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The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency within the Department of Commerce,  announced  Thursday that it's formally retiring the SHA-1 cryptographic algorithm. SHA-1 , short for Secure Hash Algorithm 1, is a 27-year-old  hash function  used in cryptography and has since been  deemed   broken  owing to the risk of  collision attacks . While hashes are designed to be irreversible – meaning it should be impossible to reconstruct the original message from the fixed-length enciphered text – the lack of collision resistance in SHA-1 made it possible to generate the same hash value for two different inputs. In February 2017, a group of researchers from CWI Amsterdam and Google  disclosed  the first practical technique for producing collisions on SHA-1, effectively undermining the security of the algorithm. "For example, by crafting the two colliding PDF files as two rental agreements with different rent, it is possible to trick someone to create

SHA-1, Secure Hash Algorithm 1, a very popular cryptographic hashing function designed in 1995 by the NSA, is officially dead after a team of researchers from Google and the CWI Institute in Amsterdam announced today submitted the first ever successful SHA-1 collision attack. SHA-1 was designed in 1995 by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a part of the Digital Signature Algorithm. Like other hashes, SHA-1 also converts any input message to a long string of numbers and letters that serve as a cryptographic fingerprint for that particular message. Collision attacks appear when the same hash value (fingerprint) is produced for two different messages, which then can be exploited to forge digital signatures, allowing attackers to break communications encoded with SHA-1. The explanation is technologically tricky, but you can think of it as attackers who surgically alters their fingerprints in order to match yours, and then uses that to unlock your smartphone. The researchers h

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

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been hacked by unknown attackers that allowed them to gain administrative access to some of the organization's systems, the organization confirmed. The attackers used " spear phishing " campaign to target sensitive systems operated by ICANN and sent spoofed emails disguised as internal ICANN communications to its staff members. The link in the emails took the staff to bogus login page, where they provided their usernames and passwords with the keys to their work email accounts. The data breach began in late November 2014 and was discovered a week later, ICANN, which oversees the Internet's address system, said in a release published Tuesday. ICANN is the organization that manages the global top-level domain system. " We believe a 'spear phishing' attack was initiated in late November 2014 ," Tuesday's press release stated. " It involved email messages that we