cyber security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A story has been making the rounds on the Internet since yesterday about a cyber attack on an Indian nuclear power plant. Due to some experts commentary on social media even after lack of information about the event and overreactions by many, the incident received factually incorrect coverage widely suggesting a piece of malware has compromised "mission-critical systems" at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant . Relax! That's not what happened. The attack merely infected a system that was not connected to any critical controls in the nuclear facility. Here we have shared a timeline of the events with brief information on everything we know so far about the cyberattack at Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in Tamil Nadu. From where this news came? The story started when Indian security researcher Pukhraj Singh tweeted that he informed Indian authorities a few months ago about an information-stealing malware, dubbed Dtrack, which successfully hit "extre

Over the past few months, hundreds of Android users have been complaining online of a new piece of mysterious malware that hides on the infected devices and can reportedly reinstall itself even after users delete it, or factory reset their devices. Dubbed Xhelper , the malware has already infected more than 45,000 Android devices in just the last six months and is continuing to spread by infecting at least 2,400 devices on an average each month, according to the latest report published today by Symantec. Here below, I have collected excerpts from some comments that affected users shared on the online forums while asking for how to remove the Xhelper Android malware: "xhelper regularly reinstalls itself, almost every day!" "the 'install apps from unknown sources' setting turns itself on." "I rebooted my phone and also wiped my phone yet the app xhelper came back." "Xhelper came pre-installed on the phone from China."

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

Managed detection and response (MDR) is one of the fastest-growing segments in the cybersecurity market. ESG research from April 2019 reveals that 27% of organizations are actively pursuing an MDR project, while another 11% plan to pursue an MDR project in the future. Cynet now enables service providers to add MDR to their portfolio and gain an important competitive advantage over competitors with Cynet 360 integrated offering of breach protection platform and CyOps 24\7 SOC team ( Learn more here ). MDR is a relatively new security service offering that emerged in recent years to assist the standard organization with a team of experts that provide 24\7 alert prioritization, investigation, and proactive threat hunting — tasks that are typically beyond its in-house capabilities. Cynet 360's complete coverage across endpoints, network, and user accounts makes it a tool of choice that provides MDR providers with real-time threat coverage across the entire environment with a

As Japan gears up for the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo for the next year, the country needs to brace itself for sophisticated cyberattacks, especially from state-sponsored hackers. Microsoft has issued a short notice, warning about a new wave of highly targeted cyberattacks by a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers attempting to hack over a dozen anti-doping authorities and sporting organizations around the world. The attacks are originating from the 'Strontium' Russian hacking group, widely known as Fancy Bear or APT28, and are believed to be linked to the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The Fancy Bear hacking group, also known as APT28, Sofacy, X-agent , Sednit , Sandworm , and Pawn Storm, is believed to be linked to Russian military intelligence agency GRU and has been in operation since at least 2007. Over these past three decades, the group has been credited to many high profile hacking incidents, like hacking the US presidential elections

UniCredit, an Italian global banking and financial services company, announced today that it suffered a security incident that leaked some personal information belonging to at least 3 million of its domestic customers. Officially founded in 1870, UniCredit is Italy's biggest banking and financial services and one of the leading European commercial banks with more than 8,500 branches across 17 countries. What happened? — Though UniCredit did not disclose any details on how the data incident happened, the bank did confirm that an unknown attacker has compromised a file created in 2015 containing three million records relating only to its Italian customers. What type of information was compromised? — The leaked data contains personal information of 3 million customers, including their: Names Cities Telephone numbers Email addresses What type of information was not compromised? — Unicredit confirmed that the compromised user records did not include any other perso

The U.S. multinational computer software company Adobe has suffered a serious security breach earlier this month that exposed user records' database belonging to the company's popular Creative Cloud service. With an estimated 15 million subscribers, Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe CC is a subscription service that gives users access to the company's full suite of popular creative software for desktop and mobile, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Lightroom, and many more. What happened? — Earlier this month, security researcher Bob Diachenko collaborated with the cybersecurity firm Comparitech to uncover an unsecured Elasticsearch database belonging to Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service that was accessible to anyone without any password or authentication. How many victims? — The inadvertently exposed database, which has now been secured, contained personal information of nearly 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud user accounts. What type

What's the price of unprotected IT infrastructure? Cybercrime Magazine says that global damages will surpass $6 billion as soon as 2021 . Here we'll go through some of the most frequent and emerging causes of data breaches in 2019 and see how to address them in a timely manner. Misconfigured Cloud Storage It's hard to find a day without a security incident involving unprotected AWS S3 storage, Elasticsearch, or MongoDB. A global study from Thales and the Ponemon Institute states that only 32% of organizations believe protecting their data in a cloud is their own responsibility. Worse, according to the same report, 51% of the organizations still do not use encryption or tokenization to protect sensitive data in the cloud. McAfee confirms, claiming that 99% of cloud and IaaS misconfigurations fall into the realm of end users' control and remain unnoticed. Marco Rottigni, Chief Technical Security Officer EMEA at Qualys , explains the problem: "Some of th

