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Category — cryptography
How Long Does It Take Hackers to Crack Modern Hashing Algorithms?

How Long Does It Take Hackers to Crack Modern Hashing Algorithms?

Jan 28, 2025 Cybersecurity / Encryption
While passwords remain the first line of defense for protecting user accounts against unauthorized access, the methods for creating strong passwords and protecting them are continually evolving. For example, NIST password recommendations are now prioritizing password length over complexity. Hashing, however, remains a non-negotiable. Even long secure passphrases should be hashed to prevent them from being completely exposed in the event of a data breach – and never stored in plaintext. This article examines how today's cyber attackers attempt to crack hashed passwords, explores common hashing algorithms and their limitations, and discusses measures you can take to protect your hashed passwords, regardless of which algorithm you are using. Modern password cracking techniques Malicious actors have an array of tools and methods at their disposal for cracking hashed passwords. Some of the more widely used methods include brute force attacks, password dictionary attacks, hybrid attacks...
Experts Find Shared Codebase Linking Morpheus and HellCat Ransomware Payloads

Experts Find Shared Codebase Linking Morpheus and HellCat Ransomware Payloads

Jan 23, 2025 Threat Intelligence / Data Breach
An analysis of HellCat and Morpheus ransomware operations has revealed that affiliates associated with the respective cybercrime entities are using identical code for their ransomware payloads. The findings come from SentinelOne, which analyzed artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal malware scanning platform by the same submitter towards the end of December 2024. "These two payload samples are identical except for victim specific data and the attacker contact details," security researcher Jim Walter said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. Both HellCat and Morpheus are nascent entrants to the ransomware ecosystem, having emerged in October and December 2024, respectively. A deeper examination of the Morpheus/HellCat payload, a 64-bit portable executable, has revealed that both samples require a path to be specified as an input argument. They are both configured to exclude the \Windows\System32 folder, as well as a hard-coded list of extensions from the encryp...
Navigating the Future: Key IT Vulnerability Management Trends

Navigating the Future: Key IT Vulnerability Management Trends 

Feb 11, 2025Vulnerability / Threat Detection
As the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve, proactive vulnerability management has become a critical priority for managed service providers (MSPs) and IT teams. Recent trends indicate that organizations increasingly prioritize more frequent IT security vulnerability assessments to identify and address potential security flaws. Staying informed on these trends can help MSPs and IT teams remain one step ahead of potential cyber-risks. The Kaseya Cybersecurity Survey Report 2024 navigates this new frontier of cyber challenges. The data is clear: Organizations are becoming increasingly reliant on vulnerability assessments and plan to prioritize these investments in 2025. Companies are increasing the frequency of vulnerability assessments  In 2024, 24% of respondents said they conduct vulnerability assessments more than four times per year, up from 15% in 2023. This shift highlights a growing recognition of the need for continuous monitoring and quick response to emerging t...
U.S. Sanctions North Korean IT Worker Network Supporting WMD Programs

U.S. Sanctions North Korean IT Worker Network Supporting WMD Programs

Jan 17, 2025 Insider Threat / Cryptocurrency
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned two individuals and four entities for their alleged involvement in illicit revenue generation schemes for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) by dispatching IT workers around the world to obtain employment and draw a steady source of income for the regime in violation of international sanctions. "These IT workers obfuscate their identities and locations to fraudulently obtain freelance employment contracts from clients around the world for IT projects, such as software and mobile application development," the Treasury Department said . "The DPRK government withholds up to 90% of the wages earned by these overseas workers, thereby generating annual revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars for the Kim regime's weapons programs to include weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programs." The action represents the latest salvo in the U.S. g...
cyber security

Webinar: 5 Ways New AI Agents Can Automate Identity Attacks | Register Now

websitePush SecurityAI Agents / Identity Security
Watch how Computer-Using Agents can be used by attackers to automate account takeover and exploitation.
Google's AI-Powered OSS-Fuzz Tool Finds 26 Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Projects

Google's AI-Powered OSS-Fuzz Tool Finds 26 Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Projects

