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Security researchers have publicly disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the firmware of AT&T DirecTV WVB kit after trying to get the device manufacturer to patch this easy-to-exploit flaw over the past few months. The problem is with a core component of the Genie DVR system that's shipped free of cost with DirecTV and can be easily exploited by hackers to gain root access and take full control of the device, placing millions of people who've signed up to DirecTV service at risk. The vulnerability actually resides in WVBR0-25 —a Linux-powered wireless video bridge manufactured by Linksys that AT&T provides to its new customers. DirecTV Wireless Video Bridge WVBR0-25 allows the main Genie DVR to communicate over the air with customers' Genie client boxes (up to 8) that are plugged into their TVs around the home. Trend Micro researcher Ricky Lawshae, who is also a DirecTV customer, decided to take a closer look at the device and found that Linksy

The U.S. federal officials have arrested three hackers who have pleaded guilty to computer-crimes charges for creating and distributing Mirai botnet that crippled some of the world's biggest and most popular websites by launching the massive DDoS attacks last year. According to the federal court documents unsealed Tuesday, Paras Jha (21-year-old from New Jersey), Josiah White (20-year-old Washington) and Dalton Norman (21-year-old from Louisiana) were indicted by an Alaska court last week on multiple charges for their role in massive cyber attacks conducted using Mirai botnet. Mirai is a piece of nasty IoT malware that scans for insecure routers, cameras, DVRs, and other Internet of Things devices which are still using their default passwords and then add them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks on websites and Internet infrastructure. According to his plea agreement, Jha " conspired to conduct DDoS attacks against websites and web ho

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

Even after so many efforts by Google like launching bug bounty program and preventing apps from using Android accessibility services , malicious applications somehow manage to get into Play Store and infect people with malicious software. The same happened once again when security researchers discovered at least 85 applications in Google Play Store that were designed to steal credentials from users of Russian-based social network VK.com and were successfully downloaded millions of times. The most popular of all masqueraded as a gaming app with more than a million downloads. When this app was initially submitted in March 2017, it was just a gaming app without any malicious code, according to a blog post published Tuesday by Kaspersky Lab. However, after waiting for more than seven months, the malicious actors behind the app updated it with information-stealing capabilities in October 2017. Besides this gaming app, the Kaspersky researchers found 84 such apps on Google Play

A 19-year-old vulnerability has been re-discovered in the RSA implementation from at least 8 different vendors—including F5, Citrix, and Cisco—that can give man-in-the-middle attackers access to encrypted messages. Dubbed ROBOT ( Return of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Attack ), the attack allows an attacker to perform RSA decryption and cryptographic operations using the private key configured on the vulnerable TLS servers. ROBOT attack is nothing but a couple of minor variations to the old Bleichenbacher attack on the RSA encryption protocol. First discovered in 1998 and named after Swiss cryptographer Daniel Bleichenbacher, the Bleichenbacher attack is a padding oracle attack on RSA-based PKCS#1 v1.5 encryption scheme used in SSLv2. Leveraging an adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack which occurred due to error messages by SSL servers for errors in the PKCS #1 1.5 padding, Bleichenbacher attack allows attackers to determine whether a decrypted message is correctly padded.

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

As promised last week , Google's Project Zero researcher Ian Beer now publicly disclosed an exploit that works on almost all 64-bit Apple devices running iOS 11.1.2 or earlier, which can be used to build an iOS jailbreak, allowing users to run apps from non-Apple sources. On Monday morning, Beer shared the details on the exploit, dubbed "tfp0," which leveraged double-free memory corruption vulnerabilities in the kernel, the core of the operating system. Here, " tfp0 " stands for " task for pid 0 " or the kernel task port—which gives users full control over the core of the operating system. The Project Zero researcher responsibly reported these vulnerabilities to Apple in October, which were patched by the company with the release of iOS 11.2 on 2nd December. While Beer says he has successfully tested his proof of concept exploit on the iPhone 6s and 7, and iPod Touch 6G, he believes that his exploit should work on all 64-bit Apple devices.

