories options. Kali Linux 2.0 is now a rolling distribution, means users will receive tools and core system updates frequently. Kali Linux 2.0 Features: Runs on Linux kernel 4.0,  use full Gnome 3 Desktop instead of gnome-fallback,  improved hardware and wireless driver coverage,  support for a variety of Desktop Environments,  updated desktop environment and tools,  Featuring new cutting-edge wireless penetration

Python is an excellent programming language that has rapidly become popular among Hackers, Reverse engineers, software testers, Forensic analyst and Penetration testers. Python is a simple object-oriented and minimalistic language that is easy to learn for novice programmers as well as experienced developers. Most Python programs run on all major operating systems including Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. What makes Python such an effective platform for Security Professional and Hackers? Python supports pre-built extensive libraries that are specifically designed for penetration testing and provide some powerful functionalities. So if you are looking for a most widely used and easy to learn scripting language, go for Python. Here I'm introducing you a Free IT training from Cybrary – Python for Security Professionals . There is nothing wrong if I say that scripting languages like BASH, Perl, and Ruby can not do the same things as Python, but building those ca

The Developers of one of the most advanced open source operating system for penetration testing called ' KALI Linux ' have made the operating system available for Docker-addicted system administrators. But, What's Docker? Docker is a new open-source container technology, released in June 2014, that automates the deployment of applications inside self-sufficient software containers by providing an additional layer of abstraction and automation of operating-system-level visualization on Linux. Docker, built on top of Linux containers, is simply a way of managing multiple containers on a single machine. Nowadays, companies are adopting Docker at a remarkable rate. Docker is not just the favorite of Linux powers like RedHat and Canonical, but also big software firms, including Microsoft, which has embraced Docker. Why bringing Kali Linux for Docker? The same was happened to the developer of Offensive Security, who was requested for a Dockerised image of

A new Tails 1.3 has been released with support to a secure Bitcoin wallet. Tails, also known as the ' Amnesic Incognito Live System ', is a free security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution, specially designed and optimized to preserve users' anonymity and privacy. Tails operating system came to light when the global surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden said that he had used it in order to remain Anonymous and keep his communications hidden from the law enforcement authorities. Tails 1.3 offers new applications, updates to the Tor browser, and fixes a number of security vulnerabilities from previous releases of the software and specially introduces Electrum Bitcoin Wallet . NEW FEATURES IN Tails OS 1.3 Electrum Bitcoin Wallet Updated Tor Browser Bundle obfs4 pluggable transport KeyRinger Electrum Bitcoin Wallet is one of the major changes Tails 1.3 received. Electrum is a new open-source and easy-to-use bitcoin wallet that protects you fro

Google on Tuesday launched a Security testing tool "Firing Range" , which aimed at improving the efficiency of automated Web application security scanners by evaluating them with a wide range of cross-site scripting (XSS) and a few other web vulnerabilities seen in the wild. Firing Range basically provides a synthetic testing environment mostly for cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that are seen most frequently in web apps. According to Google security engineer Claudio Criscione, 70 percent of the bugs in Google's Vulnerability Reward Program are cross-site scripting flaws . In addition to XSS vulnerabilities , the new web app scanner also scans for other types of vulnerabilities including reverse clickjacking , Flash injection , mixed content, and cross-origin resource sharing vulnerabilities. Firing Range was developed by Google with the help of security researchers at Politecnico di Milano in an effort to build a test ground for automated scanners

Lots of Linux distributions are offered free of cost on the Internet by a number of companies, non-commercial organizations and by many individuals as well, and now, the notorious Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has announced their own Linux distribution known as SEANux . A Linux distribution is a coordinated collection of software consisting of a customized version of the kernel together with hundreds of open source (i.e., free) utilities, installers, programming languages and application programs. Some of the most popular distributions are Fedora (formerly Red Hat), SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Tails OS and Mint Linux. SEA (Syrian Electronic Army) is the same group of hackers who made the headlines in past year by launching advance phishing attacks against media organisations, usually Western media outlets. The group is reportedly aligned with president Bashar al-Assad and had purposely targeted social media accounts of a number of high-profile media outlets inclu

