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For over past two years, Iranian hackers have infiltrated computer networks of some of the world's top organizations including airlines, defense contractors, universities, military installations, hospitals, airports, telecommunications firms, government agencies, and energy and gas companies, security researchers said. An 87-page report published by the U.S. cyber security firm Cylance says Iranian state-sponsored hackers have hacked critical infrastructure of more than 50 organizations in 16 countries worldwide in a cyber-espionage campaign that could allow them to eventually cause physical damage. Among the targeted organizations, ten are reportedly based in the United States. The threat-detection firm dubbed the campaign as " Operation Cleaver ," which aimed at gathering data from various agencies. The group reportedly stole highly sensitive information and took control of networks in Canada, China, England, France, Germany, India, Israel, Kuwait, Mexic

What a horrible start the holiday season in U.S. Over Thanksgiving weekend, Sony Pictures Entertainment suffered a massive data breach as "Guardians of Peace" hacked-into Sony Pictures' computer system that brought the studio's network to a screeching halt. Following the hack, hackers leaked five unreleased Sony movies to Torrent file-sharing website during Black Friday. It's still not clear whether both the incident back to back with Sony Pictures belongs to same group of hackers or not, but here's what you need to know about the breach: 1. FBI MALWARE WARNING AFTER SONY PICTURES HACK The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned businesses that cyber criminals have used malicious software to launch destructive cyber-attacks in the United States, following the last week's massive data breach at Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which four unreleased films were stolen and pirate-shared. In a five-page confidential 'flash'

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

A Vulnerability has been discovered in the wildly popular messaging app WhatsApp , which allows anyone to remotely crash WhatsApp just by sending a specially crafted message, two security researchers reported ' The Hacker News '. Two India based independent security researchers, Indrajeet Bhuyan and Saurav Kar, both 17-year old teenagers demonstrated the WhatsApp Message Handler vulnerability to one of our security analyst. In a video demonstration, they showed that how a 2000 words (2kb in size) message in special character set can crash Whatsapp messenger app. Previous it was discovered that sending a huge message ( greater than 7mb in size) on Whatsapp could crash victim device and app immediately, but using this new exploit attacker only need to send a very small size (approx 2kb) message to the victim. The worried impact of the vulnerability is that the user who received the specially crafted message will have to delete his/her whole conversation and start a fresh

Following the last week's massive hack attack on Sony Pictures' network by a group calling themselves "#GOP," or Guardians of Peace , high-quality versions of several of the studio's newest films have hit piracy websites. It seems like matters for Sony Pictures is getting worse with time. Sony Pictures Entertainment has reportedly begun investigating links to North Korea of the possible cyberattack occurred last week that made the studio's internal email systems offline, which was still offline at the time of writing. Now its five movie screeners – Annie , Fury , Still Alice , Mr. Turner and To Write Love on Her Arms – have made their way onto torrent file-sharing websites, though it has not been confirmed that the leak of all the films came from the same breach. "Still Alice" starring Julianne Moore, Alec Baldwin – US release date: Jan 16, 2015 "Mr Turner" starring Timothy Spall. – US release date: Dec 19, 2014 "Ann

The popular ride-sharing service Uber has been hit by various controversies lately, but now the things gone even worse for the company when a security researcher made a worrying discovery this week and claims, " Uber's app is literally malware. " The ride-hailing company is in disputes of handling privacy of its customers data. A Phoenix-based security researcher Joe Giron found that a surprising amount of users' data is being collected by the company's mobile application for Android. Researcher, who runs a cyber security firm in Arizona , just reverse-engineered the code of Uber's Android application and come to the conclusion that it is a malware. He discovered that the app " calls home " and sends data back to the company. But this excessive amount of access to users' data is not the sort of app data a taxi company should have access to in the first place. It really seems strange and unnecessary to collect. " Christ man! Why the hell woul

Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) , a pro-hacker group supposed to be aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has again gain media attention by compromising a number of popular news websites and displayed a Thanksgiving popups informing people that they've been hacked. The Forbes, The Independent, The Chicago Tribune , The Daily Telegraph , The London Evening Standard, broadcaster CNBC, PC World and the US National Hockey League were among those popular websites affected by the group. This time they apparently targeted a third-party widget that is used by all those compromised websites. It is being reported that the hacker group found a way into registrar GoDaddy to compromise DNS records for the Gigya , a customer identity management platform used by all the sites. Although all site visitors were not affected by the attack, but some visitors using a line of Javascript were redirected to SEA web pages with the message " You've been hacked by the Syrian Elec

