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Today, Microsoft has issued an emergency update for almost all versions of Windows and also for Microsoft devices running Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 to secure users from attacks that abuse the latest issued rogue SSL certificates, which could be used to impersonate Google and Yahoo! websites. A week after the search engine giant Google spotted and blocked unauthorized digital certificates for a number of its domains that could result in a potentially serious security and privacy threat, Microsoft has responded back to block the bogus certificates from being used on its software as well. " Today, we are updating the Certificate Trust List (CTL) for all supported releases of Microsoft Windows to remove the trust of mis-issued third-party digital certificates, " said Dustin Childs, group manager of response communications. The fake digital certificates , issued by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) of India - a unit of India's Ministry of Communications and Infor

It's the age of surveillance what made the Use of Encryption so widely that it has become a need of law enforcement agencies, cyber criminals as well as every individual. But, encryption is not so easy. To solve this problem, a 23-year old Cryptocat developer Nadim Kobeissi is ready to release a simple solution to deliver strong encryption at the HOPE hacker conference in New York later this month, which may soon come as an extension for Google Chrome web browser, Wired reported . The encryption program is dubbed as miniLock , which is a free and open-source browser plugin designed to let anyone encrypt and decrypt files in seconds using a drag-and-drop interface with practically unbreakable cryptographic protection. " The tagline is that this is file encryption that does more with less, " says Kobeissi, activist and security consultant. " It's super simple, approachable, and it's almost impossible to be confused using it. " Drag-and-drop interface here means, miniL

In today's digital world, where connectivity is rules all, endpoints serve as the gateway to a business's digital kingdom. And because of this, endpoints are one of hackers' favorite targets.  According to the IDC,  70% of successful breaches start at the endpoint . Unprotected endpoints provide vulnerable entry points to launch devastating cyberattacks. With IT teams needing to protect more endpoints—and more kinds of endpoints—than ever before, that perimeter has become more challenging to defend. You need to improve your endpoint security, but where do you start? That's where this guide comes in.  We've curated the top 10 must-know endpoint security tips that every IT and security professional should have in their arsenal. From identifying entry points to implementing EDR solutions, we'll dive into the insights you need to defend your endpoints with confidence.  1. Know Thy Endpoints: Identifying and Understanding Your Entry Points Understanding your network's

After the wide chain of scandals over US global snooping that seriously damaged the trust on the top U.S. Tech companies, Google and Yahoo! came forward and took initiative to provide more secure, encrypted and NSA-proofed service in an effort to gain their reputation again among its users. Now, Microsoft has also announced several improvements to the encryption used in its online cloud services in order to protect them from cyber criminals, bad actors and prying eyes. The company effort detailed in a blog entry by Matt Thomlinson, Microsoft's Vice President of Trustworthy Computing Security. MICROSOFT'S COMMITMENT Last December, Microsoft promised to protect its users data from government snooping by expanding encryption across its services, reinforcing legal protections for its customers' data and enhancing the transparency of its software code, making it easier for the customers to reassure themselves that its products contain no backdoors. Yesterday's announc

In cryptography, Block ciphers such as AES or DES are a symmetric key cipher operating on fixed-length groups of bits, called blocks, and typically operate on large input data blocks i.e. 64 or more than 128, 256 bits. Block cipher encrypts Plain-text to Cipher-text by applying cryptographic key and algorithm to a block of data at once as a group rather than to one bit at a time, so that identical blocks of text do not get encrypted the same way. However, some applications need smaller blocks, and possibly non-binary blocks. So, to fulfil this need Cisco is providing a  small block cipher , what it calls "FNR" (Flexible Naor and Reingold), but currently it is an experimental block cipher rather a production software. Sashank Dara , software engineer at the security technology group Cisco , says in a detailed explanation that FNR is a flexible length small domain block cipher for encrypting objects that works without the need for padding, as happens in the traditional

The Edward Snowden revelations triggered a large-scale movement worldwide towards deploying encryption across the Internet for secure services, which is something the government agencies like NSA and GCHQ have targeted repeatedly, as exemplified by abruptly shutting down Lavabit , a Texas-based Encrypted Email Service. In response, a group of young developers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has launched a new email service which offers end-to-end encryption and securing communications that could put an end to government snooping and will keep away our personal data from prying eyes. PROTONMAIL - AN END-to-END ENCRYPTED EMAIL This new encrypted email service, called ProtonMail is a super-secure email service created in collaboration with the scientists from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European research lab CERN. ProtonMail offers a user-friendly experience with full "end-to-end" encryption . It encrypts the data on the browser

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced to abandon the controversial  Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic  Random Bit Generator,  better known as  Dual_EC_DRBG in the wake of allegations that the National Security Agency. Back in December, Edward Snowden leaks revealed that RSA received $10 million bribe from NSA under a secret contract to implement their flawed cryptographic algorithm Dual_EC_DRBG in its bSafe Security tool as the default protocol in its products for keeping Encryption Weak . In response to the accusations on NSA and RSA, and despite RSA denied all the accusations. without wasting time NIST issued an announcement recommending against using Dual_EC_DRBG and abandon the cryptographic algorithm from its revised guidance provided in the Recommendation for Random Number Generation Using Deterministic Random Bit Generators ( NIST Special Publication 800-90A, Rev.1 ). But it didn't remove it from its random number generator