A team of German cybersecurity researchers has discovered a new cache poisoning attack against web caching systems that could be used by an attacker to force a targeted website into delivering error pages to most of its visitors instead of legitimate content or resources. The issue could affect sites running behind reverse proxy cache systems like Varnish and some widely-used Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) services, including Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, and CDN77. In brief, a Content Distribution Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that sit between the origin server of a website and its visitors to optimize the performance of the website. A CDN service simply stores/caches static files—including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos—from the origin server and delivers them to visitors more quickly without going back to the originating server again and again. Each of the geographically distributed CDN se

Cybersecurity researchers claim to have discovered a previously undocumented backdoor specifically designed for Microsoft SQL servers that could allow a remote attacker to control an already compromised system stealthily. Dubbed Skip-2.0 , the backdoor malware is a post-exploitation tool that runs in the memory and lets remote attackers connect to any account on the server running MSSQL version 11 and version 12 by using a "magic password." What's more? The malware manages to remain undetected on the victim's MSSQL Server by disabling the compromised machine's logging functions, event publishing, and audit mechanisms every time the "magic password" is used. With these capabilities, an attacker can stealthily copy, modify, or delete the content stored in a database, the impact of which varies from application to application integrated with targeted servers. "This could be used, for example, to manipulate in-game currencies for financial gai

NordVPN, one of the most popular and widely used VPN services out there, yesterday disclosed details of a security incident that apparently compromised one of its thousands of servers based in Finland. Earlier this week, a security researcher on Twitter disclosed that "NordVPN was compromised at some point," alleging that unknown attackers stole private encryption keys used to protect VPN users traffic routed through the compromised server. In response to this, NordVPN published a blog post detailing about the security incident, and here we have summarized the whole incident for our readers to let you quickly understand what exactly happened, what's at stake, and what you should do next. Some of the information mentioned below also contains information The Hacker News obtained via an email interview with NordVPN. What has been compromised? — NordVPN has thousands of servers across the world hosted with third-party data centers. One such server hosted with a

Humankind had come a long way from the time when the Internet became mainstream. What started as a research project ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) funded by DARPA has grown exponentially and has single-handedly revolutionized human behavior. When WWW (world wide web) came into existence, it was meant to share information over the Internet, from there part through natural evolution and part through webonomics driving innovations, Internet & www has metamorphosized into the lifeblood of the world. It is hard to imagine now how the world functioned before the time of the Internet. It has touched each aspect of human life and is now critical for day to day existence. No business today can exist without an online presence. It is no more just a medium to share information, but world economics runs over the web nowadays. Organizations, governments, and people all depend on this. New warfares will not happen in the real world but would be fought over the cyber

A decade-old botnet malware that currently controls over 450,000 computers worldwide has recently shifted its operations from infecting machines with ransomware or crypto miners to abusing them for sending out sextortion emails to millions of innocent people. Extortion by email is growing significantly, with a large number of users recently complaining about receiving sextortion emails that attempt to extort money from individuals by blackmailing them into exposing their sexual content. Though until now, it wasn't clear how scammers were sending such massive amounts of emails without getting blacklisted by the email providers, security researchers from CheckPoint finally found the missing block in this puzzle. In its latest report shared with The Hacker News prior to the release, Tel Aviv-based security firm CheckPoint reveals that a botnet, called Phorpiex , has recently been updated to include a spam bot designed to use compromised computers as proxies to send out over 3

No, it's not a patch Tuesday. It's the third Tuesday of the month, and as The Hacker News shared an early heads-up late last week on Twitter, Adobe today finally released pre-announced out-of-band security updates to patch a total of 82 security vulnerabilities across its various products. The affected products that received security patches today include: Adobe Acrobat and Reader Adobe Experience Manager Adobe Experience Manager Forms Adobe Download Manager Out of 82 security vulnerabilities, 45 are rated critical, and all of them affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader and which, if exploited successfully, could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. A majority of critical-rated vulnerabilities (i.e., 26) in Adobe Acrobat and Reader reside due to use-after-free, 6 due to out-of-bounds write, 4 are type confusion bugs, 4 due to untrusted pointer dereference, 3 are heap overflow bugs, one buffer overrun and one race condition issue. Ad

Do you know Apple is sending iOS web browsing related data of some of its users to Chinese Internet company Tencent? I am sure many of you are not aware of this, neither was I, and believe me, none of us could expect this from a tech company that promotes itself as a champion of consumer privacy. Late last week, it was widely revealed that starting from at least iOS 12.2 , Apple silently integrated the " Tencent Safe Browsing " service to power its " Fraudulent Website Warning " feature in the Safari web browser for both iOS and macOS. Just like the Safe Browsing feature in Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Safari's fraudulent website warning feature has also been designed to protect users from various online threats by simply checking every website they visit against a regularly updated list of malicious websites. Until iOS 12.2, Apple primarily relied on the database of "blacklisted websites" provided by Google's Safe Browsing service, whic