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High-Severity RCE Security Bug Reported in Apache Cassandra Database Software

High-Severity RCE Security Bug Reported in Apache Cassandra Database Software

Feb 16, 2022
Researchers have revealed details of a now-patched high-severity security vulnerability in Apache Cassandra that, if left unaddressed, could be abused to gain remote code execution (RCE) on affected installations. "This Apache security vulnerability is easy to exploit and has the potential to wreak havoc on systems, but luckily only manifests in non-default configurations of Cassandra," Omer Kaspi, security researcher at DevOps firm JFrog,  said  in a technical write-up published Tuesday. Apache Cassandra is an open-source, distributed, NoSQL database management system for managing very large amounts of structured data across commodity servers. Tracked as  CVE-2021-44521  (CVSS score: 8.4), the vulnerability concerns a specific scenario where the configuration for user-defined functions ( UDFs ) are enabled, effectively allowing an attacker to leverage the  Nashorn  JavaScript engine, escape the sandbox, and achieve execution of untrusted code. Specifically, it was fou
Flipboard Database Hacked — Users' Account Information Exposed

Flipboard Database Hacked — Users' Account Information Exposed

May 29, 2019
Flipboard, a popular social sharing and news aggregator service used by over 150 million people, has disclosed that its databases containing account information of certain users have been hacked. According to a public note published yesterday by the company, unknown hackers managed to gain unauthorized access to its systems for nearly 10 months—between June 2, 2018, and March 23, 2019, and then again on April 21-22, 2019. The hackers then potentially downloaded database containing Flipboard users' real name, usernames, cryptographically (salted hash) protected passwords and email addresses, including digital tokens for users who linked their Flipboard account to a third-party social media service. According to a breach notification email sent out to affected users and seen by The Hacker News, the company has now reset passwords for all users as a precautionary measure, forcing users to create a new strong password for their accounts. "You can continue to use Flipb
How to Find and Fix Risky Sharing in Google Drive

How to Find and Fix Risky Sharing in Google Drive

Mar 06, 2024Data Security / Cloud Security
Every Google Workspace administrator knows how quickly Google Drive becomes a messy sprawl of loosely shared confidential information. This isn't anyone's fault; it's inevitable as your productivity suite is purposefully designed to enable real-time collaboration – both internally and externally.  For Security & Risk Management teams, the untenable risk of any Google Drive footprint lies in the toxic combinations of sensitive data, excessive permissions, and improper sharing. However, it can be challenging to differentiate between typical business practices and potential risks without fully understanding the context and intent.  Material Security, a company renowned for its innovative method of protecting sensitive data within employee mailboxes, has recently launched  Data Protection for Google Drive  to safeguard the sprawl of confidential information scattered throughout Google Drive with a powerful discovery and remediation toolkit. How Material Security helps organ
191 Million US Voters' Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Database

191 Million US Voters' Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Database

Dec 28, 2016
BREAKING: A misconfigured database has resulted in the exposure of around 191 Million voter records including voters' full names, their home addresses, unique voter IDs, date of births and phone numbers. The database was discovered on December 20th by Chris Vickery , a white hat hacker, who was able to access over 191 Million Americans' personal identifying information (PII) that are just sitting in the public to be found by anyone looking for it. Vickery is the same security researcher who uncovered personal details of 13 Million MacKeeper users two weeks ago, which included names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, IP addresses, phone numbers, and system information. However, the recent discovery made him shocked when he saw his own information in the database, according to DataBreaches.net, whom the researcher contacted and provided all the details about his finding. 300GB Trove of Voters' Information Leaked Vickery has his hands on all
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British Intelligence Open-Sources its Large-Scale Graph Database Software

British Intelligence Open-Sources its Large-Scale Graph Database Software

Dec 16, 2015
UK's Secretive Spy Agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has open-sourced one of its tools on code-sharing website GitHub for free... A graph database called ' Gaffer .' Gaffer , written in Java, is a kind of database that makes it "easy to store large-scale graphs in which the nodes and edges have statistics such as counts, histograms and sketches." Github is a popular coding website that allows software developers to build their project on a single platform equipped with all the requirements that are gone in the making of a software. Gaffer and its Functionalities In short, Gaffer is a framework for creating mass-scale databases, to store and represent data, and is said to be useful for tasks including: Allow the creation of graphs with summarised properties within Accumulo with a very less amount of coding. Allow flexibility of stats that describe the entities and edges. Allow easy addition of nodes and edges. Allo
Incapsula - Essential Cloud based Security Solution for your Website

Incapsula - Essential Cloud based Security Solution for your Website

Oct 16, 2012
Over 2011-2012 we've seen an increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other web attacks on SME's websites. Incapsula is one of the companies whose service is useful to protect your website from all threats and mitigate DDoS attacks which affect your websites, servers, databases, and other essential infrastructure. Incapsula is a cloud-based website security and performance service, including a PCI-certified cloud web application firewall and a content delivery network (CDN) for small and medium-sized businesses. We at ' The Hacker News ' got the chance to review the service using an Enterprise plan account. Really it takes I think 1-2 minutes to join the service and add this extra layer of virtual shield around your Website. You have to make a simple DNS settings change in your domain panel. Your site traffic is then routed through Incapsula's global network of high-powered servers. Incoming traffic is analyzed and a security layer is a
Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Hacked, Password was "DOG" ?

Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Hacked, Password was "DOG" ?

Oct 08, 2012
Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy website ( www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/ ) was hacked last week  and then silently fixed by the administrator without giving Reply/Credit to the Whitehat Hacker who reported the vulnerability. The Hack incident was performed in 3 Phases as described below: Phase 1: A Hacker , with nickname " FastFive" posted a few sql injection vulnerable Educational sites on a famous Hacking Forum last week which included the SQLi vulnerable link for the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy website, as you can see in the list in the above screenshot taken by me. Phase 2 : Almost 100's of Hackers have seen the post from " FastFive " and they got some juicy information for their next targets. One of them named, " Vansh " successfully exploit the Harvard's site and  extracted the database onto his computer. He Found the username and Password from the table and tried to login on the Admin access panel location
5 Major Japanese universities websites hacked

5 Major Japanese universities websites hacked

Oct 05, 2012
A group of hackers identifying itself as " Ghost Shell " said that he has leaked some 120,000 pieces of information from 100 universities across the globe including Harvard University and the University of Cambridge.  Today reports says that Servers at the University of Tokyo and four other major universities in Japan have apparently been attacked by hackers, and same hacker release IDs and passwords from databases. Officials at the University of Tokyo confirmed that the e-mail addresses, names and telephone numbers of people who appear to be students and professors were leaked. The information was stored on four computer servers at the university. The university has closed the sites from which the information was stolen. Officials at Kyoto and Tohoku universities said they had not confirmed whether personal information had been leaked. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has launched an investigation into the domestic cases following consul
Oracle Database stealth password cracking vulnerability

Oracle Database stealth password cracking vulnerability

Sep 20, 2012
Oracle suffered with serious vulnerability in the authentication protocol used by some Oracle databases. This Flaw enable a remote attacker to brute-force a token provided by the server prior to authentication and determine a user's password. A researcher - Esteban Martinez Fayo, a researcher with AppSec tomorrow will demonstrate a proof-of-concept attack. Martinez Fayo and his team first reported the bugs to Oracle in May 2010. Oracle fixed it in mid-2011 via the 11.2.0.3 patch set, issuing a new version of the protocol. " But they never fixed the current version, so the current 11.1 and 11.2 versions are still vulnerable ," Martinez Fayo says, and Oracle has no plans to fix the flaws for version 11.1. The first step in the authentication process when a client contacts the database server is for the server to send a session key back to the client, along with a salt. The vulnerability enables an attacker to link a specific session key with a specific password hash. Th
Sony Mobile website hacked by NullCrew

Sony Mobile website hacked by NullCrew

Sep 03, 2012
Another Cyber attack on Sony this year, Hacking group called " NullCrew " hack into one of the biggest site of Sony mobile website (www.sonymobile.com) and leak complete database on Internet. Nullcrew releasing their hack dumps from their official twitter account @OfficialNull. The dump of database released on Pastebin with a small note from Hackers as given below: Sony, we are dearly dissapointed in your security. This is just one of eight sony servers that we have control of. Maybe, just maybe considering IP addresses are available. Maybe, just maybe it's the fact that not even your customers can trust you. Or maybe, just maybe the fact that you can not do anything correct technologically Stats of Dump: 441 Members Username with Email Addresses  24 User names with Hashed password from Think_Users table  3 Admin user data from admin_user table Not just Sony, Nullcrew recently hack into Cambodia Army website and dump database. " Recently the co-founder of Pirate
AVX Corporation Hacked by Anonymous #OpColtan

AVX Corporation Hacked by Anonymous #OpColtan

Aug 27, 2012
Anonymous Operation #OpColtan have announced another attack in the name of this operation and this time its on a Manufacturer and Supplierof Electronic Components AVX Corporation (www.avx.com). AVX It's a big firm wich produce ceramic and tantalum capacitors, connectors, thick and thin film capacitors, resistors and integrated passive components.  UN accused AVX, and many other firms to be interested in illegal coltan extraction and war in DRC. According to Hackers " Usually Coltan was stealed by war groups from Congo mines and carried out to the firms.Million of people lost their lives in Congo war, nature was destroied in order to dig coltan and a lots of gorillas were killed.Unfortunatelly UN decided to abandon the case and never punish the responsibles of the war an nature devastation ." " AVX and other involved firms published an ethical code in 2010; they claim that they don't get tantalium from war areas.NOW a new civil war is growing up in Congo and is
AMD Blog Hacked, Database leaked on Internet