It's better for smokers to quit smoking. Are you using electronic cigarettes (E-cigarettes) instead normal ones?? Still, you should quit your smoking habit, because it not only damages your health, but could pose a danger risk to the health of your computer. E-cigarettes have become the latest vector for hackers to distribute malicious software. E-cigarettes manufactured in China are reportedly being used to spread malware via a USB port to computers when users plug in for charging it up. The report broke when an executive at a "large corporation" had been infected with malware from an undetermined source after he quit smoking and switched to e-cigarettes made in China, detailed a recent post to social news forum Reddit . Further investigating the matter, he found that the chargers of the e-cigarettes - bought from the online auction site eBay for $5 - are hard-coded with the malware that infected his workstation despite having latest virus and anti m

We access our Google account from so many devices that we our self forget on how many devices our account is still connected and perhaps we don't use that device anymore. To make this problem easy for you, Google has come up with its new security dashboard which will help you keep better control over the devices that can access your account. The Internet giant on Monday launched a new " Devices and Activity dashboard " with additional insight over the devices which will allow Google Apps users to identify every single active device that has been used to access their account in the last 28 days as well as those currently signed in. Users will now be able to monitor a comprehensive set of details including the last time their account was accessed, location from where their account was accessed, as well as the web browser that was used to open their account. Eran Feigenbaum , security director at the Google for Work team, said admins could quickly change pass

It's a bad day for Sony yesterday!! Sony appears to be hacked once again by hackers, but this time not its PlayStation , instead its Sony Pictures Entertainment – the company's motion picture, television production and distribution unit. According to multiple reports, the corporate computers of Sony Picture employees in New York and around the world were infiltrated by a hacker, displaying a weird skeleton, a series of URL addresses, and a threatening message that reads: "Hacked By #GOP Warning: We've already warned you, and this is just a beginning. We continue till our request be met. We've obtained all your internal data, including your secrets and top secrets. If you don't obey us, we'll release data shown below to the world. Determine what will you do till November the 24th, 11:00 PM (GMT)." News broke after a user, who claimed to be a former Sony staff, posted allegations of the security breach with the defacement image on Reddit . Hack

Security researchers have discovered thousands of backdoored plugins and themes for the popular content management systems (CMS) that could be used by attackers to compromise web servers on a large scale. The Netherlands-based security firm Fox-IT has published a whitepaper revealing a new Backdoor named "CryptoPHP . " Security researchers have uncovered malicious plugins and themes for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal . However, there is a slight relief for Drupal users, as only themes are found to be infected from CryptoPHP backdoor. In order to victimize site administrators, miscreants makes use of a simple social engineering trick. They often lured site admins to download pirated versions of commercial CMS plugins and themes for free. Once downloaded, the malicious theme or plugin included backdoor installed on the admins' server. "By publishing pirated themes and plug-ins free for anyone to use instead of having to pay for them, the CryptoPHP actor is

Researchers have uncovered a highly advanced, sophisticated piece of malware they believe was used to spy on a wide-range of international targets including governments, infrastructure operators and other high-profile individuals since at least 2008. The nasty malware, dubbed "Regin" , is said to be more sophisticated than both Stuxnet and Duqu , according to the researchers at antivirus software maker Symantec Corp. DEVELOPED BY NATION STATE The research showed that the Regin malware is believe to be developed by a wealthy "nation state" and is a primary cyber espionage tool of a nation state because of the financial clout needed to produce code of this complexity with several stealth features to avoid detection. But, the antivirus software maker didn't identify which country was behind it. "It is likely that its development took months, if not years, to complete and its authors have gone to great lengths to cover its tracks. Its capabili

Security researchers have discovered a new type of "Man-in-the-Middle" (MitM) attack in the wild targeting smartphone and tablets users on devices running either iOS or Android around the world. The MitM attack, dubbed DoubleDirect , enables an attacker to redirect a victim's traffic of major websites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter to a device controlled by the attacker. Once done, cyber crooks can steal victims' valuable personal data, such as email IDs, login credentials and banking information as well as can deliver malware to the targeted mobile device. San Francisco-based mobile security firm Zimperium detailed the threat in a Thursday blog post , revealing that the DoubleDirect technique is being used by attackers in the wild in attacks against the users of web giants including Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Live.com and Twitter, across 31 countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. DoubleDirect makes use of ICMP (Internet Control Message P

