brute force attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Snapchat , a Smartphone application that lets users share snapshots with friends is catching fire among teenagers. It was first hacked in December when 4.6 million Snapchat users were exposed in a database breach. Later, the denial-of-service attack and CAPTCHA Security bypass were discovered by other researchers within last two-three weeks. Snapchat has no Vulnerability Reward Program, but still many penetration testers are working hard and free of cost to make the application more secure by disclosing flaws. Interestingly, this is not the end of vulnerabilities, Mohamed Ramadan , a security researcher with Attack-Secure from Egypt, has spotted a new vulnerability on Snapchat that allow an attacker to brute-force login credentials of the users. Brute-force is a process of trying multiple passwords against a username until you get a correct password. " This vulnerability allows anyone who knows your SnapChat email to brute force your account's password without any

File transfer services such as FTP or HTTP has been the most common way of file transfer for business requirements. Typically what a file transfer means is that a file transfer protocol such as FTP or HTTP is used to send the stream of bits stored as a single unit in a file system including file name, file size, timestamp and other metadata from one host to another host over a TCP-based network such as the Internet. But this process is not foolproof. FTP, by itself, is not a secure file transfer protocol and it has a lot of security vulnerabilities. It's a known fact that FTP doesn't provide any encryption for data transfer. Most of the times, the requirement in any business is pretty simple: to transfer files between two endpoints in different locations, and the parties involved do not think much about how secure the file transfer process is going to be. Using FTP for official file transfer can leave your data transmission exposed to many security attacks: FTP Bounce Attack Gener

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

In a recent cyber attack on a Forum site, thousands of outdated legitimate WordPress blogs were abused to perform DDOS attacks using previously known vulnerabilities . After analyzing the Log file from the victim's server, we have noticed many Wordpress CMS based educational (.EDU) and Government (.GOV) websites from where the attack was originated. In the past we have reported about many such cyber attacks, where attackers hacked into the Wordpress blogs using password brute-force attack or they used the  PINGBACK  vulnerability in older versions of Wordpress without compromising the server. WordPress has a built in functionality called Pingback , which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site and it can be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations. We have seen more than 100,000 IP addresses involved in the recent DDOS attack and the victim's Forum website received more than 40,000 requests in 7 mi

Takashi Katsuki, a researcher at Antivirus firm Symantec has discovered a new cyber attack ongoing in the wild, targeting an open-source Web server application server Apache Tomcat with a cross platform Java based backdoor that can be used to attack other machines. The malware, dubbed as " Java.Tomdep " differs from other server malware and is not written in the PHP scripting language. It is basically a Java based backdoor act as Java Servlet that gives Apache Tomcat platforms malicious capabilities. Because Java is a cross platform language, the affected platforms include Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and most supported versions of Windows. The malware was detected less than a month ago and so far the number of infected machines appears to be low. You may think that this type of attack only targets personal computers, such as desktops and laptops, but unfortunately that isn't true. Servers can also be attacked. They are quite valuable targets, since they are usu

Popular source code repository service GitHub has recently been hit by a massive Password Brute-Force attack that successfully compromised some accounts,  GitHub has urged users to set up two-factor authentication for their accounts and has already reset passwords for compromised accounts. " We sent an email to users with compromised accounts letting them know what to do ," " Their passwords have been reset and personal access tokens, OAuth authorizations, and SSH keys have all been revoked. "  However, GitHub uses the  bcrypt  algorithm to hash the passwords , which is extremely resilient against brute force attacks because it takes an inordinate amount of time to encrypt each password. In a blog post , GitHub engineer Shawn Davenport said that a brute force attack from around 40,000 IP addresses revealed some commonly used passwords . These addresses were used to slowly brute force weak passwords. In addition to normal strength requirements like length or cha

There is currently a Mega cyber attack campaign being launched on a large number of WordPress websites across the Internet.  In April, 2012 we reported about a large distributed brute force attack against millions of WordPress sites were occurring, out of that hackers are successful to compromise 90,000 servers to create a large Botnet  of Wordpress hosts. According to the DDOS attack logs report  received from a ' The Hacker News ' reader ' Steven Veldkamp ', victim's website was under under heavy DDOS attack recently, coming from various compromised Wordpress based websites. Possibly using the brute force attack on WordPress administrative portals with the a world list of the most commonly used username and password combinations, attackers are taking control of many poorly secured WordPress Hosts. After analyzing the piece of a DDOS attack Log file from timing 23/Sep/2013:13:03:13 +0200 to 23/Sep/2013:13:02:47 +0200, we found that in 26 second attacker was

Password theft has been a growing problem within the security community. Researchers at Arbor Networks have uncovered a botnet called Fort Disco that was used to compromise more than 6000 websites based on popular CMSs such as WordPress , Joomla and Datalife Engine. The Fort Disco botnet is currently made up of nearly 25,000 Windows machines and receives a list of sites to attack from a central command and control server. The bots receive also a list of common username-password combinations, typically composed of default combinations with password options including admin or 123456. Arbor Networks security researcher Matthew Bing said the attack has several advanced features that make it next to impossible to fully track and they obtained precious info on the botnet exploiting a misconfiguration on the attackers' side that made possible the analysis of logs on several of the six command and control servers discovered. " We stumbled upon these detailed logs the attacker left open o

Japanese video game maker Nintendo recently revealed that one of its main fan sites Club Nintendo got hacked and Out of 15.5 million login attempts in brute-force process, almost 24,000 user accounts have been hijacked early last month. Nintendo said it first became aware of the illicit logins on Tuesday evening after a large number of access errors on the site. However the security team believe that the hackers obtained the logins and passwords from an outside resource. The fan site, Club Nintendo, allows 3DS and Wii owners, as well as other fans of Nintendo games and hardware to answer survey questions and register their products. Members can do all this in exchange for "coins" or points. These can later be traded for other goods or services on the site. The site is open to users from all over the world, about four million of which are located in Japan. These accounts contain secure data of users' real names, addresses, phone numbers and email information. " The

Every day we read about an incredible number of successful attacks and data breaches that exploited leak of authentication mechanisms practically in every sector. Often also critical control system are exposed on line protected only by a weak password, in many cases the default one of factory settings, wrong behavior related to the human component and absence of input validation makes many applications vulnerable to external attacks. Today I desire to focus the attention of a report published by the consulting firm's Deloitte titled " Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions 2013 " that provide a series of technology predictions, including the outlook for subscription TV services and enterprise social networks. The document correctly express great concern of the improper use of passwords that will continue also in 2013 being causes of many problems, it must to be considered that value of the information protected by passwords continues to grow attracting il