decrypting messages | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In the year 2014, we came to know about the NSA's ability to break Trillions of encrypted connections by exploiting common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm – thanks to classified documents leaked by ex-NSA employee Edward Snowden. At that time, computer scientists and senior cryptographers had presented the most plausible theory: Only a few prime numbers were commonly used by 92 percent of the top 1 Million Alexa HTTPS domains that might have fit well within the NSA's $11 Billion-per-year budget dedicated to "groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities." And now, researchers from University of Pennsylvania, INRIA, CNRS and Université de Lorraine have practically proved how the NSA broke the most widespread encryption used on the Internet. Diffie-Hellman key exchange (DHE) algorithm is a standard means of exchanging cryptographic keys over untrusted channels, which allows protocols such as HTTPS, SSH, VPN, SMTPS and IPsec to negotia

The makers of ultra secure BlackPhone titled by Silent Circle as, " world's first Smartphone which places privacy and control directly in the hands of its users ," have recently fixed a critical vulnerability in the instant messaging application that allows hackers to run malicious code on the handsets. BlackPhone was also hacked last year at the BlackHat security conference , but the interesting factor about the recent hack was that the attackers only needed to send just a message on a targeted phone number in order to compromise the device. The vulnerability was first discovered and disclosed by Mark Dowd , a principal security researcher at the Australia-based consultancy firm Azimuth Security. Dowd discovered the issue late in 2014, but waited to disclose it until Blackphone got their patches and fixes in place. The flaw actually resides in Silent Text application — the secure text messaging application bundled with the BlackPhone handsets, which is al

Shadow apps, a segment of Shadow IT, are SaaS applications purchased without the knowledge of the security team. While these applications may be legitimate, they operate within the blind spots of the corporate security team and expose the company to attackers.  Shadow apps may include instances of software that the company is already using. For example, a dev team may onboard their own instance of GitHub to keep their work separate from other developers. They might justify the purchase by noting that GitHub is an approved application, as it is already in use by other teams. However, since the new instance is used outside of the security team's view, it lacks governance. It may store sensitive corporate data and not have essential protections like MFA enabled, SSO enforced, or it could suffer from weak access controls. These misconfigurations can easily lead to risks like stolen source code and other issues. Types of Shadow Apps  Shadow apps can be categorized based on their interac