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More than half of South Korea's 50 million population aged between 15 and 65 have been affected in a massive data breach, compromising their personal information. The data breach came to light when 16 individual were arrested following the theft of about 220 million stolen records from a number of online game, ringtone storefronts and movie ticket sites that contains personally identifiable information related to 27 million victims. The stolen records included actual name, account name, password and resident registration number of the victims, According to the English version of a Seoul-based daily newspaper, the Korea Joongang Daily . Among 16 perpetrators, the South Jeolla Provincial Police Agency arrested a 24-year-old man named 'Kim' , for allegedly obtaining and selling all 220 million personal information including names, registration numbers, account names, and passwords , from a Chinese hacker he met through an online game in 2011. Police estimated the

As far sci-fi movies have been entertaining the public, but their ideas have always been a matter of adoption in real life. Just like in any other sci-fi movie, simply touching a laptop can be enough to extract the cryptographic keys used to secure data stored on it. A team of computer security experts at Tel Aviv University (Israel) has come up with a new potentially much simpler method that lets you steal data from computers — Just Touch it — literally. WAYS TO ATTACK ENCRYPTION There are different ways of attacking encryption systems. On one side, there are security vulnerabilities and weakness in the encryption algorithms themselves that make it possible to figure out the cryptographic keys. On the other side, there are flaws and weaknesses in the people themselves that make it easier than it should be to force them to offer up the keys to decrypt something. But, Flaws and weaknesses in neither of which is necessarily quick or easy to find out, as there are seve

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

A group of security researchers has successfully discovered a method to hack into six out of seven popular Smartphone apps, including Gmail across all the three platforms - Android , Windows, and iOS operating systems - with shockingly high success rate of up to 92 percent. Computer scientists the University of California Riverside Bourns College of Engineering and the University of Michigan have identified a new weakness they believe to exist in Android, Windows, and iOS platforms that could allow possibly be used by hackers to obtain users' personal information using malicious apps. The team of researchers - Zhiyun Qian , of the University of California, Riverside, and Z. Morley Mao and Qi Alfred Chen from the University of Michigan - will present its paper, " Peeking into Your App without Actually Seeing It: UI State Inference and Novel Android Attacks " ( PDF ), at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego on August 23. The paper detailed a new type of

Along with a dream to make Internet access available to everyone across the world, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is working to make the Internet a more secure place as well. Till now, a number of large technology companies have bug bounty programs to reward researchers and cyber enthusiast who contribute in the security of Internet by finding out security holes in software or web platforms, and the social networking giant Facebook is the latest one to do so. Facebook and Usenix have together implemented the Internet Defense Prize — an award recognizing superior quality research that combines a working prototype with great contributions to securing the Internet, Facebook announced Thursday at the annual USENIX Security Symposium in San Diego. Also, Facebook announced the first award under its Internet Defense Prize, and crowned a pair of German researchers for their paper , " Static Detection of Second-Order Vulnerabilities in Web Applications " — a seemingly viabl

Pebble, a wristwatch that can connect to your phone - both iOS and Android - and interact with apps, has a hard-coded vulnerability that allows a remote attacker to destroy your Smartwatch completely. Pebble Smartwatch , developed and released by Pebble Technology Corporation in 2013, is considered as one of the most popular SmartWatches that had become the most funded project in the history of Kickstarter. Just two hours after its crowd-funding campaign launched, Pebble had already surpassed its $100,000 goal and at last had reached over $10.25 million pledged by nearly 70,000 Kickstarter backers. A security enthusiast Hemanth Joseph  claimed to have found that his Pebble SmartWatch with the latest v2.4.1 Firmware can be remotely exploited by anyone with no technical knowledge in order to delete all data stored in the device, apps, notes, and other information stored in it. HOW PEBBLE SMARTWATCH WORKS Before proceeding towards how he did this, let me explain how Peb