Is TrueCrypt Audited Yet? Yes, In Part!  One of the world's most-used open source file encryption software trusted by tens of millions of users - TrueCrypt is being audited by a team of experts to assess if it could be easily exploited and cracked. Hopefully it has cleared the first phase of the audit and given a relatively clean bill of health. TrueCrypt is a free, open-source and cross-platform encryption program available for Windows, OSX and Linux that can be used to encrypt individual folders or encrypt entire hard drive partitions including the system partition.  The program is also capable to do some amazing things, such as can create a hidden operating system on a computer, essentially an OS within an OS where users can keep their most secret files. EVERYONE HAS SOMETHING TO HIDE TrueCrypt developers are anonymous and used the aliases " ennead " and " syncon ", perhaps to avoid unwelcome attention from their own governments. But when we talk about Privacy an

Heartbleed has left a worst impression worldwide affecting millions of websites and is also supposed to put millions of Smartphones and tablets users at a great risk. Heartbleed is a critical bug ( CVE-2014-0160 ) in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension, which allows attackers to read portions of the affected server's memory, potentially revealing users data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers, that the server did not intend to reveal. OpenSSL is a widely-used cryptographic library which implements the SSL and TLS protocol and protects communications on the Internet, and mostly every websites use either SSL or TLS, even the Apache web server that powers almost half of the websites over internet utilizes OpenSSL. But to assume that the users using desktop browsers to visit websites are vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, will be wrong. Despite 40

The Bloomberg claimed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) knew about the most critical Heartbleed flaw and has been using it on a regular basis to gather " critical intelligence " and sensitive information for at least past two years and decided to keep the bug secret, citing two sources ' familiar with the matter '. In response to the above report, NSA has issued a ' 94 character' statement today denying the claims that it has known about the Heartbleed bug since two years and that it has been using it silently for the purpose of surveillance. " NSA was not aware of the recently identified Heartbleed vulnerability until it was made public ," the U.S. intelligence agency said on its Twitter feed . Heartbleed is one of the biggest Internet vulnerabilities in recent history that left large number of cryptographic keys and private data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers, from the most important sites and services on the Int

Millions of websites, users' passwords, credit card numbers and other personal information may be at risk as a result of the Heartbleed security flaw , a vulnerability in widely used cryptographic library ' OpenSSL '. [ READ DETAILS HERE ] Netcraft survey says that about half a million widely trusted active websites on the internet are vulnerable to the heartbleed bug, which means the information transmitting through hundreds of thousands of websites could be vulnerable, despite the protection offered by encryption techniques. According to Netcraft, " the heartbeat extension was enabled on 17.5% of SSL sites, accounting for around half a million certificates issued by trusted certificate authorities. These certificates are consequently vulnerable to being spoofed (through private key disclosure), allowing an attacker to impersonate the affected websites without raising any browser warnings. " Among the trusted names running OpenSSL is Yahoo!, which has been

Are you safe from the critical bug Heartbleed?? OpenSSL- the encryption technology used by millions of websites to encrypt the communication and is also used to protect our sensitive data such as e-mails, passwords or banking information.  But a tiny, but most critical flaw called " Heartbleed " in the widely used OpenSSL opened doors for the cyber criminals to extract sensitive data from the system memory. WHAT IS HEARTBLEED? SSL and TLS are known to provide communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as websites, email, instant messaging (IM), including some virtual private networks (VPNs). Heartbleed is a critical bug ( CVE-2014-0160 ) is in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS (transport layer security protocols) and DTLS ( Datagram TLS ) heartbeat extension (RFC6520). This bug was independently discovered by a team of security enginee

Passwords are the first line of defense against cyber criminals. It is the most vital secret of every activity we do over the internet and also a final check to get into any of your user account, whether it is your bank account, email account, shopping cart account or any other account you have. We all know storing passwords in clear text in your database is ridiculous. Many desktop applications and almost every web service including, blogs, forums eventually need to store a collection of user data and the passwords, that has to be stored using a hashing algorithm. Cryptographic hash algorithms MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, SHA-3 are general purpose hash functions, designed to calculate a digest of huge amounts of data in as short a time as possible. Hashing is the greatest way for protecting passwords and considered to be pretty safe for ensuring the integrity of data or password. The benefit of hashing is that if someone steals the database with hashed passwords, they o

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

Many Smartphone applications support, installation or app data storage to an external SD Card, that can be helpful in saving space on the internal memory, but also vulnerable to hackers. Typically, an app that has permission to read and write data from an SD card has the permission to read all data on that card, including information written by other apps. This means that if you install a malicious application by mistake, it can easily steal any sensitive data from your Phone's SD Card. To prevent the data from being misused by any other app, the best implementation is to encrypt the data, but that will drop the performance of the device. On its 10th birthday, as a treat for mobile developers, Facebook has unveiled the source code of its Android security tool called ' Conceal ' cryptographic API Java library, that will allow app developers to encrypt data on disk in the most resource efficient way, with an easy-to-use programming interface. Smaller th

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) had published a document on Jan 2011 that the SHA-1 algorithm will be risky and should be disallowed after year 2013, but it was recently noticed by Netcraft experts that NIST.gov website itself were using 2014 dated SSL certificate with SHA-1 hashes. " From January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2013, the use of SHA-1 is deprecated for digital signature generation. The user must accept risk when SHA-1 is used, particularly when approaching the December 31, 2013 upper limit. SHA-1 shall not be used for digital signature generation after December 31, 2013. " NIST in the document. Digital signatures facilitate the safe exchange of electronic documents by providing a way to test both the authenticity and the integrity of information exchanged digitally. Authenticity means when you sign data with a digital signature, someone else can verify the signature, and can confirm that the data originated from you and was not