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Yes, you read that right! Russia has fined Facebook with 3,000 rubles, roughly $47, for not complying with the country's controversial Data Localization law. It's bizarre and unbelievable, but true. In December last year, Russian Internet watchdog Roskomnadzor sent notifications to Twitter and Facebook asking them to provide information about the location of servers that store the personal data of its citizens. Roskomnadzor – also known as the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies, and Mass Communications – is Russian telecommunications watchdog that runs a huge blacklist of websites banned in Russia. Though the social media platforms had one month to reply, they choose not to disclose this information, as a result of which Moscow's Tagansky District Court imposed 3,000 rubles fine on Twitter last week and the same on Facebook today. The fine is the minimum that Russian courts can impose on companies for violatin

Update (4/4/2019) — Great news. NSA today finally released the complete source code for GHIDRA version 9.0.2 which is now available on its Github repository . GHIDRA  is agency's home-grown classified software reverse engineering tool that agency experts have been using internally for over a decade to hunt down security bugs in software and applications. GHIDRA is a Java-based reverse engineering framework that features a graphical user interface (GUI) and has been designed to run on a variety of platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Reverse engineering a program or software involves disassembling, i.e. converting binary instructions into assembly code when its source code is unavailable, helping software engineers, especially malware analysts, understand the functionality of the code and actual design and implementation information. The existence of GHIDRA was first publicly revealed by WikiLeaks in CIA Vault 7 leaks , but the NSA today publicly released t

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

Visibility into an environment attack surface is the fundamental cornerstone to sound security decision making. However, the standard process of 3rd party threat assessment as practiced today is both time consuming and expensive. Cynet changes the rules of the game with a free threat assessment offering based on more than 72 hours of data collection and enabling organizations to benchmark their security posture against their industry vertical peers and take actions accordingly. Cynet Free Threat Assessment (available for organizations with 300 endpoints and above) spotlights critical, exposed attack surfaces and provides actionable knowledge of attacks that are currently alive and active in the environment: ➤ Indication of live attacks: active malware, connection to C&C, data exfiltration, access to phishing links, user credential theft attempts and others: ➤ Host and app attack surfaces: unpatched vulnerabilities rated per criticality: ➤ Benchmark comparing

Facebook has been caught practicing the worst ever user-verification mechanism that could put the security of its users at risk. Generally, social media or any other online service asks users to confirm a secret code or a unique URL sent to the email address they provided for the account registration. However, Facebook has been found asking some newly-registered users to provide the social network with the passwords to their email accounts, which according to security experts is a terrible idea that could threaten privacy and security of its users. First noticed by Twitter account e-Sushi using the handle @originalesushi, Facebook has been prompting users to hand over their passwords for third-party email services, so that the company can "automatically" verify their email addresses. However, the prompt only appears for email accounts from certain email providers which Facebook considers to be suspicious. "Tested it myself registering 3 times with 3 differe

In today's world, data plays a crucial role in the success of any organization, but if left unprotected, it could be a cybercriminal's dream come true. Poorly protected MongoDB, CouchDB, and Elasticsearch databases recently got a lot more attention from cybersecurity firms and media lately. More than half of the known cases of massive data breaches over the past year originated from unsecured database servers that were accessible to anyone without any password. Since the database of an organization contains its most valuable and easily exploitable data, cybercriminals have also started paying closer attention to find other insecure entry points. Though the problems with unprotected databases are no news and are widely discussed on the Internet, I want cybersecurity community and industry experts to pay some attention to thousands of unsafe Kibana instances that are exposed on the Internet, posing a huge risk to many companies. Kibana is an open-source analytics and visualiz

A former National Security Agency contractor—who stole an enormous amount of sensitive information from the agency and then stored it at his home and car for over two decades—today changed his plea to guilty. The theft was labeled as the largest heist of classified government material in America's history. Harold Thomas Martin III, a 54-year-old Navy veteran from Glen Burnie, abused his top-secret security clearances to stole at least 50 terabytes of classified national defense data from government computers over two decades while working for a number of NSA departments between 1996 and 2016. In August 2016, the FBI arrested Martin at his Maryland home and found "six full bankers' boxes" worth of documents, many of which were marked "Secret" and "Top Secret," in his home and car. At the time of his arrest in August 2016, Martin also worked for Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp, the same company that previously employed  Edward Snowden  

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Thursday issued an advisory warning people of severe vulnerabilities in over a dozen heart defibrillators that could allow attackers to fully hijack them remotely, potentially putting lives of millions of patients at risk. Cardioverter Defibrillator is a small surgically implanted device (in patients' chests) that gives a patient's heart an electric shock (often called a countershock) to re-establish a normal heartbeat. While the device has been designed to prevent sudden death, several implanted cardiac defibrillators made by one of the world's largest medical device companies Medtronic have been found vulnerable to two serious vulnerabilities. Discovered by researchers from security firm Clever Security, the vulnerabilities could allow threat actors with knowledge of medical devices to intercept and potentially impact the functionality of these life-saving devices. "Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities

A hacker who was selling details of nearly 890 million online accounts stolen from 32 popular websites in three separate rounds has now put up a fourth batch of millions of records originating from 6 other sites for sale on the dark web. The Hacker News today received a new email from the Pakistani hacker, who goes by online alias Gnosticplayers and previously claimed to have hacked dozens of popular websites from companies which, according to him, probably had no idea that they were compromised. The hacker last month made three rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on the popular dark web market called Dream Market, posting details of 620 million accounts stolen from 16 websites in the first round, 127 million records from 8 sites in the second, and 92 million from 8 websites in the third. Although while releasing the third round Gnosticplayers told The Hacker News that it would be his last batch of the stolen database, the hacker released the fourth round containing nearl

Adobe users would feel lighter this month, as Adobe has released patches for just two security vulnerability in its March Security Update. The company today released its monthly security updates to address two critical arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities—one in Adobe Photoshop CC and another in Adobe Digital Editions. Upon successful exploitation, both critical vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to achieve arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user and take control of an affected system. However, the good news is that the company found no evidence of any exploits in the wild for these security issues, Adobe said. The vulnerability in Adobe Photoshop CC , discovered by Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative and assigned CVE-2019-7094, is a heap corruption issue which affects Photoshop CC 19.1.7 and earlier 19.x versions as well as Photoshop CC 20.0.2 and earlier 20.x versions for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS operating systems. Users are recommended

Cybercriminals have actively started exploiting an already patched security vulnerability in the wild to install cryptocurrency miners on vulnerable Drupal websites that have not yet applied patches and are still vulnerable. Last week, developers of the popular open-source content management system Drupal patched a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2019-6340) in Drupal Core that could allow attackers to hack affected websites. Despite releasing no technical details of the security vulnerability, the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for the vulnerability was made publicly available on the Internet just two days after the Drupal security team rolled out the patched version of its software. Now, security researchers at data center security vendor Imperva discovered a series of attacks—that began just a day after the exploit code went public—against its customers' websites using an exploit that leverages the CVE-2019-6340 security flaw. The attacks or

Great news. If you have already installed the latest update of Google Play Services released earlier today, and your Android device is running Android version 7.0 Nougat or above—Congratulations! Your device is now FIDO2 Certified. Are you thinking… what the heck that actually means? It means, instead of remembering complex passwords for your online accounts, you can now actually use your Android's built-in fingerprint sensor or FIDO security keys for secure password-less access to log into apps and websites that support the FIDO2 protocols, Google and the FIDO Alliance—a consortium that develops open source authentication standards—announced Monday. FIDO2 (Fast Identity Online) protocol offers strong passwordless authentication based on standard public key cryptography using hardware FIDO authenticators like security keys, mobile phones, and other built-in devices. FIDO2 protocol is a combination of W3C's WebAuthn API that allows developers to integrate FIDO aut

Why would someone bother to hack a so-called "ultra-secure encrypted database that is being protected behind 13 feet high and 5 feet thick walls," when one can simply fetch a copy of the same data from other sources. French security researcher Baptiste Robert, who goes by the pseudonym "Elliot Alderson" on Twitter, with the help of an Indian researcher, who wants to remain anonymous, discovered that the official website of popular state-owned LPG gas company Indane is leaking personal details of its millions of customers, including their Aadhaar numbers. This is not the first time when an unprotected third-party database has leaked Aadhaar details of Indian citizens, which is a unique number assigned to each citizen as part of India's biometric identity programme maintained by the government's Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). Earlier this week an anonymous Indian researcher initially discovered a loophole in the Indane's online

It's not at all surprising that downloading movies and software from the torrent network could infect your computer with malware, but it's more heartbreaking when a popular, trusted file uploader goes rogue. Popular software cracks/keygens uploader "CracksNow," who had trusted status from many torrent sites, has now been banned from several torrent sites after he was repeatedly found distributing the malware bundled with his uploads. In recent months, according to TorrentFreak , many downloaders complained that the files they downloaded, shared by CracksNow on torrents, found containing GandCrab ransomware and other malware that can do severe damage to computers. Discovered earlier last year, GandCrab is a widespread ransomware threat, like every other ransomware in the market, that encrypts all files on an infected system and blackmails victims to pay a ransom in digital currency to unlock them. GandCrab ransomware was being distributed late last month via a

All these numbers…. "More than 5 billion records from 6,500 data breaches were exposed in 2018" — a report from Risk Based Security says. "More than 59,000 data breaches have been reported across the European since the GDPR came into force in 2018" — a report from DLA Piper says. …came from data breaches that were reported to the public, but in reality, more than half of all data breaches actually go unreported. Just last week, we disclosed the existence of some massive unreported data breaches in two rounds, which a hacker has now started monetizing by selling stolen user databases publicly. Now, a new set of databases containing millions of hacked accounts from several websites has been made available for sale on the dark web marketplace by the same hacker who goes by online alias Gnosticplayers. Gnosticplayers last week made two rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on the popular dark web marketplace called Dream Market , posting details of near

