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The United States Justice Department today announced charges against a Chinese hacker and his hacking team member for their alleged role in the 2015 massive data breach at health insurance giant Anthem and three other unnamed American companies. Fujie Wang (王 福 杰) and another hacker named John Doe with three different aliases—Deniel Jack, Kim Young, and Zhou Zhihong—are charged with four counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, wire fraud, and damage to a protected computer, according to an indictment [ pdf ] unsealed today in federal court in Indianapolis. In 2015, the hackers managed to breach Anthem, the country's second-largest health insurance company and stole personal information of over 80 Millions of its customers, including their Social Security Numbers, birthdates, email addresses, residential addresses, medical identification numbers, employment information, and income data. The incident marked as one of the worst data breaches in history, with the company paying

Researchers from Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360's NetLab have revealed details of an ongoing credit card hacking campaign that is currently stealing payment card information of customers visiting more than 105 e-commerce websites. While monitoring a malicious domain, www.magento-analytics[.]com , for over last seven months, researchers found that the attackers have been injecting malicious JS scripts hosted on this domain into hundreds of online shopping websites. The JavaScript scripts in question include the digital credit card skimming code that when execute on a site, automatically steal payment card information, such as credit card owner name, credit card number, expiration time, CVV information, entered by its customers. In an email Interview, NetLab researcher told The Hacker News that they don't have enough data to determine how hackers infected affected websites on the first place or what vulnerabilities they exploited, but did confirm that all affected

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

For the second time in just over a year, the city of Baltimore has been hit by a ransomware attack, affecting its computer network and forcing officials to shut down a majority of its computer servers as a precaution. Ransomware works by encryption files and locking them up so users can't access them. The attackers then demand a ransom amount, typically in Bitcoin digital currency, in exchange for the decryption keys use to unlock the files. The ransomware attack on the Baltimore City Hall took place on Tuesday morning and infected the city's technology systems with an unknown ransomware virus, which according to government officials, is apparently spreading throughout their network. According to new Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. Jack Young, Baltimore City's critical public safety systems, such as 911, 311, emergency medical services and the fire department, are operational and not affected by the ransomware attack. Young also says the city technology officials are

Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, confirmed today that the company lost nearly $41 million in Bitcoin in what appears to be its largest hack to date. In a statement, Binance's CEO Changpeng Zhao said the company discovered a "large scale security breach" earlier on May 7, as a result of which hackers were able to steal roughly 7000 bitcoins, which worth 40.6 million at the time of writing. News of the hack comes just hours after Zhao tweeted that Binance has "to perform some unscheduled server maintenance that will impact deposits and withdrawals for a couple of hours." According to the company, malicious attackers used a variety of attack techniques, including phishing and computer viruses, to carry out the intrusion and were able to breach a single BTC hot wallet (a cryptocurrency wallet that's connected to the Internet), which contained about 2% of the company's total BTC holdings, and withdraw stolen Bitcoins

The saying that there are two types of organizations, those that have gotten breached and those who have but just don't know it yet, has never been more relevant, making the sound incident response a required capability in any organization's security stack. To assist in this critical mission, Cynet is launching a free IR tool offering, applicable to both IR service providers in need of a powerful, free incident response platform , and to organizations that either suspect security incidents and want to get immediate visibility into what happened, or that know they have a breach and need to respond immediately. The Cynet Free IR tool offering for IR providers can be accessed here . The Cynet Free IR tool offering for organizations can be accessed here . Incident response is about getting two things done as fast as possible: accurately knowing breach scope and impact; ensuring that all malicious presence and activity are eliminated. Cynet introduces unmatched speed and effi

If you use a Dell computer, then beware — hackers could compromise your system remotely. Bill Demirkapi, a 17-year-old independent security researcher, has discovered a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the Dell SupportAssist utility that comes pre-installed on most Dell computers . Dell SupportAssist , formerly known as Dell System Detect , checks the health of your computer system's hardware and software. The utility has been designed to interact with the Dell Support website and automatically detect Service Tag or Express Service Code of your Dell product, scan the existing device drivers and install missing or available driver updates, as well as perform hardware diagnostic tests. If you are wondering how it works, Dell SupportAssist in the background runs a web server locally on the user system, either on port 8884, 8883, 8886, or port 8885, and accepts various commands as URL parameters to perform some-predefined tasks on the computer, like collecting

Google is giving you more control over how long you want the tech company to hold on to your location history and web activity data. Google has introduced a new, easier, privacy-focused auto-delete feature for your Google account that will allow you to automatically delete your Location History and Web and App Activity data after a set period of time. Google's Location History feature, if enabled, allows the company to track locations that you have visited, while Web and App Activity tracks websites you have visited and apps you have used. Until now, Google allowed you to either altogether disable the Location History and Web and App Activity feature or manually delete all or part of that data, providing no controls for regular deletion so that users can manage their data efficiently. However, an AP investigation last year revealed that even if you turn off the Location History feature in all your accounts, Google services on Android and iPhone devices continue to trac