Security researchers have uncovered a previously undetected group of Russian-speaking hackers that has silently been targeting Banks, financial institutions, and legal firms, primarily in the United States, UK, and Russia. Moscow-based security firm Group-IB published a 36-page report on Monday, providing details about the newly-disclosed hacking group, dubbed MoneyTaker , which has been operating since at least May 2016. In the past 18 months, the hacking group is believed to have conducted more than 20 attacks against various financial organisations—stolen more than $11 Million and sensitive documents that could be used for next attacks. According to the security firm, the group has primarily been targeting card processing systems, including the AWS CBR (Russian Interbank System) and SWIFT international bank messaging service (United States). " Criminals stole documentation for OceanSystems' FedLink card processing system, which is used by 200 banks in Latin America

Here we are with our weekly roundup, briefing this week's top cybersecurity threats, incidents, and challenges, just in case you missed any of them. Last week has been very short with big news from the theft of over 4,700 Bitcoins from the largest cryptocurrency mining marketplace to the discovery of a new malware evasion technique that works on all versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Besides this, the newly discovered Janus vulnerability in the Android operating system and a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Malware Protection Engine (MPE) for which Microsoft released an emergency patch made their places in our weekly roundup. I recommend you to read the entire news (just click 'Read More' because there's some valuable advice in there as well). So, here we go with the list of this Week's Top Stories: Process Doppelgänging: New Malware Evasion Technique A team of researchers, who previously discovered AtomBombing

HP has an awful history of 'accidentally' leaving keyloggers onto its customers' laptops. At least two times this year, HP laptops were caught with pre-installed keylogger or spyware applications. I was following a tweet made by a security researcher claiming to have found a built-in keylogger in several HP laptops, and now he went public with his findings. A security researcher who goes by the name of ZwClose discovered a keylogger in several Hewlett-Packard (HP) laptops that could allow hackers to record your every keystroke and steal sensitive data, including passwords, account information, and credit card details. The Keylogger was found embedded in the SynTP.sys file, a part of Synaptics touchpad driver that ships with HP notebook computers, leaving more than 460 HP Notebook models vulnerable to hackers. Although the keylogger component is disabled by default, hackers can make use of available open source tools for bypassing User Account Control (UAC) to

Microsoft has just released an emergency security patch to address a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in its Malware Protection Engine (MPE) that could allow an attacker to take full control of a victim's PC. Enabled by default, Microsoft Malware Protection Engine offers the core cybersecurity capabilities, like scanning, detection, and cleaning, for the company's antivirus and antimalware programs in all of its products. According to Microsoft, the vulnerability affects a large number of Microsoft security products, including Windows Defender and Microsoft Security Essentials along with Endpoint Protection, Forefront Endpoint Protection, and Exchange Server 2013 and 2016, impacting Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server. Tracked as CVE-2017-11937 , the vulnerability is a memory corruption issue which is triggered when the Malware Protection Engine scans a specially crafted file to check for any potential threat.

A team of security researchers has discovered a critical implementation flaw in major mobile banking applications that left banking credentials of millions of users vulnerable to hackers. The vulnerability was discovered by researchers of the Security and Privacy Group at the University of Birmingham, who tested hundreds of different banking apps—both iOS and Android—and found that several of them were affected by a common issue, leaving their users vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The affected banking apps include HSBC, NatWest, Co-op, Santander, and Allied Irish bank, which have now been updated after researchers reported them of the issue. According to a research paper [ PDF ] published by researchers, vulnerable applications could have allowed an attacker, connected to the same network as the victim, to intercept SSL connection and retrieve the user's banking credentials, like usernames and passwords/pincodes—even if the apps are using SSL pinning feature. SS

A team of security researchers has discovered a new malware evasion technique that could help malware authors defeat most of the modern antivirus solutions and forensic tools. Dubbed Process Doppelgänging , the new fileless code injection technique takes advantage of a built-in Windows function and an undocumented implementation of Windows process loader. Ensilo security researchers Tal Liberman and Eugene Kogan, who discovered the Process Doppelgänging attack, presented their findings today at Black Hat 2017 Security conference held in London. Process Doppelgänging Works on All Windows Versions Apparently, Process Doppelgänging attack works on all modern versions of Microsoft Windows operating system, starting from Windows Vista to the latest version of Windows 10. Tal Liberman, the head of the research team at enSilo, told The Hacker New that this malware evasion technique is similar to Process Hollowing—a method first introduced years ago by attackers to defeat the m