AMD Blog Hacked, Database leaked on Internet

Aug 19, 2012
A team of Hackers called, " r00tBeer Security Team " today hack into official blog of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) which is a American multinational semiconductor company. AMD is the second-largest global supplier of microprocessors based on the x86 architecture and also one of the largest suppliers of graphics processing units. Hacker deface the blog page ( https://blogs.amd.com/wp-content/r00tbeer.html ) and also leak the complete user database of blog on his twitter account. Leaked database SQL file uploaded on Mediafire by Hackers which include 200 AMD user's Emails, Wordpress Blog Usernames and Passwords. During the time of writing, I think AMD is not aware about that they are the Victim of a Hack attack. We are tweeting to the AMD team for informing them. Screenshot of Hack as shown below: Now only AMD, these hackers also hack another High Profile website called " TBN - The Botting Network ", A Popular forum to learn How to make Money with 96000 member
Security Firm Reveals Flaw in Dirt Jumper Bot

Security Firm Reveals Flaw in Dirt Jumper Bot

Aug 16, 2012
A team of researchers has discovered a weakness in the command-and-control infrastructure of one of the major DDoS toolkits, Dirt Jumper, that enables them to stop attacks that are in progress. The command and control (C&C) servers of the Dirt Jumper DDoS toolkit can be compromised and, in principle, completely taken over via SQL injection holes. SQL injection involves inserting database instructions in unexpected and unprotected places, effectively taking charge of a web application's database from the outside. According to the Prolexic report, the open source penetration testing tool sqlmap can be used to dump the contents of Dirt Jumper's database configuration file in a matter of seconds, revealing administrative usernames and passwords. The company's research includes Dirt Jumper v.3, Pandora and Di BoT. According to Prolexic, the Dirt Jumper family of DDoS botnet kits was originally authored by an individual who uses the handle 'sokol.' Various versions of Dir
8 million passwords dumped from gaming website Gamigo

8 million passwords dumped from gaming website Gamigo

Jul 23, 2012
Four months after the gaming site Gamigo warned users about a hacker intrusion that accessed some portions of its users' credentials, more than 8 million usernames, emails and and encrypted passwords from the site have been published on the Web, according to the data breach alert service PwnedList. The list of passwords, which were scrambled using a one-way cryptographic hash algorithm, were published earlier this month to a forum on the password-cracking website Inside Pro . According to forbe," The list also contained 8.2 million unique e-mail addresses, including 3 million American accounts from the US, 2.4 million accounts from Germany, and 1.3 million accounts from France ." Gamigo warned users in early March that an attack on the Gamigo database had exposed hashed passwords and usernames and possibly other, unspecified additional personal data. The site required users to change their account passwords. PwnedList founder Steve Thomas said, " It's the largest leak I'v
FACT : One in five Microsoft logins controlled by hackers

FACT : One in five Microsoft logins controlled by hackers

Jul 17, 2012
About 20 percent of Microsoft Account logins are found on lists of compromised credentials in the wake of hack attacks on other service providers, Eric Doerr, Group Program Manager for Microsoft's Account system said . A significant proportion of compromised credentials Microsoft sees from other services have the same username and password on the Microsoft account system (formerly Windows Live ID) logins, which cover services such as Hotmail, Messenger and SkyDrive. These logins have not been compromised from the Microsoft server, but are instead based on login information leaked from other sites. " These attacks shine a spotlight on the core issue people reuse passwords between different websites ," he said. Microsoft regularly gets lists of compromised third-party login details from ISPs, law enforcement and vendors, as well as from lists published on the internet by hackers, according to Doerr. This information is checked against Microsoft login details using an auto
Android Forums hacked, User Credentials Stolen

Android Forums hacked, User Credentials Stolen

Jul 12, 2012
Phandroid's Android Forums Web site is hacked and user account details stolen, according to a notice posted online. The data includes the user names, e-mail addresses, hashed passwords, and registration IP addresses of the forums' more than 1 million users. If you are one of them, you should change your password: go to your UserCP or use the Forgot your password? . Furthermore, if you use the same e-mail address and password combination elsewhere, you should change it there as well. " I have some unfortunate news to pass along ," the post reads. " Yesterday I was informed by our sever/developer team that the server hosting Androidforums.com was compromised and the website's database was accessed. While the breach is most likely harmless, there are important and potential pitfalls, and we want to provide as much helpful information to our users as possible (without getting too technical). " Phandroid will continue to investigate what happened. The ex
Yahoo Voice hacked, 400,000 yahoo passwords leaked