An ongoing attack against Electrum Bitcoin wallets has just grown bigger and stronger with attackers now targeting the whole infrastructure of the exchange with a botnet of over 152,000 infected users, raising the amount of stolen users' funds to USD 4.6 million. Electrum has been facing cyber attacks since December last year when a team of cybercriminals exploited a weakness in the Electrum infrastructure to trick wallet users into downloading the malicious versions of the software. In brief, the attackers added some malicious servers to the Electrum peer network which were designed to purposely display an error to legitimate Electrum wallet apps, urging them to download a malicious wallet software update from an unofficial GitHub repository. The phishing attack eventually allowed attackers to steal wallet funds (almost 250 Bitcoins that equals to about $937,000 at the time) and take full control over the infected systems. To counter this, the developers behind Electrum

A team of security researchers has claims to have found a publicly-accessible database that exposes information on more than 80 million U.S. households—nearly 65 percent of the total number of American households. Discovered by VPNMentor's research team lead by hacktivists Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, the unsecured database includes 24GB of extremely detailed information about individual homes, including their full names, addresses, ages, and birth dates. The massive database which is hosted on a Microsoft cloud server also contains coded information noted in "numerical values," which the researchers believe correlates to homeowners' gender, marital status, income bracket, status, and dwelling type. Fortunately, the unprotected database does not contain passwords, social security numbers or payment card information related to any of the affected American households. The researchers verified the accuracy of some data in the cache, but they did not download the

Docker Hub, one of the largest cloud-based library of Docker container images, has suffered a data breach after an unknown attacker gained access to the company's single Hub database. Docker Hub is an online repository service where users and partners can create, test, store and distribute Docker container images, both publicly and privately. The breach reportedly exposed sensitive information for nearly 190,000 Hub users (that's less than 5 percent of total users), including usernames and hashed passwords for a small percentage of the affected users, as well as Github and Bitbucket tokens for Docker repositories. Docker Hub started notifying affected users via emails informing them about the security incident and asking them to change their passwords for Docker Hub, as well as any online account using the same password. "On Thursday, April 25th, 2019, we discovered unauthorized access to a single Hub database storing a subset of non-financial user data. Upon

Facebook has a lot of problems, then there are a lot of problems for Facebook—and both are not going to end anytime sooner. Though Facebook has already set aside $5 billion from its revenue to cover a possible fine the company is expecting as a result of an FTC investigation over privacy violations, it seems to be just first installment of what Facebook has to pay for continuously ignoring users' privacy. This week, Facebook has been hit with three new separate investigations from various governmental authorities—both in the United States and abroad—over the company's mishandling of its users' data . New York Attorney General to Investigate Facebook Email Collection Scandal New York Attorney General is opening an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of the email contacts of more than 1.5 million users during site registration without their permission. Earlier this month, Facebook was caught practicing the worst ever user-verification mechanism

If you own an eCommerce website built on WordPress and powered by WooCommerce plugin, then beware of a new, unpatched vulnerability that has been made public and could allow attackers to compromise your online store. A WordPress security company—called " Plugin Vulnerabilities "—that recently gone rogue in order to protest against moderators of the WordPress's official support forum has once again dropped details  and proof-of-concept exploit for a critical flaw in a widely-used WordPress plugin. To be clear, the reported unpatched vulnerability doesn't reside in the WordPress core or WooCommerce plugin itself. Instead, the vulnerability exists in a plugin , called WooCommerce Checkout Manager , that extends the functionality of WooCommerce by allowing eCommerce sites to customize forms on their checkout pages and is currently being used by more than 60,000 websites. The vulnerability in question is an "arbitrary file upload" issue that can be exploi

A team of cybersecurity researchers today published a post warning enterprises of an unpatched, highly critical zero-day vulnerability in Oracle WebLogic server application that some attackers might have already started exploiting in the wild. Oracle WebLogic is a scalable, Java-based multi-tier enterprise application server that allows businesses to quickly deploy new products and services on the cloud. It's popular across both, cloud environment and conventional environments. Oracle WebLogic application reportedly contains a critical deserialization remote code execution vulnerability that affects all versions of the software, which can be triggered if the "wls9_async_response.war" and "wls-wsat.war" components are enabled. The vulnerability, spotted by the researchers from KnownSec 404, allows attackers to remotely execute arbitrary commands on the affected servers just by sending a specially crafted HTTP request—without requiring any authorization.