The United States Department of Justice has announced espionage charges against a former US Air Force intelligence officer with the highest level of top-secret clearance for providing the Iranian government classified defense information after she defected to Iran in 2013. Monica Elfriede Witt , 39, was a former U.S. Air Force Intelligence Specialist and Special Agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, who served the Air Force between 1997 and 2008 and Department of Defense (DOD) as a contractor until 2010. The indictment states that Witt once held the highest level of Top Secret security clearance and had access to details of highly classified counterintelligence operations, real names of sources, and the identities of U.S. intelligence officers. In February 2012, Witt allegedly traveled to Iran to attend an all-expenses-paid "Hollywoodism" conference held by the Iranian New Horizon Organization, which DoJ describes as focused on promoting anti-U.S.

A security researcher has discovered yet another cryptocurrency-stealing malware on the official Google Play Store that was designed to secretly steal bitcoin and cryptocurrency from unwitting users. The malware, described as a " Clipper ," masqueraded as a legitimate cryptocurrency app and worked by replacing cryptocurrency wallet addresses copied into the Android clipboard with one belonging to attackers, ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko explained in a blog post . Since cryptocurrency wallet addresses are made up of long strings of characters for security reasons, users usually prefer copying and pasting the wallet addresses using the clipboard over typing them out. The newly discovered clipper malware, dubbed Android/Clipper.C by ESET, took advantage of this behavior to steal users cryptocurrency. To do this, attackers first tricked users into installing the malicious app that impersonated a legitimate cryptocurrency service called MetaMask , claiming to let users

Using an Android device? Beware! You have to remain more caution while opening an image file on your smartphone—downloaded anywhere from the Internet or received through messaging or email apps. Yes, just viewing an innocuous-looking image could hack your Android smartphone—thanks to three newly-discovered critical vulnerabilities that affect millions of devices running recent versions of Google's mobile operating system, ranging from Android 7.0 Nougat to its current Android 9.0 Pie. The vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2019-1986, CVE-2019-1987, and CVE-2019-1988, have been patched in Android Open Source Project (AOSP) by Google as part of its February Android Security Updates . However, since not every handset manufacturer rolls out security patches every month, it's difficult to determine if your Android device will get these security patches anytime sooner. Although Google engineers have not yet revealed any technical details explaining the vulnerabilities, t

The developers behind the privacy-minded Zcash cryptocurrency have recently discovered and patched a highly dangerous vulnerability in the most secretive way that could have allowed an attacker to coin an infinite number of Zcash (ZEC). Yes, infinite… like a never-ending source of money. Launched in October 2016, Zcash is a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency that claims to be more anonymous than Bitcoin, as the sender, recipient, and value of transactions remain hidden. In a blog post published today, the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company—the startup behind Zcash—revealed that one of its employees, Ariel Gabizon, discovered the vulnerability in its code on 1st March 2018, the night prior to his talk at the Financial Cryptography conference almost a year ago. Gabizon contacted Sean Bowe, a Zcash Company's cryptographer, immediately after discovering the counterfeiting vulnerability, as dubbed by the team, and the team decided to keep the flaw secret in order to avoid the risk o

Many of you might have this question in your mind: "Is it illegal to test a website for vulnerability without permission from the owner?" Or… "Is it illegal to disclose a vulnerability publicly?" Well, the answer is YES, it's illegal most of the times and doing so could backfire even when you have good intentions. Last year, Hungarian police arrested a 20-year-old ethical hacker accused of finding and exploiting serious vulnerabilities in Magyar Telekom, the largest Hungarian telecommunication company, who is now facing up to 8 years in prison. According to local Hungarian media , the defender first discovered a severe vulnerability in Magyar Telekom systems in April 2018 and reported it to the company officials, who later invited him to a meeting. Reportedly, the hacker then traveled to Budapest for the meeting, which didn't go well as he expected, and apparently, the company did not permit him to test its systems further. However, the man conti

If you are thinking that Facebook is sitting quietly after being forced to remove its Onavo VPN app from Apple's App Store, then you are mistaken. It turns out that Facebook is paying teenagers around $20 a month to use its VPN app that aggressively monitors their smartphone and web activity and then sends it back to Facebook. The social media giant was previously caught collecting some of this data through Onavo Protect , a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service that it acquired in 2013. However, the company was forced to pull the app from the App Store in August 2018 after Apple found that Facebook was using the VPN service to track its user activity and data across multiple apps, which clearly violates its App Store guidelines on data collection. Onavo Protect became a data collection tool for Facebook helping the company track smartphone users' activities across multiple different apps to learn insights about how Facebook users use third-party apps. Facebook&#