Along with a dream to make Internet access available to everyone across the world, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is working to make the Internet a more secure place as well. Till now, a number of large technology companies have bug bounty programs to reward researchers and cyber enthusiast who contribute in the security of Internet by finding out security holes in software or web platforms, and the social networking giant Facebook is the latest one to do so. Facebook and Usenix have together implemented the Internet Defense Prize — an award recognizing superior quality research that combines a working prototype with great contributions to securing the Internet, Facebook announced Thursday at the annual USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego. Also, Facebook announced the first award under its Internet Defense Prize, and crowned a pair of German researchers for their paper , " Static Detection of Second-Order Vulnerabilities in Web Applications " — a seemingly viabl

There is a good news for all Security researchers, Penetration testers and Hackers. The developers of one of the most advance open source operating system for penetration testing, ' KALI Linux ' have announced yesterday the release of its latest version of Kali Linux 1.0.7 with some interesting features. Kali Linux is an open source Debian-based distribution for penetration testing and forensics that is maintained and funded by Offensive Security, a provider of world-class information security training and penetration testing services. In the beginning of this year, Offensive Security released Kali Linux 1.0.6 with Kernel version 3.12, and also added the Self Destruct feature that allows Kali users to encrypt the full hard disk to make the data inaccessible in an emergency case by entering a secret password at boot time. This latest Kali Linux 1.0.7 version added some more features to the last version, along with many new penetration testing and hacking too

Smartphones are powerful and popular, with more than thousands of new mobile apps hitting the market everyday. Apps and mobile devices often rely on consumers' data, including private information, photos, and location, that can be vulnerable to data breaches, surveillance and real-world thieves. When developing a mobile application, developer has to fulfill high security requirements, established for apps that deal with confidential data of the users. If you are a developer then responsibilities for providing security to the users is very high in comparison to functionality you are going to feed into the app. e.g. A vulnerability found in Starbucks' iOS app could have caused a massive financial data loss. It is always important for all app developers to have enough knowledge about major Mobile platform Security threats and its countermeasures. Today we would like to introduce open source ' Damn Vulnerable IOS App (DVIA) ' developed by Prateek Gianchan

A few days back the developers of one of the most advance open source operating system for penetration testing called ' KALI Linux ' announced that they were planning to include " emergency self-destruction of LUKS ". They patched a utility called cryptsetup,  which introduces a self destruction feature that will allow the Kali user to encrypt the full hard disk to make the data inaccessible in an emergency case by entering a secret password at boot time. Offensive Security has finally announced today the release of the latest version i.e. Kali Linux 1.0.6 with Kernel version 3.12, and also added the Self Destruct feature along with many new penetration testing and hacking tools. The new release also includes an ARM image script, that allow the user to build Kali Linux images for various ARM devices. Some more scripts are also added that enables the user to build their own custom Amazon AMI and Google Compute cloud images. If you already have a Kali Linux insta

Full disk encryption is expected to be the top security technology to be adopted this year. Take a moment to think about the information that is present on your personal computer, i.e. Photo s , passwords, emails, Important documents from work or  Financial data and  trade secrets. Many of us from the Security Industry obviously have enough confidential and important data regarding our work, source codes, or researches stored in our laptops or systems. What if your computer is stolen or seized by any Law enforcement agency at the Airport? Best example to explain the situation is as follows: We all know  Guardian journalist ' Glenn Greenwald ', who  has written a series of stories in July 2013 revealing the NSA's secret surveillance programs, leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden . In August 2013,  The partner of the Guardian journalist ' Glenn Greenwald ', was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at the Airport under Terrorism Act 20

For years, the Capture the Flag platform has been a common and very popular part of the hacker convention scene. Teams come from all over the world to show their skill and technique in various competitions. The CTF365 team took that interest, passion and excitement and went to a new level in their platform. That original capture the flag environment is now available to anyone from the safety and comfort of their own home. Not only is the original and fun capture the flag platform available, but the CTF365 team is bringing in red verses blue competitions, as well as an entire exploitable virtual world! While still in alpha, the development team is working tirelessly to bring a brand new approach to an original favorite to the hacker and information security community. What is CTF365? CTF365 is a revolution in the world of capture the flag, simulated attacks and Information security as a whole. Capture the flag is always a fan favorite at hacker conventions, online and