Nov 21, 2024 Artificial Intelligence / Software Security
Google has revealed that its AI-powered fuzzing tool, OSS-Fuzz, has been used to help identify 26 vulnerabilities in various open-source code repositories, including a medium-severity flaw in the OpenSSL cryptographic library. "These particular vulnerabilities represent a milestone for automated vulnerability finding: each was found with AI, using AI-generated and enhanced fuzz targets," Google's open-source security team said in a blog post shared with The Hacker News. The OpenSSL vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-9143 (CVSS score: 4.3), an out-of-bounds memory write bug that can result in an application crash or remote code execution. The issue has been addressed in OpenSSL versions 3.3.3, 3.2.4, 3.1.8, 3.0.16, 1.1.1zb, and 1.0.2zl. Google, which added the ability to leverage large language models (LLMs) to improve fuzzing coverage in OSS-Fuzz in August 2023, said the vulnerability has likely been present in the codebase for two decades and that it "wo...
Live Webinar: Dive Deep into Crypto Agility and Certificate Management

Live Webinar: Dive Deep into Crypto Agility and Certificate Management

Nov 15, 2024 Webinar / Cyber Security
In the fast-paced digital world, trust is everything—but what happens when that trust is disrupted? Certificate revocations, though rare, can send shockwaves through your operations, impacting security, customer confidence, and business continuity. Are you prepared to act swiftly when the unexpected happens? Join DigiCert's exclusive webinar, " When Shift Happens: Are You Ready for Rapid Certificate Replacement? " , and discover how automation, crypto agility, and best practices can transform revocation challenges into opportunities for growth and resilience. Here's what you'll uncover: Revocations Uncovered: Understand why they happen, their ripple effects, and the role of post-quantum cryptography in mitigating risks. Automation to the Rescue: Learn how to minimize downtime and streamline certificate replacements with cutting-edge tools. Crypto Agility in Action: Stay ahead of evolving cryptographic standards with strategies that keep your organization secure and ...
Malicious npm Packages Target Developers' Ethereum Wallets with SSH Backdoor

Malicious npm Packages Target Developers' Ethereum Wallets with SSH Backdoor

Oct 22, 2024 Vulnerability / Supply Chain
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a number of suspicious packages published to the npm registry that are designed to harvest Ethereum private keys and gain remote access to the machine via the secure shell (SSH) protocol. The packages attempt to "gain SSH access to the victim's machine by writing the attacker's SSH public key in the root user's authorized_keys file," software supply chain security company Phylum said in an analysis published last week. The list of packages identified as part of the campaign, which aim to impersonate the legitimate ethers package , are as follows - ethers-mew (62 downloads) ethers-web3 (110 downloads) ethers-6 (56 downloads) ethers-eth (58 downloads) ethers-aaa (781 downloads) ethers-audit (69 downloads) ethers-test (336 downloads) Some of these packages, most of which have been published by accounts named "crstianokavic" and "timyorks," are believed to have been released for testing purpose...
Researchers Discover Severe Security Flaws in Major E2EE Cloud Storage Providers

Researchers Discover Severe Security Flaws in Major E2EE Cloud Storage Providers

Oct 21, 2024 Encryption / Data Protection
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered severe cryptographic issues in various end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) cloud storage platforms that could be exploited to leak sensitive data. "The vulnerabilities range in severity: in many cases a malicious server can inject files, tamper with file data, and even gain direct access to plaintext," ETH Zurich researchers Jonas Hofmann and Kien Tuong Truong said . "Remarkably, many of our attacks affect multiple providers in the same way, revealing common failure patterns in independent cryptographic designs." The identified weaknesses are the result of an analysis of five major providers such as Sync, pCloud, Icedrive, Seafile, and Tresorit. The devised attack techniques hinge on a malicious server that's under an adversary's control, which could then be used to target the service providers' users. A brief description of the flaws uncovered in the cloud storage systems is as follows - Sync, in which a maliciou...
Google Chrome Switches to ML-KEM for Post-Quantum Cryptography Defense

