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Just in time… Some cybersecurity experts this week arguing over Twitter in favor of not using HTTPS and suggesting software developers to only rely on signature-based package verification, just because APT on Linux also does the same. Ironically, a security researcher just today revealed details of a new critical remote code execution flaw in the apt-get utility that can be exploited by a remote, man-in-the middle attacker to compromise Linux machines. The flaw, apparently, once again demonstrates that if the software download ecosystem uses HTTPS to communicate safely, such attacks can easily be mitigated at the first place. Discovered by Max Justicz, the vulnerability (CVE-2019-3462) resides in the APT package manager, a widely used utility that handles installation, update and removal of software on Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions. According to a blog post published by Justicz and details shared with The Hacker News, the APT utility doesn't properly

Since most security tools also keep an eye on the network traffic to detect malicious IP addresses, attackers are increasingly adopting infrastructure of legitimate services in their attacks to hide their malicious activities. Cybersecurity researchers have now spotted a new malware attack campaign linked to the notorious DarkHydrus APT group that uses Google Drive as its command-and-control (C2) server. DarkHydrus first came to light in August last year when the APT group was leveraging the open-source Phishery tool to carry out credential-harvesting campaign against government entities and educational institutions in the Middle East. The latest malicious campaign conducted by the DarkHydrus APT group was also observed against targets in the Middle East, according to reports published by the 360 Threat Intelligence Center ( 360TIC ) and Palo Alto Networks. This time the advanced threat attackers are using a new variant of their backdoor Trojan, called RogueRobin , which i

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

A Russian hacker indicted by a United States court for his involvement in online ad fraud schemes that defrauded multiple American companies out of tens of millions of dollars pleaded not guilty on Friday in a courtroom in Brooklyn, New York. Aleksandr Zhukov , 38, was arrested in November last year by Bulgarian authorities after the U.S. issued an international warrant against him, and was extradited by Bulgaria to the United States on Thursday (January 18, 2019). He is currently in prison in Brooklyn. In November 2018, law enforcement and multiple security firms collaborated to shut down one of the largest digital ad-fraud schemes, which they dubbed 3ve , that infected over 1.7 million computers worldwide to generate fake clicks used to defraud digital advertisers for years and made tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Pronounced "Eve," the online ad-fraud campaign was believed to have been active since at least 2014, but its fraudulent activity grew last yea

Even after so many efforts by Google for preventing its Play Store from malware, shady apps somehow managed to fool its anti-malware protections and get into its service to infect Android users with malware. Two such Android apps have recently been spotted on the Google Play Store by security researchers with the Trend Micro malware research team, infecting thousands of Android users who have already downloaded them with banking malware. The apps in question masquerade as a currency exchange app called Currency Converter and battery saver app called BatterySaverMobi , and are using motion-sensor inputs of infected Android devices to monitor them before installing a dangerous banking Trojan called Anubis. The malicious Android apps, with a large number of fake five-star reviews, use this clever trick instead of traditional evasion techniques in order to avoid detection when researchers run emulators (which are less likely to use sensors) to detect such malicious apps. &quo

Ukrainian Police have this week busted out two separate groups of hackers involved in carrying out DDoS attacks against news agencies and stealing money from Ukrainian citizens, respectively. According to the authorities, the four suspected hackers they arrested last week , all aged from 26 to 30 years, stole more than 5 million Hryvnia (around 178,380 USD) from the bank accounts of Ukrainian citizens by hacking into their computers. The suspects carried out their attacks by scanning vulnerable computers on the Internet and infecting them with a custom Trojan malware to take full remote control of the systems. The group then apparently enabled key-logging on the infected computers in an attempt to capture banking credentials of victims when the owners of those infected computers fill in that information on any banking site or their digital currency wallet. Once getting a hold on the victims banking and financial data, the attackers logged into their online banking accounts

Magecart strikes again, one of the most notorious hacking groups specializes in stealing credit card details from poorly-secured e-commerce websites. According to security researchers from RiskIQ and Trend Micro, cybercriminals of a new subgroup of Magecart, labeled as "Magecart Group 12," recently successfully compromised nearly 277 e-commerce websites by using supply-chain attacks. Magecart is the same group of digital credit card skimmers which made headlines last year for carrying out attacks against some big businesses including Ticketmaster , British Airways , and Newegg . Typically, the Magecart hackers compromise e-commerce sites and insert malicious JavaScript code into their checkout pages that silently captures payment information of customers making purchasing on the sites and then send it to the attacker's remote server. However, the researchers from the two firms today revealed that instead of directly compromising targeted websites, the Magecart G

Almost half of the fight travelers around the world were found exposed to a critical security vulnerability discovered in online flight ticket booking system that allowed remote hackers to access and modify their travel details and even claim their frequent flyer miles. Israeli network security researcher Noam Rotem discovered the vulnerability when he booked a flight on the Israeli airline ELAL, successful exploitation of which just required victim's PNR (Passenger Name Record) number. The vulnerability resided in the widely used online flight booking system developed by Amadeus, which is currently being used by nearly 141 international airlines, including United Airlines, Lufthansa and Air Canada. After booking a flight with ELAL, the traveler receives a PNR number and a unique link that allows customers to check their booking status and related information associated with that PNR. Rotem found that merely by changing the value of the "RULE_SOURCE_1_ID" param