Facebook expects to face a massive fine of up to $5 billion from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as the result of an investigation into its privacy policies—that's about one month's revenue for the social media giant. To be clear the amount of fine is not what the FTC has announced or hinted yet; instead, it's an estimated due that Facebook disclosed on Wednesday in its first quarter 2019 financial earnings report. In its earnings report, Facebook said the company had set $3 billion aside in anticipation of the settlement with the FTC, who launched a probe into Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal . The probe centers around the violation of a 2011 agreement Facebook made with the FTC that required the social media to gain explicit consent from users to share their data. The FTC launched an investigation into Facebook last year after it was revealed that the company allowed Cambridge Analytica access to the personal data of around 50 million Face

U.S. Congress has sent an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking for more information about its Sensorvault database that's reportedly being used by law enforcement agencies to solve crime cases. Last week, we reported a story based upon NY Times findings that revealed how using a "geofence" warrant, authorities obtain location history of all devices from Google's Sensorvault database that pass through a crime scene over a certain time period. For those unaware, Google maintains Sensorvault database over nearly the past decade which contains precise location information from hundreds of millions of smartphones around the world and shares it with authorities to help in criminal cases. However, Google does not share identifiable information on all devices after receiving a warrant. Instead, authorities have to first narrow down their list of suspects using the location history data, only after which Google shares further information about a few selected u

Hackers have been found exploiting a pair of critical security vulnerabilities in one of the popular social media sharing plugins to take control over WordPress websites that are still running a vulnerable version of the plugin. The vulnerable plugin in question is Social Warfare which is a popular and widely deployed WordPress plugin with more than 900,000 downloads. It is used to add social share buttons to a WordPress website or blog. Late last month, maintainers of Social Warfare for WordPress released an updated version 3.5.3 of their plugin to patch two security vulnerabilities—stored cross-site scripting (XSS) and remote code execution (RCE)—both tracked by a single identifier, i.e., CVE-2019-9978 . Hackers can exploit these vulnerabilities to run arbitrary PHP code and take complete control over websites and servers without authentication, and then use the compromised sites to perform digital coin mining or host malicious exploit code. However, the same day when Soc

Security researchers have discovered the full source code of the Carbanak malware—yes, this time it's for real. Carbanak—sometimes referred as FIN7, Anunak or Cobalt—is one of the most full-featured, dangerous malware that belongs to an APT-style cybercriminal group involved in several attacks against banks, financial institutions, hospitals, and restaurants. In July last year, there was a rumor that the source code of Carbanak was leaked to the public, but researchers at Kaspersky Lab later confirmed that the leaked code was not the Carbanak Trojan . Now cybersecurity researchers from FireEye revealed that they found Carbanak's source code, builders, and some previously unseen plugins in two RAR archives [ 1 , 2 ] that were uploaded on the VirusTotal malware scanning engine two years ago from a Russian IP address. "CARBANAK source code was 20MB comprising 755 files, with 39 binaries and 100,000 lines of code," researchers say. "Our goal was to find

Not a week goes without a new Facebook blunder. Remember the most recent revelation of Facebook being caught asking users new to the social network platform for their email account passwords to verify their identity? At the time, it was suspected that Facebook might be using access to users' email accounts to unauthorizedly and secretly gather a copy of their saved contacts. Now it turns out that the collection of email contacts was true, Facebook finally admits. In a statement released on Wednesday, Facebook said the social media company "unintentionally" uploaded email contacts from up to 1.5 million new users on its servers, without their consent or knowledge, since May 2016. In other words, nearly 1.5 million users had shared passwords for their email accounts with Facebook as part of its dubious verification process. A Facebook spokesperson shared information with Business Insider that the company was using harvested data to "build Facebook'

An unprotected database belonging to JustDial , India's largest local search service, is leaking personally identifiable information of its every customer in real-time who accessed the service via its website, mobile app, or even by calling on its fancy "88888 88888" customer care number, The Hacker News has learned and independently verified. Founded over two decades ago, JustDial (JD) is the oldest and leading local search engine in India that allows users to find relevant nearby providers and vendors of various products and services quickly while helping businesses listed in JD to market their offerings. Rajshekhar Rajaharia , an independent security researcher, yesterday contacted The Hacker News and shared details of how an unprotected, publicly accessible API endpoint of JustDial's database can be accessed by anyone to view profile information of over 100 million users associated with their mobile numbers. The leaked data includes JustDial users' na

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released new versions of its Tomcat application server to address an important security vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code and take control of an affected server. Developed by ASF, Apache Tomcat is an open source web server and servlet system, which uses several Java EE specifications such as Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Expression Language, and WebSocket to provide a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java concept to run in. The remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2019-0232 ) resides in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Servlet when running on Windows with enableCmdLineArguments enabled and occurs due to a bug in the way the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) passes command line arguments to Windows. Since the CGI Servlet is disabled by default and its option enableCmdLineArguments is disabled by default in Tomcat 9.0.x, the remote code execution vulnerability has