Hacking Internet of Things (IoTs) have become an amazing practice for cyber criminals out there, but messing with Traffic lights would be something more crazy for them. The hacking scenes in hollywood movies has just been a source of entertainment for the technology industry, like we've seen traffic lights hacked in Die Hard and The Italian Job , but these movies always inspire hackers to perform similar hacking attacks in day-to-day life. Security researchers at the University of Michigan have not only hacked traffic light signals in real life, but also claimed that it's actually shockingly easy to perform by anyone with a laptop and the right kind of radio. If we compare the traffic light hacks in movies and real life, the reality is much easier. In a paper study published this month, the security researchers describe how a series of major security vulnerabilities in traffic light systems allowed them to very easily and very quickly seized control of the whole system of at

Albertson's and SuperValu - Two nation's most popular supermarket store chains announced last weekend that a data breach may have revealed the credit and debit card information of their customers at a number of grocery store locations in more than 18 states. Minnesota-based Supervalu announced that an unknown number of its customers who used their payment cards in around 180 stores between June 22 and July 17 may have had payment card data compromised by attackers who gained access to the Supervalu computer network that processes card transactions. The affected information may includes names, payment card numbers, expiration dates, and other numerical information from cards used at POS devices. " The Company has not determined that any such cardholder data was in fact stolen by the intruder, and it has no evidence of any misuse of any such data, but is making this announcement out of an abundance of caution ," SuperValu said in a statement . The massive da

Fiverr.com, a global online marketplace which provides a platform for people to sell their services for five dollars per job, is vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that puts its millions of users at risk. Fiverr recently raised $30 million in a third round of institutional funding to continue supporting the new version of its marketplace, but the company ignored the advance warning of the critical bug reported responsibly by a vulnerability hunter and fails to patch up their website before his public release. There are endless numbers of people providing services on Fiverr website, such as graphic design, language translation, illustration, blogging and a lot more that start from just $5 but can go much higher, depending on complexity, seller rating, and type of work. According to a security researcher Mohamed Abdelbaset, an Information Security Evangelist from Egypt, told The Hacker News that Fiverr website is vulnerable to CSRF (Cross-site reque

Have you ever used Shodan search engine? A publicly available service crawls the Internet looking for connected devices and list their open ports, services running, system information etc. Shodan search engine is majorly used by Hackers, developers, students and anyone else with a sense of curiosity to find Internet-facing vulnerable systems with open ports and insecure mechanisms for authentication and authorization i.e. Servers, Internet-Connected Cameras, Traffic Lights, And SCADA Systems. According to latest revelation from the whistleblower Edward Snowden , British spy agency GCHQ – counterpart of NSA – apparently uses their own port scanning service to target internet-connected systems in at least 27 countries, in an attempt to potentially exploit them. In top-secret documents published by Heise on Friday, the Port-scan is a part of the "Hacienda" program which scans for open ports on all public-facing servers to find out vulnerable applications running on the

Before proceeding towards the story, let's first go back two years to figure out what was wrong when Syria was completely blackout - sudden disconnect from the Internet - which lasted for the period of three days in 2012. Is that the Syrian government behind the blackout ? The outage took place during a period of intense fighting in the country's still-ongoing civil war. So, it was supposed that may it be the government's fault. But, the Syrian Minister of Information said that the government didn't disable the Internet, instead the outage was caused by a cable being cut by some terrorists. When investigated, it was unlikely to be the case. So, Who was actually behind Syria Blackout ? NSA? Yup! It was the same NSA who was behind a number of major happenings. National Security Agency ( NSA ) – the God-like powered agency that had ruled over the privacy of the entire world from countries to individuals, the one with master access to read anyone's data, intruded into larg

FinFisher spyware, a spyware application used by government and law enforcement agencies for the purpose of surveillance, appears to have been hacked earlier this week and a string of files has been dumped on the Internet. The highly secret surveillance software called " FinFisher " sold by British company Gamma International can secretly monitors computers by turning ON webcams, recording everything the user types with a keylogger, and intercepting Skype calls, copying files, and much more. A hacker has claimed on Reddit and Twitter that they'd infiltrated the network of one of the world's top surveillance & motoring technology company Gamma International, creator of FinFisher spyware, and has exposed 40GB of internal data detailing the operations and effectiveness of the FinFisher suite of surveillance platforms. The leaked information was published both on a parody Gamma Group Twitter account ( @GammaGroupPR ) and Reditt by the hacker that began publishi

