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MyHeritage Says Over 92 Million User Accounts Have Been Compromised

MyHeritage Says Over 92 Million User Accounts Have Been Compromised

Jun 05, 2018
MyHeritage, the Israel-based DNA testing service designed to investigate family history, has disclosed that the company website was breached last year by unknown attackers, who stole login credentials of its more than 92 million customers. The company learned about the breach on June 4, 2018, after an unnamed security researcher discovered a database file named "myheritage" on a private server located outside of the company, and shared it with MyHeritage team. After analyzing the file, the company found that the database, which included the email addresses and hashed passwords of nearly 92.3 million users, are of those customers who signed up for the MyHeritage website before October 27, 2017. While the MyHeritage security team is still investigating the data breach to identify any potential exploitation of its system, the company confirmed that no other data such as credit card details and family trees, genetic data were ever breached and are stored on a separate sy
Malware Encoded Into DNA Hacks the Computer that Reads It

Malware Encoded Into DNA Hacks the Computer that Reads It

Aug 10, 2017
Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years? Even in March this year, a team of researchers successfully stored digital data — an entire operating system, a movie, an Amazon gift card, a study and a computer virus — in the strands of DNA. But what if someone stores a malicious program into the DNA, just like an infected USB storage, to hijack the computer that reads it. A team of researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle have demonstrated the first successful DNA-based exploit of a computer system that executes the malicious code written into the synthesised DNA strands while reading it. To carry out the hack, the researchers created biological malware and encoded it in a short stretch of DNA, which allowed them to gain "full control" of a computer that tried to process the genetic data when read by a DNA sequencing machine. The DNA-based hack becomes possible due to lack of security in multiple DNA proces
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
Scientists Store an Operating System, a Movie and a Computer Virus on DNA

Scientists Store an Operating System, a Movie and a Computer Virus on DNA

Mar 04, 2017
Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years. Just last year, Microsoft purchased 10 Million strands of synthetic DNA from San Francisco DNA synthesis startup called Twist Bioscience and collaborated with researchers from the University of Washington to focus on using DNA as a data storage medium. However, in the latest experiments, a pair of researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) have come up with a new technique to store massive amounts of data on DNA, and the results are marvelous. The duo successfully stored around 2mb in data, encoding a total number of six files, which include: A full computer operating system An 1895 French movie "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" A $50 Amazon gift card A computer virus A Pioneer plaque A 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon The new research, which comes courtesy of Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, has been published in the jou
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Automated remediation solutions are crucial for security

websiteWing SecurityShadow IT / SaaS Security
Especially when it comes to securing employees' SaaS usage, don't settle for a longer to-do list. Auto-remediation is key to achieving SaaS security.
Israeli Scientists develop advanced biological computer

Israeli Scientists develop advanced biological computer

May 27, 2013
Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa have created an advanced biological computer using only bio molecules such as DNA and enzymes.  There's no traditional CPU or hard drive powering the bio-computer, no hardware or software, nor is there any tangible interface to the system. The computing devices having ability to interact directly with biological systems and even living organisms. No interface is required since all components of molecular computers, including hardware, software, input and output, are molecules that interact in solution along a cascade of programmable chemical events. Researchers believe that a sufficiently advanced biological computer could have the computational power of a universal Turing machine, able to simulate other computers. This would allow for simple customization of such processors. In addition to enhanced computation power, this DNA based transducer offers multiple benefits, including the ability to
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