RC4 encryption attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

It is finally time to say GoodBye to the old and insecure Web security protocols. Citing the long history of weaknesses in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) 3.0 cryptographic protocol and the RC4 Cipher Suite, Google plans to disable support for both SSLv3 as well as RC4 stream cipher in its front-end servers. While announcing on its official blog , the Search Engine giant said the company is looking to put away SSLv3 and RC4 in all of its front-end servers, and eventually, in all its software including Chrome, Android, Web crawlers, and email servers. The move by Google came as no surprise, considering the fact that both RC4 and SSLv3 have been deemed unsecure by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). What are the Problems? SSLv3, which was made outdated 16 years ago, has a long history of security problems like BEAST , out of them the most recent one was POODLE ( Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption ) attacks, which lead to the recovery of plaintext communication...

Security researchers have developed a more practical and feasible attack technique against the RC4 cryptographic algorithm that is still widely used to encrypt communications on the Internet. Despite being very old, RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4) is still the most widely used cryptographic cipher implemented in many popular protocols, including: SSL (Secure Socket Layer) TLS (Transport Layer Security) WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) Microsoft's RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) BitTorrent and many more However, weaknesses in the algorithm have been found over the years, indicating that the RC4 needs to be wiped from the Internet. But, yet about 50% of all TLS traffic is currently protected using the RC4 encryption algorithm. Now, the situation got even worse, when two Belgian security researchers demonstrated a more practical attack against RC4, allowing an attacker to subsequently expose encrypted information in a much shorter amount of time t...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...