Google Chrome Switches to ML-KEM for Post-Quantum Cryptography Defense

Sep 17, 2024 Browser Security / Quantum Computing
Google has announced that it will be switching from KYBER to ML-KEM in its Chrome web browser as part of its ongoing efforts to defend against the risk posed by cryptographically relevant quantum computers ( CRQCs ). "Chrome will offer a key share prediction for hybrid ML-KEM (codepoint 0x11EC)," David Adrian, David Benjamin, Bob Beck, and Devon O'Brien of the Chrome Team said . "The PostQuantumKeyAgreementEnabled flag and enterprise policy will apply to both Kyber and ML-KEM." The changes are expected to take effect in Chrome version 131, which is on track for release in early November 2024. Google noted that the two hybrid post-quantum key exchange approaches are essentially incompatible with each other, prompting it to abandon KYBER. "The changes to the final version of ML-KEM make it incompatible with the previously deployed version of Kyber," the company said. "As a result, the codepoint in TLS for hybrid post-quantum key exchange is ch...
Say Goodbye to Phishing: Must-Haves to Eliminate Credential Theft

Say Goodbye to Phishing: Must-Haves to Eliminate Credential Theft

Sep 13, 2024 Device Security / Identity Management
Even as cyber threats become increasingly sophisticated, the number one attack vector for unauthorized access remains phished credentials ( Verizon DBIR, 2024 ). Solving this problem resolves over 80% of your corporate risk, and a solution is possible.  However, most tools available on the market today cannot offer a complete defense against this attack vector because they were architected to deliver probabilistic defenses. Learn more about the characteristics of Beyond Identity that allow us to deliver deterministic defenses.  The Challenge: Phishing and Credential Theft Phishing attacks trick users into revealing their credentials via deceptive sites or messages sent via SMS, email, and/or voice calls. Traditional defenses, such as end-user training or basic multi-factor authentication (MFA), lower the risk at best but cannot eliminate it. Users may still fall prey to scams, and stolen credentials can be exploited. Legacy MFA is a particularly urgent problem, given that ...
Zoom Adopts NIST-Approved Post-Quantum End-to-End Encryption for Meetings

Zoom Adopts NIST-Approved Post-Quantum End-to-End Encryption for Meetings

May 22, 2024 Encryption / Quantum Computing
Popular enterprise services provider Zoom has announced the rollout of post-quantum end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Zoom Meetings, with support for Zoom Phone and Zoom Rooms coming in the future. "As adversarial threats become more sophisticated, so does the need to safeguard user data," the company  said  in a statement. "With the launch of post-quantum E2EE, we are doubling down on security and providing leading-edge features for users to help protect their data." Zoom's post-quantum E2EE uses  Kyber-768 , which aims at security roughly equivalent to AES-192. Kyber was  chosen  by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in July 2022 as the quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithm for general encryption. However, for post-quantum E2EE to be enabled by default, it  requires  all meeting participants to be on Zoom desktop or mobile app version 6.0.10 or higher. In the e...
New Spectre-Style 'Pathfinder' Attack Targets Intel CPU, Leak Encryption Keys and Data

New Spectre-Style 'Pathfinder' Attack Targets Intel CPU, Leak Encryption Keys and Data

May 08, 2024 Data Encryption / Hardware Security
Researchers have discovered two novel attack methods targeting high-performance Intel CPUs that could be exploited to stage a key recovery attack against the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. The techniques have been collectively dubbed  Pathfinder  by a group of academics from the University of California San Diego, Purdue University, UNC Chapel Hill, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Google. "Pathfinder allows attackers to read and manipulate key components of the branch predictor, enabling two main types of attacks: reconstructing program control flow history and launching high-resolution Spectre attacks," Hosein Yavarzadeh, the lead author of the  paper , said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "This includes extracting secret images from libraries like libjpeg and recovering encryption keys from AES through intermediate value extraction." Spectre is the name given to a  class of side-channel attacks ...
Widely-Used PuTTY SSH Client Found Vulnerable to Key Recovery Attack

Widely-Used PuTTY SSH Client Found Vulnerable to Key Recovery Attack

Apr 16, 2024 Encryption / Network Security
The maintainers of the  PuTTY Secure Shell (SSH) and Telnet client  are alerting users of a critical vulnerability impacting versions from 0.68 through 0.80 that could be exploited to achieve full recovery of NIST P-521 (ecdsa-sha2-nistp521) private keys. The flaw has been assigned the CVE identifier  CVE-2024-31497 , with the discovery credited to researchers Fabian Bäumer and Marcus Brinkmann from the Ruhr University Bochum. "The effect of the vulnerability is to compromise the private key," the PuTTY project  said  in an advisory. "An attacker in possession of a few dozen signed messages and the public key has enough information to recover the private key, and then forge signatures as if they were from you, allowing them to (for instance) log in to any servers you use that key for." However, in order to obtain the signatures, an attacker will have to compromise the server for which the key is used to authenticate to. In a message posted on the Open Sou...
New "GoFetch" Vulnerability in Apple M-Series Chips Leaks Secret Encryption Keys

