encrypted password | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Hackers always first go for the weakest link to quickly gain access to your online accounts. Online users habit of reusing the same password across multiple services gives hackers opportunity to use the credentials gathered from a data breach to break into their other online accounts. Researchers from security firm 4iQ have now discovered a new collective database on the dark web (released on Torrent as well) that contains a whopping 1.4 billion usernames and passwords in clear text. The aggregate database, found on 5 December in an underground community forum, has been said to be the largest ever aggregation of various leaks found in the dark web to date, 4iQ founder and chief technology officer Julio Casal noted in a blog post. Though links to download the collection were already circulating online over dark-web sites from last few weeks, it took more exposure when someone posted it on Reddit a few days ago, from where we also downloaded a copy and can now verify its auth...

TripAdvisor's  Online travel booking and review website  Viator  has reportedly been hit by a massive data breach at its  that may have exposed payment card details and account credentials of its customers, affecting an estimated 1.4 million of its customers. The San Francisco-based Viator, acquired by TripAdvisor – the world's largest travel site – for £122 million ( US$ 200 million ) back in July, admitted late on Friday that the intruders have hacked into some of its customers' payment card accounts and made unauthorized charges. The data breach was discovered in the bookings made through Viator's websites and mobile offerings that could potentially affect payment card data. Viator said that the company has hired forensic experts to figure out the extent of the breach. Meanwhile, the company has begun notifying its affected customers about the security breach as said by the travel outfit in a press release . " On September 2, we were info...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

If you have an account at the popular crowd funding site Kickstarter , it's time to change your account's password. Kickstarter's CEO Yancey Strickle r says that the company has been hacked by an unknown hacker earlier this week. Kickstarter said in a blog post that no credit card information was stolen in Data Breach , but users' personal information has been compromised and they also haven't found evidence of unauthorized activities on accounts. Data accessed and stolen by hackers included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords of the users. Facebook usernames and logins were not compromised for those who use that log-in system to get on Kickstarter. According to a Kickstarter's team member, the older users' passwords were encrypted using salted SHA1  and newer users' passwords are encrypted with a stronger hashing algorithm called ' bcrypt '. Hackers could attempt to crack the encrypted pa...

Popular Mac news and information site MacRumors user forums have been breached by hackers on Monday this week. More than 860,000 usernames, emails and hashed passwords were potentially compromised. Users are advised to users that they change their passwords on the forums, as well as any other sites or services where the same password has been used. MD5 with or without salt, to be an inadequate means of protecting stored passwords. Back in 2012, the original author of the MD5 password hash algorithm has publicly declared that MD5 is no longer considered safe to use on commercial websites. u The owner of the site, Arnold Kim, apologized for the intrusion and said that it occurred because the hacker gained access to a moderator account, which then allowed the intruder to escalate their own privileges with the goal of stealing user login credentials. " We are looking into it further to see if there was another exploit, but there hasn't been any evidence of it...

Bitcoin Talk , the popular Bitcoin discussion forum, has been hacked and as it stands the site is currently unreachable. Bitcointalk has been down for nearly 6 hours. The forums have been allegedly hacked and Defaced by " The Hole Seekers " and selling 150,000 emails and hashed passwords stolen from Bitcointalk.org for 25 Bitcoins , where the passwords are hashed with sha256crypt. Hacker embedded the "1812 Overture" song in the background with a dazzling animated picture show. According to Bitcointalk admin Theymos, it's possible that the hackers gained access to the database. He says the website will not be restored until he figures out precisely what vulnerability the hackers leveraged. He's offering 50 Bitcoin to the first individual who can pinpoint the security hole. See the video below for the Hack-in-Action: " Hello friend, Bitcoin has been seized by the FBI for being illegal. Thanks, bye " reads one the message in the video. To be safe, i...

Hackers broke into Adobe Systems' internal network on Thursday, stealing personal information on 2.9 million customers and the source code for several of Adobe's most popular products. This an absolutely massive blow to Adobe, especially their reputation. Adobe, which makes Photoshop and other programs, revealed that cyber attackers had access user information, including account IDs and encrypted passwords as well as credit and debit card numbers. The company did not specify which users of its various software programs were hit. But Products compromised in this attack include Adobe Acrobat, ColdFusion , and ColdFusion Builder. " We believe these attacks may be related. We are working diligently internally, as well as with external partners and law enforcement, to address the incident. " the company said in a customer security alert . Adobe's Arkin says the company is not aware of zero-day exploits or other specific threats to its customers due to the...

Ubuntuforums.org , The popular Ubuntu Forums site, has posted a message on its index page, informing its near 2 million users that it has suffered a serious security breach. " There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums, " reads the page. The site was defaced by hacker with Twitter handle " Sputn1k_ " and Unfortunately the attacker have gotten every user's local username, encrypted password, and email address from the Ubuntu Forums database. " The Canonical IS team is working hard as we speak to restore normal operations ." page said. Canonical advises users who have used their same forum password on other sites to change it immediately. " Ubuntu One, Launchpad and other Ubuntu/Canonical services are not affected by the breach, " company stated.

The LinkedIn became inaccessible for an hour last night. Few Hours before App.net co-founder Bryan Berg posted that LinkedIn DNS was hijacked but later LinkedIn confirmed that they suffered outage due to DNS issue, not Hack. DNS Hijacking is an unauthorized modification of a DNS server or change of DNS address that directs users attempting to access a web page to a different web page that looks the same, but contains extra content such as advertisements, is a competitor page, a malware page, or third-party search page. Bryan said," all of your traffic has been sent to a network hosted by this company [confluence-networks.com]. And they don't require SSL, so if you tried to visit, your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plaintext ." LinkedIn tweeted " Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we're continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience, " but provided no further details. LinkedIn DNS hacked ...

The Password serves to protect your financial transactions, your social networking sites, and a host of other nominally secure websites online. People often say, " don't use dictionary words as passwords. They are horribly unsecure ", but what if hackers also managed to crack any 16 character password ? Criminals or trespassers who want to crack into your digital figurative backyard will always find a way. A team of hackers has managed to crack more than 14,800 supposedly random passwords from a list of 16,449 converted into hashes using the MD5 cryptographic hash function. The problem is the relatively weak method of encrypting passwords called hashing.  Hashing takes each user's plain text password and runs it through a one-way mathematical function. This creates a unique string of numbers and letters called the hash. The article reports that, using a commodity computer with a single AMD Radeon 7970 graphics card, it took him 20 hours to crack 14...