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A security researcher has won $24,000 from Microsoft for finding a critical flaw in its Live.com authentication system that could allow hackers to gain access to a user's complete Outlook account or other Microsoft services. Microsoft's Live.com is the authentication system that everyone go through while attempting to authenticate to Outlook.com and a large number of other Microsoft services, including OneDrive, Windows Phone, Skype, and Xbox LIVE. Hacking Hotmail (Outlook.com) Account It's one account for all services. So, if say, Outlook wants to access other apps, it uses a standard set of authentication code called OAuth . OAuth is an open standard for authorization that keeps your passwords safe on third-party sites and instead of sharing your password, it shares a special key called 'Access token' to access the app. OAuth authorizations are accomplished through a prompt, as shown below and to allow an app to gain access to your account, you n

Researchers have unearthed a dangerous backdoor in Microsoft's Outlook Web Application (OWA) that has allowed hackers to steal e-mail authentication credentials from major organizations. The Microsoft Outlook Web Application or OWA is an Internet-facing webmail server that is being deployed in private companies and organisations to provide internal emailing capabilities. Researchers from security vendor Cybereason discovered a suspicious DLL file loaded into the company's OWA server that siphoned decrypted HTTPS server requests. Although the file had the same name as another benign DLL file, the suspicious DLL file was unsigned and loaded from another directory. Hackers Placed Malicious DLL on OWA Server According to the security firm, the attacker replaced the OWAAUTH.dll file ( used by OWA as part of the authentication mechanism ) with one that contained a dangerous backdoor. Since it ran on the OWA server, the backdoored DLL file allowed hacker

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

An Israeli Singer and former contestant on a reality talent show has been jailed for hacking Madonna's online accounts and stealing songs from her unreleased music tracks. Adi Lederman , 39, who participated in Israel's version of American Idol called A Star Is Born , is set to spend his 14 months in prison and pay $4000 in fine after confessing to computer trespassing, infringement of privacy and property rights. Citing Madonna as Lederman's victim, Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court did not specify whether Lederman was actually behind the song leak from her " Rebel Heart " album, the Jerusalem Post reported this week. "The ease with which crimes such as this can be committed by those who have skills in the field," the court said, "such as the accused, require an appropriate punitive response that has a deterrent and uncompromising message." Deeply Devastating and Hurtful Madonna planned to launch her new album " Rebel

We all have been receiving spam phone calls and messages on almost daily basis from scammers who want to pilfer your money and personal information, but a new type of social engineering hack that makes use of just your mobile number to trick you is a little scarier. Security firm Symantec is warning people about a new password recovery scam that tricks users into handing over their webmail account access to the attackers. In order to get into your email account, an attacker does not need any coding or technical skills. All an attacker needs your email address in question and your cell phone number. Since the process to reset the password is almost similar to all mail services, this new password recovery scam affects all popular webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook among others. Symantec has provided a video explanation of how this new hack attack works. The trick is as simple as it sounds: if you want to reset someone's email account password, all y

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been hacked by unknown attackers that allowed them to gain administrative access to some of the organization's systems, the organization confirmed. The attackers used " spear phishing " campaign to target sensitive systems operated by ICANN and sent spoofed emails disguised as internal ICANN communications to its staff members. The link in the emails took the staff to bogus login page, where they provided their usernames and passwords with the keys to their work email accounts. The data breach began in late November 2014 and was discovered a week later, ICANN, which oversees the Internet's address system, said in a release published Tuesday. ICANN is the organization that manages the global top-level domain system. " We believe a 'spear phishing' attack was initiated in late November 2014 ," Tuesday's press release stated. " It involved email messages that we

Mozilla on Friday notified users of its Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) that the company has accidentally exposed the e-mail addresses and cryptographically protected passwords of thousands of Mozilla developers. The email addresses of over 76,000 members of its Developer Network, along with 4000 "salted" passwords were disclosed through a database glitch that may have been exploited by hackers, Mozilla officials warned Friday. The database glitch caused due to a data " sanitization " process failure, that was lasted for a month beginning on June 23, which inadvertently published the records of members of the MDN and left on a publicly accessible server for around a month until one of the outfit's web developers discovered their presence on a server accessible to the general public around a couple of weeks back, according to a blog post . " As soon as we learned of it, the database dump file was removed from the server immediately, and the process that ge

Everything we do online, whether chatting on phone, talking via video or audio, sending messages on phones or emails are being watched by Governments and Intelligence agencies. However, many Internet giants offer encrypted environment in an effort to protect our online data from prying eyes, but still those companies can read our data stored into their servers. But, there is a great news for Gmail users. On Tuesday, Google has announced two major privacy enhancements in its Gmail and this new push for its email service will even protect our data and communication from Google itself. With the ongoing concerns about privacy and the pervasiveness of email communications, Google already provides encryption for its Gmail called Transit encryption (HTTPS). In which only the transmission of emails sending or receiving is protected by the transit encryption but not the content of the email. Few Months back, Google itself admitted that their automated systems read our email c