New "GoFetch" Vulnerability in Apple M-Series Chips Leaks Secret Encryption Keys

Mar 25, 2024 Hardware Security / Data Protection
A new security shortcoming discovered in Apple M-series chips could be exploited to extract secret keys used during cryptographic operations. Dubbed  GoFetch , the vulnerability relates to a microarchitectural side-channel attack that takes advantage of a feature known as data memory-dependent prefetcher (DMP) to target constant-time cryptographic implementations and capture sensitive data from the CPU cache. Apple was made aware of the findings in December 2023. Prefetchers are a hardware optimization technique that predicts what memory addresses a currently running program will access in the near future and retrieve the data into the cache accordingly from the main memory. The goal of this approach is to reduce the program's memory access latency. DMP is a type of prefetcher that takes into account the contents of memory based on previously observed access patterns when determining what to prefetch. This behavior makes it ripe for cache-based attacks that trick the prefetche...
Apple Unveils PQ3 Protocol - Post-Quantum Encryption for iMessage

Apple Unveils PQ3 Protocol - Post-Quantum Encryption for iMessage

Feb 22, 2024 Quantum Computing / Encryption
Apple has announced a new post-quantum cryptographic protocol called  PQ3  that it said will be integrated into iMessage to secure the messaging platform against future attacks arising from the threat of a practical quantum computer. "With compromise-resilient encryption and extensive defenses against even highly sophisticated quantum attacks, PQ3 is the first messaging protocol to reach what we call Level 3 security — providing protocol protections that surpass those in all other widely deployed messaging apps," Apple  said . The iPhone maker described the protocol as "groundbreaking," "state-of-the-art," and as having the "strongest security properties" of any cryptographic convention deployed at scale. PQ3 is the latest security guardrail erected by Apple in iMessage after it switched from  RSA  to Elliptic Curve cryptography ( ECC ), and by protecting encryption keys on devices with the Secure Enclave in 2019. While the current algorith...
LummaC2 Malware Deploys New Trigonometry-Based Anti-Sandbox Technique

LummaC2 Malware Deploys New Trigonometry-Based Anti-Sandbox Technique

Nov 20, 2023 Malware / Cyber Attack
The stealer malware known as  LummaC2  (aka Lumma Stealer) now features a new anti-sandbox technique that leverages the mathematical principle of trigonometry to evade detection and exfiltrate valuable information from infected hosts. The method is designed to "delay detonation of the sample until human mouse activity is detected," Outpost24 security researcher Alberto Marín  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Written in the C programming language, LummaC2 has been sold in underground forums since December 2022. The malware has since  received   iterative updates  that make it harder to analyze via control flow flattening and even allow it to deliver additional payloads. The current version of LummaC2 (v4.0) also requires its customers to use a  crypter  as an added concealing mechanism, not to mention prevent it from being leaked in its raw form. Another noteworthy update is the reliance on trigonometry to detect ...
Post-Quantum Cryptography: Finally Real in Consumer Apps?

Post-Quantum Cryptography: Finally Real in Consumer Apps?

Sep 29, 2023 Quantum Computing / Network Security
Most people are barely thinking about basic cybersecurity, let alone post-quantum cryptography. But the impact of a post-quantum world is coming for them regardless of whether or not it's keeping them up tonight.  Today, many rely on encryption in their daily lives to protect their fundamental digital privacy and security, whether for messaging friends and family, storing files and photos, or simply browsing the web. The question experts have been asking for a long time, with their eye on the advances in quantum computing, is, "How long before these defenses fail?"  The ticking clock of quantum computing One set of researchers is already sounding the alarms,  claiming  that they've found a way to break 2048-bit RSA encryption with a quantum computer. While the claims may be premature, they hint toward a scary future that is perhaps closer than we once thought. Breaking RSA encryption would represent a massive privacy and security vulnerability for virtually every...
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