Yahoo Voice hacked, 400,000 yahoo passwords leaked

Jul 12, 2012
A list of over 450,000 email addresses and plain-text passwords, in a document marked " Owned and Exposed " apparently from users of a Yahoo! service, is in circulation on the internet. The affected accounts appeared to belong to a voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VOIP, service called Yahoo Voices, which runs on Yahoo's instant messenger. The Voices service is powered by Jajah, a VOIP platform that was bought by Telefonica Europe BV in 2010. The dump, posted on a public website by a hacking collective known as D33Ds Company , said it penetrated the Yahoo subdomain using what's known as a union-based SQL injection. By injecting powerful database commands into them, attackers can trick back-end servers into dumping huge amounts of sensitive information. Since all the accounts are in plain-text, anyone with an account present in the leak which also has the same password on other sites (e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc), should assume that someone has accessed their accoun
Millions of Passwords leaked from Social Site Formspring

Millions of Passwords leaked from Social Site Formspring

Jul 11, 2012
Formspring, a social Q&A website popular with teenagers,this week disabled its users' passwords after discovering a security breach. Formspring founder and CEO Ade Olonoh apologized to users for the inconvenience, and advised them to change their passwords when they log back into Formspring. A blog entry posted by Formspring's CEO and founder Ade Olonoh explains that the passwords of all 28 million users have been disabled and the company was notified that 420,000 password hashes that seem to belong to its users have been posted to a security forum, and immediately began an internal investigation. Usernames and other identifying information were not posted with the passwords, but Formspring found that someone had broken into one of its development servers and stolen data from a production database. Encrypted passwords aren't immediately useable, although they can sometimes be decoded by a savvy attacker. Formspring launched in 2009 as a crowd-powered question-and-a
4XP Critical SQL Injection Vulnerability Exposed

4XP Critical SQL Injection Vulnerability Exposed

Jul 10, 2012
zSecure team has recently discovered a critical SQL Injection Vulnerability in the web portal of 4XP, a leading online forex broker having more than 1 lakh customer base. Financial transactions are carried on the broker's paltform on daily basis including but not limited to Credit Card Transactions. The critical vulnerability allows to get complete access to brokers database which can be misused to access their customers confidential information including their login id's, passwords, home address, email-id's, mobile no's, credit card details etc. This critical vulnerbility could prove devastating to the company if they doesn't fix it asap. Below are the details about the company & discovered vulnerability.   About the Company 4XP is an online forex broker that specializes in providing an all-inclusive trading package backed by a caring and devoted support team. 4XP was founded by a group of retail-ended entrepreneurs and capital market dealers sharing a vis
Bulgarian Hackers Group arrested

Bulgarian Hackers Group arrested

Jul 06, 2012
Bulgarian Hackers Group arrested Bulgarian authorities say that after months of investigation they have busted the "most powerful hacker group" in the country, the Cyber Warrior Invasion. The operation was conducted by Bulgaria's Sector for Computer Crimes, Intellectual Property and Gambling and the territorial units of the Chief Directorate for Fight with Organized Crime in the municipalities of Pleven, Shumen, Plovdiv, Burgas, Haskovo, Stara Zagora and Kyustendil. Using cyber "terrorist" methods, the group had attacked more than 500 websites worldwide, including those of financial institutions, web-based companies, and governmental and non-governmental organizations. On the confiscated computers, police discovered databases with large amounts of stolen emails, social network profiles and associated passwords, as well as stolen credit card data. The site www.cwi-group.org was used by the members of the group to coordinate their activities. Constantly changing its location and usin
Department of Homeland Security and U.S Navy hacked

Department of Homeland Security and U.S Navy hacked

Jun 23, 2012
Department of Homeland Security and U.S Navy hacked Department of Homeland Security and U.S Navy websites once again at Major Risk. This time hacking group called " Digital-corruption " hacked into subdomains of both sites and leak database info on pastebin . In its announcement on the pastebin.com website, the group said it has leaked database from  https://www.smartwebmove.navsup.navy.mil/ and twicinformation.tsa.dhs.gov using Blind SQL-Injection method. The Database include Usernames, Passwords, Email ID's, Security Questions - Answers of all users. Hackers shout: say("#FreeTriCk #FreeMLT #FreePhantom"); say("Knowledge is power!"); say("NAVY.MIL, care to share some of your staff information?"); Department of Homeland Security and U.S Navy websites are hacked lots of times in past one year by Different hackers from all over world.
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