Bitcoin is breaking every record—after gaining 20% jump last week, Bitcoin price just crossed the $14,800 mark in less than 24 hours—and there can be no better reason for hackers to put all of their efforts to steal skyrocketing cryptocurrency. NiceHash, the largest Bitcoin mining marketplace, has been hacked, which resulted in the theft of more than 4,700 Bitcoins worth over $57 million (at the time of breach). And guess what? You'll be surprised to know that the stolen BTC now worth over $70 million—in less than 24 hours. Founded in 2014, NiceHash is a cloud-based crypto-mining marketplace that connects people from all over the world to rent out their spare computing power to other in order to create new coins. On Wednesday, several NiceHash users reported that their BTC wallets had been emptied, which was later confirmed by NiceHash after its service went offline claiming to be undergoing maintenance. At the time of writing, the NiceHash service is still offline wi

Last year, Uber received an email from an anonymous person demanding money in exchange for the stolen user database. It turns out that a 20-year-old Florida man, with the help of another, breached Uber's system last year and was paid a huge amount by the company to destroy the data and keep the incident secret. Just last week, Uber announced that a massive data breach in October 2016 exposed personal data of 57 million customers and drivers and that it paid two hackers $100,000 in ransom to destroy the information. However, the ride-hailing company did not disclose identities or any information about the hackers or how it paid them. Now, two unknown sources familiar with the incident have told Reuters that Uber paid a Florida man through HackerOne platform, a service that helps companies to host their bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure program. So far, the identity of the Florida man was unable to be obtained or another person who helped him carry out the hack.

Finally, here we have a vulnerability that targets Android developers and reverse engineers, instead of app users. Security researchers have discovered an easily-exploitable vulnerability in Android application developer tools, both downloadable and cloud-based, that could allow attackers to steal files and execute malicious code on vulnerable systems remotely. The issue was discovered by security researchers at the Check Point Research Team, who also released a proof of concept (PoC) attack, which they called ParseDroid . The vulnerability resides in a popular XML parsing library "DocumentBuilderFactory," used by the most common Android Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Google's Android Studio, JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse as well as the major reverse engineering tools for Android apps such as APKTool, Cuckoo-Droid and more. The ParseDroid flaw, technically known as XML External Entity (XXE) vulnerability, is triggered when a vulner

Do you have remote support software TeamViewer installed on your desktop? If yes, then you should pay attention to a critical vulnerability discovered in the software that could allow users sharing a desktop session to gain complete control of the other's PC without permission. TeamViewer is a popular remote-support software that lets you securely share your desktop or take full control of other's PC over the Internet from anywhere in the world. For a remote session to work both computers—the client (presenter) and the server (viewer)—must have the software installed, and the client has to share a secret authentication code with the person he wants to share his desktop. However, a GitHub user named "Gellin" has disclosed a vulnerability in TeamViewer that could allow the client (sharing its desktop session) to gain control of the viewer's computer without permission. TeamViewer Hack Could Be Used By Anyone—Server Or Client Gellin has also publishe

In the digital age, one of the most popular sayings is—if you're not paying, then you're not the customer, you're the product. While downloading apps on their smartphones, most users may not realize how much data they collect on you. Believe me; it's way more than you can imagine. Nowadays, many app developers are following irresponsible practices that are worth understanding, and we don't have a better example than this newly-reported incident about a virtual keyboard app. A team of security researchers at the Kromtech Security Center has discovered a massive trove of personal data belonging to more than 31 million users of the popular virtual keyboard app, AI.type, accidentally leaked online for anyone to download without requiring any password. Founded in 2010, Ai.type is a customizable and personalizable on-screen keyboard for mobile phones and tablets, with more than 40 million users worldwide. Apparently, a misconfigured MongoDB database, owned by