Unless we are a human supercomputer, remembering password is not an easy task and that too, if you have a different password for every different site. But luckily to make the whole process easy, there is a growing market for password managers which provides an extra layer of protection. Wait! Wait! Seriously?? Security researchers have discovered a new variant of data-stealing Citadel Trojan program used by cybercriminals to slurp up users' master passwords for a number of password management applications and other authentication programs, which will let you think twice before using one. Citadel Trojan malware program has typically been used to steal online banking credentials and other financial information by masquerading itself as legitimate banking sites when victims open it in their local browser, which is also known as a man-in-the-browser attack . The malware has previously targeted users' credentials stored in the password management applications included

Good news for all Privacy Lovers!! Finally the wildly popular messaging app WhatsApp has made end-to-end encryption a default feature, stepping a way forward for the online privacy of its users around the world. WhatsApp , most popular messaging app with 600 Million users as of October 2014, has partnered with Open Whisper Systems to boost its privacy and security by implementing strong end-to-end encryption on all text messages. The strong end-to-end encryption here means that even Mark Zuckerberg himself can't pry into your conversations, even if asked by law enforcement officials. The app maker describe this move as the " largest deployment of end-to-end encryption ever ." The Open Whisper System is a non-profit software organisation started by security researcher Moxie Marlinspike, who is behind the development of TextSecure app used for encryption. Over the past three years, his team has been in the process of developing a 'modern, open source

Microsoft today released an " out-of-band " security updates to fix a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of its Windows Server software that cyber criminals are exploiting to compromise whole networks of computers. The Emergency patch release comes just one week after Microsoft provided its monthly security patch updates. The November 2014 Patch Tuesday updates included 16 security patches, five of which were rated by Redmond as "critical." The security update (MS14-068) addresses a vulnerability in the Windows component called Microsoft Windows Kerberos KBC , authentication system used by default in the operating system. The flaw allows an attacker to elevate domain user account privileges and access rights to that of a domain administrator account. As a result, if users unknowingly or accidentally run a malicious software on their system, it could therefore be used to compromise the entire network, which could be more dangerous for those who

Tor has always been a tough target for law enforcement for years and FBI has spent millions of dollars to de-anonymize the identity of Tor users, but a latest research suggests that more than 81% of Tor clients can be "de-anonymised" by exploiting the traffic analysis software 'Netflow' technology that Cisco has built into its router protocols. NetFlow is a network protocol designed to collect and monitor network traffic. It exchanged data in network flows, which can correspond to TCP connections or other IP packets sharing common characteristics, such UDP packets sharing source and destination IP addresses, port numbers, and other information. The research was conducted for six years by professor Sambuddho Chakravarty , a former researcher at Columbia University's Network Security Lab and now researching Network Anonymity and Privacy at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology in Delhi. Chakravarty used a technique, in order to determine the Tor

The malicious Russian Tor exit node , which was claimed to be patching binary files, is actually distributing a malware program to launch cyber-espionage attacks against European government agencies. The group behind the rogue Tor exit node had likely been infecting files for more than a year, causing victims to download and install a backdoor file that gave hackers full control of their systems. Last month Josh Pitts of Leviathan Security Group uncovered a malicious Tor exit node that wraps Windows executable files inside a second, malicious Windows executable. But when Artturi Lehtiö of F-Secure carried out an in-depth research, he found that the exit node was actually linked to the notorious Russian APT family MiniDuke . " MiniDuke " previously infected government agencies and organizations in more than 20 countries via a modified Adobe PDF email attachment . MiniDuke malware is written in assembly language with its tiny file size (20KB), and uses hijacke

Cyber criminals are using new malware variants by exploiting GNU Bash vulnerability referred to as ShellShock ( CVE-2014-6271 ) in order to infect embedded devices running BusyBox software, according to a researcher. A new variant of " Bashlite " malware targeting devices running BusyBox software was spotted by the researchers at Trend Micro shortly after the public disclosure of the ShellShock vulnerability. BusyBox provides set of command line utilities that are specifically designed to run in constrained embedded environments. At compile time, different capabilities can be left out, reducing the size of the binaries, and efforts are made to make them memory efficient. This makes the software an excellent candidate for use in consumer electronics devices, which seem to have been the items of interest in this case. The malware variant, detected as ELF_BASHLITE.A (ELF_FLOODER.W) , when executed on victim's machine, scans compromised networks for device