If we talk about old days, a hacker often rely on the natural helpfulness as well as weaknesses of people whom he wanted to target. This tactic to break into a computer network by gaining the confidence of an authorized user and get them to reveal information that compromises the network's security is known as Social Engineering . WHAT IS SOCIAL ENGINEERING Social engineering is nothing but a non technical kind of intrusion that relies heavily on human interaction and involves manipulating people so they give up confidential information. Social engineering was very effective those old days as well as today, as major targets are made victims using this old trick only and it is also one of the important components of many types of exploits like: Virus writers use social engineering tactics to persuade people to run malicious email attachments Phishers use social engineering tactics to convince people to disclose their sensitive information such as banking credentia

Malware is nothing but a malicious files which is stored on an infected computer system in order to damage the system or steal sensitive data from it or perform other malicious activities. But security researchers have uncovered a new and sophisticated piece of malware that infects systems and steals data without installing any file onto the targeted system. Researchers dubbed this  persistent malware as Poweliks , which resides in the computer registry only and is therefore not easily detectable as other typical malware that installs files on the affected system which can be scanned by antivirus or anti-malware Software. According to Paul Rascagneres , Senior Threat Researcher, Malware analyst at GData software, due to the malware's subsequent and step-after-step execution of code, the feature set was similar to a stacking principles of Matryoshka Doll approach. Paul has made a number of name ripping malware and bots to uncover and undermine cyber crimes. He won last

While the rest of the world was engaged in cyber security and privacy, an Indian patriotic hacker targeted 43 major Pakistani Government official websites, including 'President of Pakistan', 'Government of Pakistan', 'Ministry of Defence' , and whole Ministry of Pakistan . Indian hacker Godzilla claimed responsibility to hack into one of the main proxy server of the Pakistan Government, which is being used to manage all the government websites. Once the hacker gained the access to the proxy server, he managed to take down those websites. The attack on the websites are supposed to be severe as it has been over 24 hours and the websites are still down at the time of writing. The hacker posted a message on his Facebook profile saying, " Poor Pakistan no matter how hard you try we can bypass those security anytime we want. Before making a statement in media against India think twice. " Godzilla aka G.O.D is the same hacker who launched a cyber attack last year on a number of ser

The hacktivist group Anonymous has reportedly taken down the official website of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad against Israel's military incursion in Gaza, which has resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties. The government of Israel has yet to comment on the Mossad hack attack. The ' Hacktivists ' were able to take down Mossad's website in a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack early morning, claims a statement on one of the Anonymous hacker's Twitter account. The attack on the website is supposed to be severe as it has been over 10 hours and the site is still down at the time of writing. OPERATION SAVE GAZA The Anonymous group has already targeted a number of other Israeli organizations as part of a campaign titled " Operation Save Gaza " in the mission to stop this " massacre ." Anonymous group has also claimed responsibility of taking down multiple Israeli government sites following the death of one of the organization's members. The member n

Two days ago, we reported at The Hacker News about a critical issue in the most popular image and video sharing service, Instagram app for mobiles , that allows an attacker to hijack users' account and successfully access private photos, delete victim's photos, edit comments and also post new images. Yesterday, a London developer Stevie Graham has released a tool called " Instasheep " a play on the 2010 Facebook stealer Firesheep , a Firefox extension that can be used to compromise online accounts in certain circumstances automatically using a click of mouse. Graham discovered the Instagram issue years ago and was shocked when he realized it hadn't been fixed by Facebook yet. He released the tool after claiming Facebook refused to pay a bug bounty for his reported vulnerabilities affecting the Instagram iOS mobile application. Graham tweeted about the issue: " Denied bug bounty. Next step is to write automated tool enabling mass hijacking of accounts, " he wrote. "