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UNIX Co-Founder Ken Thompson's BSD Password Has Finally Been Cracked

UNIX Co-Founder Ken Thompson's BSD Password Has Finally Been Cracked
Oct 11, 2019
A 39-year-old password of Ken Thompson , the co-creator of the UNIX operating system among, has finally been cracked that belongs to a BSD-based system, one of the original versions of UNIX, which was back then used by various computer science pioneers. In 2014, developer Leah Neukirchen spotted an interesting " /etc/passwd " file in a publicly available source tree of historian BSD version 3, which includes hashed passwords belonging to more than two dozens Unix luminaries who worked on UNIX development, including Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Ken Thompson, Eric Schmidt, Stuart Feldman, and Brian W. Kernighan. Since all passwords in that list are protected using now-depreciated DES-based crypt(3) algorithm and limited to at most 8 characters, Neukirchen decided to brute-force them for fun and successfully cracked passwords (listed below) for almost everyone using password cracking tools like John the Ripper and hashcat. The ones that she wasn't able to crack

Taringa: Over 28 Million Users' Data Exposed in Massive Data Breach

Taringa: Over 28 Million Users' Data Exposed in Massive Data Breach
Sep 04, 2017
Exclusive — If you have an account on Taringa , also known as "The Latin American Reddit," your account details may have compromised in a massive data breach that leaked login details of almost all of its over 28 million users. Taringa is a popluar social network geared toward Latin American users, who create and share thousands of posts every day on general interest topics like life hacks, tutorials, recipes, reviews, and art. The Hacker News has been informed by LeakBase , a breach notification service, who has obtained a copy of the hacked database containing details on 28,722,877 accounts, which includes usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords for Taringa users. The hashed passwords use an ageing algorithm called MD5 – which has been considered outdated even before 2012 – that can easily be cracked, making Taringa users open to hackers. Wanna know how weak is MD5?, LeakBase team has already cracked 93.79 percent (nearly 27 Million) of hashed passwords s

Code Keepers: Mastering Non-Human Identity Management

Code Keepers: Mastering Non-Human Identity Management
Apr 12, 2024DevSecOps / Identity Management
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

How to Hack Apple Mac Encryption Password in Just 30 Seconds

How to Hack Apple Mac Encryption Password in Just 30 Seconds
Dec 16, 2016
Macintosh computers are often considered to be safer than those running Windows operating system, but a recently discovered attack technique proves it all wrong. All an attacker needs is a $300 device to seize full control of your Mac or MacBook. Swedish hacker and penetration tester Ulf Frisk has developed a new device that can steal the password from virtually any Mac laptop while it is sleeping or even locked in just 30 seconds, allowing hackers to unlock any Mac computer and even decrypt the files on its hard drive. So, next time when you leave your Apple's laptop unattended, be sure to shut it down completely rather than just putting the system in sleep mode or locked. Here's How an Attacker can steal your Mac FileVault2 Password The researcher devised this technique by exploiting two designing flaws he discovered last July in Apple's FileVault2 full-disk encryption software. The first issue is that the Mac system does not protect itself against Direc

WATCH: The SaaS Security Challenge in 90 Seconds

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websiteAdaptive ShieldSaaS Security / Cyber Threat
Discover how you can overcome the SaaS security challenge by securing your entire SaaS stack with SSPM.

Ashley Madison Dating Site Agrees to Pay $1.6 Million Fine Over Massive Breach

Ashley Madison Dating Site Agrees to Pay $1.6 Million Fine Over Massive Breach
Dec 15, 2016
Ashley Madison, an American most prominent dating website that helps married people cheat on their spouses has been hacked, has agreed to pay a hefty fine of $1.6 Million for failing to protect account information of 36 Million users , after a massive data breach last year. Yes, the parent company of Ashley Madison , Ruby Corp. will pay $1.6 Million to settle charges from both Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 13 states alleging that it misled its consumers about its privacy practices and did not do enough to protect their information. Not only the company failed to protect the account information of its 36 Million users, but also it failed to delete account information after regretful users paid a $20 fee for "Full Delete" of their accounts. Moreover, the Ashley Madison site operators were accused of creating fake accounts of "female" users in an effort to attract new members. Avid Life Media denied the claim at the time, but a year later when the com

Facebook Buys Leaked Passwords From Black Market, But Do You Know Why?