If you have an account with Microsoft's popular free email service Outlook.com, and using Outlook app for Android, then there is a bad news for you. Microsoft's Android app for Outlook.com,  provides users to access their Outlook emails on their Android devices, fails to provide security and encryption. LOOPHOLES DISCOVERED Researchers from ' Include Security ' firm claims to have found multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Outlook app for Android, that leaves users' email data vulnerable to hackers and other malicious third party apps. By default, Email attachments are stored into easily accessible folders on the Android filesystem Email Database ( Body, Subject ) is stored locally in an unencrypted manner App's 'Pin Code' feature doesn't protect or encrypt email data. EMAIL ATTACHMENTS ARE ACCESSIBLE TO ANY OTHER APPS Today almost every applications available at Google Play Store generally ask for  READ_EXTERNAL_STORA

Edward Snowden 's leaks last year questioned the integrity of several big and reputed companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft that were found in relation with the NSA in its surveillance programs.  Thereafter they maintained distance with the Agency and claimed to be unaware of such government spying activities. Now, email exchanges between Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt and former NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander , obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that in real do not reveal anything ridiculously outrageous but suggest that the tech companies behind the services you use are very closely in relationship with the NSA and have worked with them over the years. The series of emails obtained by Al Jazeera clearly indicate that the relationship between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) was far cozier than anyone thought. This revelation questions not only the reputation of the largest Internet giant, but also the privac

There is no question that Mobile devices have become a staple in everyday living around the world. But have you ever asked yourself, How Secure are the Android, iPhone or any other Smart devices? It is really important for us to think about the Security and Privacy of our Data stored in Smartphones. In June 2010, Apple introduced ' Data protection ' feature in iOS 4.0 devices that offer hardware encryption for  all the data stored on the devices. " Data protection enhances the built-in hardware encryption by protecting the hardware encryption keys with your passcode. This provides an additional layer of protection for your email messages attachments , and third-party applications ." Apple claimed  in an old announcement. But unexpectedly, In last few updates Apple has silently removed the email attachment encryption from  data protection mechanisms. Noticed by Security Researcher -  Andreas Kurtz , claims that  since at least version 7.0.4 and including the current

Germany has confirmed its biggest Data theft in the country's history with usernames and passwords of some 18 million email accounts stolen and compromised by hackers. The Story broke by the German press, Der Spiegel on Thursday, when German Authorities revealed another mass hacking of private data belonged to German citizens and major Internet companies both in Germany and abroad. 16 MILLION AND NOW 18 MILLION Authorities in the northwestern city of Verden unearthed a treasure of personal information, a list of about 18 million stolen email addresses and passwords, and seized it just after only two months from the previous major data breach, when researchers came across 16 million compromised email accounts of German users while conducting research on a botnet, a network of computers infected with malware.  The accounts were compromised by hackers in the mid of January, and Der Spiegel suggests that the same group of hackers is responsible for both thefts and t

A Free Chrome, Firefox and Safari web browser plugin floating around the web, called ' Sell Hack ' allows users to view the hidden email address of any LinkedIn user, means anyone can grab email addresses that we use for professional purposes. When installed, the ' Sell Hack ' plugin will pop up a ' Hack In ' button on LinkedIn profiles and further automatically mines email addresses of LinkedIn users. NOT A SECURITY BREACH It's not a Security breach, LinkedIn has confirmed that no LinkedIn data has been compromised, but rather this free extension rely on an algorithm that checks publicly available data in order to guess users' email addresses. So without exploiting any loophole or vulnerability, Sell Hack is capable of predicting users' email addresses with OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) techniques i.e. information collected from publicly available sources. It is also possible that, the Sell Hack extension is gathering data from

Earlier this week, Microsoft admitted that they have accessed a French Blogger's private Hotmail account to identify a former Microsoft employee who had leaked the company's trade secrets in 2012. Microsoft defined this private investigation as part of " Protecting our customers and the security and integrity of our products ", mentioned in the Microsoft's terms of service, which says that the action was within the boundaries of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. U.S. Authorities arrest Alex Kibkalo , ex-Microsoft employee. The indictment states , Kibkalo " uploaded proprietary software and pre-release software updates for Windows 8 RT as well as the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit (SDK) to his personal SkyDrive account in August 2012. " Kibkalo not only leaked the secret screenshots of Windows 8 , but also provided the information about ' activation of Windows ' that helped the crackers to create a keygen for

