Social media | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Hey! Welcome to the United States. May we have your Twitter handle, please? That's exactly what you'll likely be asked by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the airport prior to entering U.S. soil. Yes, your Twitter handle may soon be part of the US Visa process as U.S. Customs and Border Protection has entered a new proposal into the federal register, suggesting a new field in which foreign visitors can declare their online presence. This new proposal submitted by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to the Federal Register on Thursday would update the required entry forms with a question asking travelers to " Please enter information associated with your online presence -- Provider/Platform -- Social media identifier. " This information would not be mandatory, but of course, foreign travelers who decline to reveal their online presence may subject for additional scrutiny. What's the idea behind Knowing the visitors' Online Prese

Is Google or Facebook evil? Forget it! Russian nerds have developed a new Face Recognition technology based app called FindFace , which is a nightmare for privacy lovers and human right advocates. FindFace is a terrifyingly powerful facial recognition app that lets you photograph strangers in a crowd and find their real identity by connecting them to their social media accounts with 70% success rate, putting public anonymity at risk. The FindFace app was launched two months ago on Google Play and Apple's App Store and currently has 500,000 registered users and processed nearly 3 Million searches, according to its co-founders, 26-year-old Artem Kukharenko, and 29-year-old Alexander Kabakov. According to The Guardian , FindFace uses image recognition technology to compare faces against profile pictures on Vkontakte, a very popular social networking site in Russia that has over 200 Million users. Besides showing the social media account of the one you are searching for, FindF

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

Social Networking giant Facebook has just launched a new platform called ThreatExchange , which is designed to mount a coordinated defense against cybercrime. Many security professionals rely largely on manual methods for collecting, analyzing, and consuming information about latest cyber security threats such as malware and botnets . Whereas, Mark Zuckerberg's ThreatExchange is a unique social media platform where multiple organizations can sign up and share information about new threats to cyber security, new types of hacks, phishing attacks and malicious activities they may have experienced. COLLABORATE AND TAKE ACTION Facebook is currently using a threat analysis framework called " ThreatData " to discover and tackle scams and cybercrimes, but with the growth in the magnitude of cyber attacks, Facebook believes that better communication between companies could help stamp them out. " We quickly learned that sharing with one another was key to bea

The hacktivist group Anonymous has launched a massive cyber attack against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — the radical Islamic terrorist group who were  responsible for the terrorist attack against the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo . With huge social media presence, ISIS is the most active terror group on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram accounts. But unluckily, over dozens of Facebook and Twitter accounts linked to ISIS has recently been taken by the Anonymous group. In a video appeared on Youtube, Anonymous group and RedCult announced the operation  #OpISIS  and claimed to have carried out cyber attack against hundreds of Twitter and Facebook accounts used by ISIS for its own propaganda and to recruit new members. According to the video, Operation  #OpISIS  is coordinated by "Muslims, Christians, Jews"  alike and a masked individual discusses the aim of the campaign. They are " hackers, crackers, Hacktivist, phi

The Iranian hackers may have spent years in running a creative and most dedicated cyber espionage campaign to steal government credentials with the help of Social Media including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Blogger. A Dallas-based computer-security firm, iSIGHT Partners, has exposed today a three-year old cyber espionage campaign which they believe to have originated in Iran, targeting a number of military and political leaders in the United States, Israel and other countries by creating false social networking accounts and a fake news website. The security firm dubbed the cyber espionage operation as ' Newscaster ', under which the iranian hackers are using more than a dozen social-media accounts of fake personas on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and targeted at least 2,000 people. Since 2011, the Iranian hackers group has targeted current and former senior U.S. military officials, including a four-star U.S. Navy ad

With all the popular social networking websites there on the web, managing them from several different internet browser tabs or windows can get frustrated very quickly. Besides our own Facebook Page, Twitter account, and Google+ profile, I also manage several others and, YES, I feel the " time management " pain! To make social media management and monitoring easier for users, some very innovative desktop applications and mobile apps were developed to help organize multiple platforms and information sharing across selected networks. Using online tools like TweetDeck, Seesmic, Hootsuite , Feedly, Twuffer and Buffer App for scheduling and posting directly from a web page has become an absolute necessity especially where Twitter is concerned. Additionally these apps gives you the ability to post on one or all of your connected accounts together i.e Multiple Facebook, Twitter or Google+ profiles. These applications don't require your passwords for social me

If you're a user of the Buffer app, the social-media management service that let you cross-posting to various social networks, be aware that the service got hacked yesterday, with spam messages going out over Facebook.  " Buffer was hacked around 1 hour ago, and many of you may have experienced spam posts sent from you via Buffer. I can only understand how angry and disappointed you must be right now. " Buffer team said, in an email sent to users and also posted to Buffer's blog . It's not yet clear how many of Buffer's 1 million or so users were affected by the hack, but buffer maintains that user passwords are safe nor has any "billing or payment information been affected or exposed" . Photo Credit : The Next Web It appears that Buffer's Facebook and Twitter spam messages were first sent at around 2:20 p.m. ET. Hackers have used the exploit to spam user accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other sites. Just recently, Instagram saw a viral wa

After months of disrupting the Twitter accounts of major U.S. media outlets, The Syrian Electronic Army Leader Says that they won't Stop hacking. Just two days before  SocialFlow,  a social media optimization platform was hacked by Syrian Electronic Army and readers on certain stories being redirected to the site of the Syrian Electronic Army. T he hackers hit four journalists employed by the New York Post, the tabloid's Facebook page, and a columnist for The Washington Post. Syrian Electronic Army today announced that they hacked into the admin panel of  Outbrain, a  content recommendation service, used my millons of websites including The  Washington Post, CNN, TIMES and also by us at ' The Hacker News '. They edit many parameters tp " Hacked by SEA " from the website panel , that actually reflects on major websites in widget as shown in above screenshot . Hackers also claimed to have access to  Outbrain's email box . The people

In the recent months I had the opportunity to conduct an interesting study on the use of Social Media in the Military Sector, large diffusion of media platforms makes them very attractive for governments and intelligence agencies . Social media platforms reveal enormous potentiality that could be exploited also in critical sectors such as military and defense. Modern social media networks are actively used by every government, the US, China and Russia are the most active in this field, but also emerging cyber countries like Iran and North Korea demonstrates an increasing interest in the matter. The principal uses of social media for government are Psychological Operations (PsyOps) OSInt Cyber espionage Offensive purposes On May 10th the Illinois Air National Guard 183rd Fighter Wing published a notice in the monthly issue of a newsletter titled Falcon View. The notice, that seems to be authentic, dedicates a paragraph to the use of social networking sites for

A multinational security firm ' Raytheon ' has secretly developed software called ' RIOT ', capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future Behavior by mining data from social networking websites. The multi billion dollar company, didn't want its concept video revealed, but the Guardian posted it anyway. Raytheon has not yet sold RIOT to any clients but has been shared with the US government as part of a joint research project to develop a Big Data system capable of surveilling large parts of the population. The software can also pull metadata from pictures taken to pinpoint a user's location when the picture was taken. From this and other location data taken from applications i.e Foursquare, the software can predict future movements of users. The video shows how Riot works on a sample Raytheon staff member, tracking his regular visits to Washington Nationals Park and a local gym. RIOT creates unique profiles from publicly available data, inclu