Facebook Buys Leaked Passwords From Black Market, But Do You Know Why?
Nov 10, 2016
Facebook is reportedly buying stolen passwords that hackers are selling on the underground black market in an effort to keep its users' accounts safe. On the one hand, we just came to know that Yahoo did not inform its users of the recently disclosed major 2014 hacking incident that exposed half a billion user accounts even after being aware of the hack in 2014. On the other hand, Facebook takes every single measure to protect its users' security even after the company managed to avoid any kind of security scandal, data breach or hacks that have recently affected top notch companies. Speaking at the Web Summit 2016 technology conference in Portugal, Facebook CSO Alex Stamos said that over 1.3 Billion people use Facebook every day, and keeping them secure is building attack-proof software to keep out hackers, but keeping them safe is actually a huge task. Stamos said there is a difference between 'security' and 'safety,' as he believes that his team

You Wouldn't Believe that Too Many People Still Use Terrible Passwords

You Wouldn't Believe that Too Many People Still Use Terrible Passwords
Jan 21, 2016
Some things online can never change like -- Terrible Passwords by Humans . When it's about various security measures to be taken in order to protect your Internet security, like installing a good anti-virus or running Linux on your system doesn't mean that your work gets over here, and you are safe enough from online threats. However, even after countless warnings, most people are continuously using deadly-simple passwords, like '123456' or 'password,' to safeguard their most sensitive data. Evidence suggests that weak passwords are as popular now as they ever were, and the top 25 passwords of 2015 are very easy to guess. Password management firm SplashData on Tuesday released its annual " Worst Passwords List ". The 2015 list almost resembled the 2014 list of the worst password, but there are some interesting new entries, including the Star Wars-inspired ' solo ,' and ' starwars .' Also Read:  Best Password Manager —

Unpatched Mac OS X Zero-day Bug Allows Root Access Without Password

Unpatched Mac OS X Zero-day Bug Allows Root Access Without Password
Aug 04, 2015
Hackers have their hands on something of your concern. A severe zero-day vulnerability in the latest, fully patched version of Apple's Mac OS X is reportedly being exploited in the wild by the hackers. The vulnerability could allow attackers to install malware and adware onto a target Mac, running OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) operating system, without requiring victims to enter system passwords , a new report says. The zero-day bug came over a week after security researcher Stefan Esser discovered a privilege escalation zero-day vulnerability in the latest version of Apple's OS X Yosemite that caused due to environment variable DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE and dynamic linker dyld , new error-logging features added to the operating system. The developers failed to implement standard safeguards that are needed while adding support for new environment variables to the OS X dynamic linker dyld, allowing hackers to create or modify files with root privileges that can fit anywhere i

Do You also want to Hack Facebook Account of your Girlfriend?

Do You also want to Hack Facebook Account of your Girlfriend?
Jun 13, 2015
We at The Hacker News get a lot of requests via emails and messages from people who want to hack into someone else's Facebook account or Gmail account or break into somebody's network. However, 80 to 90 percent requests we receive every day are from people who want to hack into their girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, or husband's Facebook account in order to read their private conversations and reveal their secret relationships, if any. Even though we strongly deny any such requests because accessing someone else's account without their knowledge or permission is a crime… ...but there are demands from people – those cheated by their love, betrayal of trust, driven by greed or revenge – to break into the Facebook accounts of other people. So, what about Hiring a Hacker? As money could buy everything, a service received a lot of popularity earlier this year – even featured on the front page of the New York Times – claims to connect these needy people to professional

Unbreakable Encryption inspired by Human Biology

Unbreakable Encryption inspired by Human Biology
Apr 08, 2014
When we talk about security, only one thing cames to our mind – ENCRYPTION . Encryption of our online messages, encryption of our emails, encryption of our voice call, encryption of our every personal data and communication that we have to keep away from cybercriminals and, if I am not wrong, also from government intelligence agencies, such as NSA and GCHQ. Eventually, secure encryption is mandatory need of our modern Internet, Mobile communication, financial transactions, network sensors, car keys, and many more. But, government agencies like NSA are trying hard to break every effort that we adopt to secure our personal and confidential data.  NSA is trying to develop a futuristic super computer called ' Quantum computer ' that could be capable of breaking almost every kind of Encryption used to protect banks, medical, business including top-secret information held by government around the world. NEARLY UNBREAKABLE ENCRYPTION So, need for new encryption schem

'123456' giving tough competition to 'password' in Worst 25 Passwords of 2013

'123456' giving tough competition to 'password' in Worst 25 Passwords of 2013
Jan 21, 2014
123456, password, 12345678, qwerty… or abc123 , How many of you have your password one of these??? I think quite a many of you. Even after countless warnings and advices given to the users by many security researchers, people are continuously using a weak strength of password chains. After observing many cyber attacks in 2013, we have seen many incidents where an attacker can predict or brute-force your passwords very easily. From 2012, the only change till now is that the string " password " has shifted to the second place in a list of the most commonly used passphrases and string " 123456 " has taken the first place recently, according to an annual " Worst Passwords " report released by SplashData , a password management software company They announced the annual list of 25 most common passwords i.e. Obviously the worst password that found on the Internet. The Most common lists of the passwords this year are " qwerty ," " abc123 ," &qu

Github accounts compromised in massive Brute-Force attack using 40,000 IP addresses

Github accounts compromised in massive Brute-Force attack using 40,000 IP addresses
Nov 21, 2013
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
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