TWITTER is taking users' privacy and security very seriously and in an effort to prevent Government snooping, the company has secured your Twitter emails with with TLS (Transport Layer Security). Twitter emails were previously using a plain text communication protocol, that now has been upgraded to an encrypted (TLS or SSL) connection using STARTTLS . In a blog post, Twitter announced : " Since mid-January, we have been protecting your emails from Twitter using TLS in the form of StartTLS. StartTLS encrypts emails as they transit between sender and receiver and is designed to prevent snooping. It also ensures that emails you receive from Twitter haven't been read by other parties on the way to your inbox if your email provider supports TLS. " " These email security protocols are part of our commitment to continuous improvement in privacy protections and complement improvements like our securing of web traffic with forward secrecy and always-on HTT

Your Financial Credentials are on SALE on the Underground Black Market without your Knowledge… sounds like a nightmare, but it's TRUE. Cyber security firm, Hold Security, said it has traced over 360 million stolen account credentials that are available for Sale on Hacker's black market websites over past three weeks. The credentials include usernames, email addresses, and passwords that are in unencrypted in most cases, according to the report released on Tuesday. It is not known till now from where these credentials exactly were stolen, but the security researchers estimated that these credentials are a result of multiple breaches. Since the banking credentials are one of the most ' valuable bounties ' for the cyber criminals, and the ways to steal these credentials can be directly from the companies and from the services in which users entrust data as well. According to Hold Security, in addition to the sale of 360 million credentials, the cyber criminals are  s

Last October, the social network ' LinkedIn ' launched a controversial Smartphone app called ' Intro ' that intercepts and route all of your emails through LinkedIn servers to inject LinkedIn profiles of the sender directly into the mails. The app was released for Android , as well as iOS devices. Why Controversial? The app puts the security and privacy of your data entirely in the company's hands, and at that time everyone criticized and reacted negatively, but LinkedIn defended Intro, claiming that all information was fully encrypted and deleted from LinkedIn's servers immediately. Just two days back, I got an e-mail from LinkedIn with the subject line " We're retiring LinkedIn Intro. " i.e. LinkedIn is giving up so quickly just four months of the launch! In a blog post today, LinkedIn SVP of products Deep Mishar explained, " We are shutting down LinkedIn Intro as of March 7, 2014. The intro was launched last year to bring the power of LinkedIn to your emai

One of the world's largest mobile operator ' Orange ' has been hit by data breach. The French multinational telecommunication company announced recently, it was targeted by unknown hackers on 16th January 2014, who allegedly gained access to the accounts of up to 800,000 customers of Orange website. According to a report published on the PC INpact website, the company warned their customers in an email that their Client Area website orange.fr was hacked and personal data of 3% customers have been stolen, but the passwords are not affected. The hacker has successfully stolen customers' names, mailing address, email, landline and mobile phone numbers. The company warned, with the information lost in this attack, hackers can perform phishing attacks, allowing them to steal personal data, including bank account details and passwords by sending emails that look as if they have come from official sources. Orange has confirmed the data breach, and afte

A location based Social Networking platform with 45 million users,' Foursquare ' was vulnerable to the primary email address disclosed.  Foursquare is a Smartphone application that gives you details of nearby cafes, bars, shops, parks using GPS location and also tells about your friends nearby. According to a Penetration tester and hacker ' Jamal Eddin e ',  an attacker can extract email addresses of all 45 million users just by using a few lines of scripting tool. Basically the flaw exists in the Invitation system of the Foursquare app. While testing the app, he found that invitation received on the recipient's end actually disclosing the sender's email address, as shown above. Invitation URL:  https://foursquare.com/mehdi?action=acceptFriendship&expires=1378920415&src=wtbfe& uid = 64761059 &sig=mmlx96RwGrQ2fJAg4OWZhAWnDvc%3D Where 'uid' parameter represents the sender's profile ID.  Hacker noticed th

Do you use Thunderbird , a free; open-source; cross-platform application for managing email and news feeds? According to a Pakistani Security Researcher from Vulnerability-Lab, a flaw gives an attacker the ability to run code on a user's machine. Mozilla Thunderbird 17.0.6 email application is vulnerable to critical validation and filter bypass vulnerability, enables an attacker to bypass the filter that prevents HTML tags from being used in messages. According to a Security Advisory released by Vulnerability-Lab , the flaw resides in Mozilla's Gecko engine. During the testing, the researchers found many java script errors which gave the researcher much hope in believing that the application might actually be vulnerable. By default, HTML tags like <script> and <iframe> are blocked in Thunderbird and get filtered immediately upon insertion. However, while drafting a new email message, attackers can easily bypass the current input filters by encoding