Sandcat Browser, The fastest web browser with many useful security and developer oriented tools updated to version 4.0 with the fastest scripting language packed with features for pen-testers. Sandcat 4 adds a large number of enhancements, new features, extensions and bug fixes, and provides a dramatically improved user experience on several fronts.  Sandcat 4 adds several new pen-tester extensions as part of the new incarnation of its Pen-Tester Tools extension pack. This includes: a Request Loader, a XHR Editor, a XHR Fuzzer, a CGI Scanner, a HTTP Brute Force extension, enhanced request editors, enhanced script runners, and more. New versions comes with a revamped and enhanced Live Headers. You can now view not only the request headers and response headers but the response of HTTP requests and XHR calls. The captured requests can be viewed, exported to and imported from individual files via its Live Headers bar. It adds the ability to save the full request details of captured requ

BackTrack Linux, a specialized distribution of penetration testing tools, has long been a favorite of security specialists and IT pros. Security professionals have been relying on the BackTrack security distribution for many years to help them perform their assessments. A couple of weeks ago, futuristic major release of BackTrack was announced as   Kali Linux . Today Backtrack team released few updates to Kali Linux as version 1.0.3 and fixed couple of bugs. " Our first attempts at building an accessible version of Kali failed and after a bit of digging, we found that there were several upstream GNOME Display Manager (GDM3) bugs in Debian, which prevented these accessibility features from functioning with the GDM greeter. Working together with an upstream GNOME developer, we knocked out these bugs and had the fixes implemeted in Kali, and hopefully in future builds of GDM3 in Debian ." Download  new version of Kali Linux ( kali-linux-1.0.3-i386.iso ) wi

Great news for Hackers and Backtrack Linux fans! The most awaited penetration testing Linux distribution has been released called ' Kali Linux ' or ' Backrack 6 ', from the creators of BackTrack itself. From last 7 years we have seen five awesome versions of Backtrack Linux. But this time to achieve some higher goals, team decided to leave the 4 years old development architecture and ' Kali Linux ' born today. Kali Linux is based upon Debian Linux, instead of Ubuntu and new streamlined repositories synchronize with the Debian repositories 4 times a day, constantly providing users with the latest package updates and security fixes available. Another great feature introduced is that, because of Debian compliant system, it is now able to Bootstrap a Kali Installation/ISO directly from Kali repositories. This allow any user to easily build their own customization of Kali, as well as perform enterprise network installs from a local or remote repository. The Kali Li

What if you could easily host malicious websites, send phishing emails, and manage compromised hosts across diverse internet addresses? This week's Cobalt Strike adds the ability to manage multiple attack servers at once. Here's how it works: When you connect to two or more servers, Cobalt Strike will show a switch bar with buttons for each server at the bottom of your window. Click a button to make that server active. It's a lot like using tabs to switch between pages in a web browser. To make use of multiple servers, designate a role for each one. Assign names to each server's button to easily remember its role. Dumbly connecting to multiple servers isn't very exciting. The fun comes when you seamlessly use Cobalt Strike features between servers. For example: Designate one server for phishing and another for reconnaissance. Go to the reconnaissance server, setup the system profiler website. Use the phishing tool to deliver the reconnaissance website through

Most of the crazy readers always demand for some solution to turn their Android Smartphone into a Hacking Machine. There are various solutions, like installing some penetration testing android based tools like ANTI, dSploit, FaceNiff etc and also Installing ARM version of Backtrack OS. Today I found another solution for same purpose i.e.UbnHD2, a Ubuntu based Pen-testing OS. UbnHD2 is a security and pentest focused ubuntu/debian system that runs natively on the HTC HD2 phone. The product right now in beta versions and various options may not work. Installations steps are described by developer . Features Based on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, Kernel 2.6.32.15 (ARM) X.org 7.5, GNOME 2.32.0 & Cairo-Dock 2.2.0 USB-OTG, 3G Network & WiFi (Drivers not included, proprietary, check XDA Forum) Perl 5.10.1, Ruby 4.5, Python 2.6.6 and more than 170 Pentest Tools preloaded Download From Sourceforge