Check Point researchers have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in Fortnite, a massively popular online battle game, one of which could have allowed remote attackers to completely takeover player accounts just by tricking users into clicking an unsuspectable link. The reported Fortnite flaws include a SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS) bug, a web application firewall bypass issue, and most importantly an OAuth account takeover vulnerability. Full account takeover could be a nightmare, especially for players of such a hugely popular online game that has been played by 80 million users worldwide, and when a good Fortnite account has been sold on eBay for over $50,000. The Fortnite game lets its players log in to their accounts using third-party Single Sign-On (SSO) providers, such as Facebook, Google, Xbox, and PlayStation accounts. According to the researchers, the combination of cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw and a malicious redirect issue on the Epic Games&

A California-based Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) services provider VOIPO has accidentally left tens of gigabytes of its customer data, containing millions of call logs, SMS/MMS messages, and plaintext internal system credentials, publicly accessible to anyone without authentication. VOIPo is one of a leading providers of Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) services in the United States offering reseller VoIP, Cloud VoIP, and VoIP services to residentials and small businesses. Justin Paine , the head of Trust & Safety at CloudFlare, discovered an open ElasticSearch database last week using the Shodan search engine and notified the VOIPO's CTO, who then promptly secured the database that contains at least 4 years of data on its customers. According to Paine, the database contained 6.7 million call logs dating back to July 2017, 6 million SMS/MMS logs dating back to December 2015, and 1 million logs containing API key for internal systems. While the call logs included timestamp and duration o

The U.S. authorities have charged two Ukrainian hackers for hacking into the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR filing system and stealing sensitive market-moving reports of companies before their public release. EDGAR, or Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval, is an online filing system wherein companies submit their financial filings. The system processes around 1.7 million electronic filings per year. EDGAR lists millions of filings on corporate disclosures—ranging from annual and quarterly earnings report to sensitive and confidential information on mergers and acquisitions, which could be used for insider-trading or even manipulating U.S. equity markets. The two Ukrainian hackers, Artem Radchenko and Oleksandr Ieremenko (27-years-old), hacked EDGAR system to extract such sensitive non-public reports of publicly traded companies and sold that information to different groups of traders. According to an indictment [ PDF ] unsealed on Tuesday, amo

If you are responsible for the cybersecurity of a medium-sized company , you may assume your organization is too small to be targeted. Well, think again. While the major headlines tend to focus on large enterprises getting breached – such as Sony, Equifax, or Target the actual reality is that small and mid-sized companies are experiencing similar threats. According to Verizon's 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, fifty-eight percent of malware attack victims are SMBs. Added to this is the fact that attack vectors that target small and medium-sized businesses are growing increasingly sophisticated, which makes securing them respectively challenging, and the trend of targeting ransomware campaigns on smaller organizations, as attackers assume smaller outfits are more likely to quickly pay in order to avoid damage to their business and reputation. Cisco's 2018 Security Capabilities Benchmark Study states that 44 percent of cyber attacks cost organizations over $500,000 i

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered and reported in the Microsoft's Windows operating system that, under a certain scenario, could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on Windows machine. Discovered by security researcher John Page (@hyp3rlinx), the vulnerability was reported to the Microsoft security team through Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) Program over 6 months ago, which the tech giant has refused to patch, at least for now. The vulnerability, which has not been assigned any CVE number, actually resides within the processing of a vCard file—a standard file format for storing contact information for a person or business, which is also supported by Microsoft Outlook. According to the researcher, a remote attacker can maliciously craft a VCard file in a way that the contact's website URL stored within the file points to a local executable file, which can be sent within a zipped file via an email or delivered separately via drive-b

In-short conclusion—Whatsapp service or its 45-days deletion policy doesn't seem to have a bug. For detailed logical explanation, please read below. An Amazon employee earlier today tweeted details about an incident that many suggest could be a sign of a huge privacy bug in the most popular end-to-end encrypted Whatsapp messaging app that could expose some of your secret messages under certain circumstances. According to Abby Fuller, she found some mysterious messages on WhatsApp, notably not associated with her contacts, immediately after she created a new account with the messaging app on her brand new phone using a new number for the very first time. Fuller believes that the mysteriously appeared content on her new account was the message history associated with the WhatsApp account of the previous owner of the same SIM/mobile number, which WhatsApp pushed to her phone. Since for WhatsApp, your phone number is your username and password is the OTP it sends to that n

A simple DDoS attack could land you in jail for 10 years or even more. A Massachusetts man has been sentenced to over 10 years in prison for launching DDoS attacks against the computer network of two healthcare organizations in 2014 to protest the treatment of a teenager at the centers. Beyond serving 121 months in prison, Martin Gottesfeld , 34, was also ordered by U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton to pay nearly $443,000 in restitution for damages he caused to the targeted facilities. Gottesfeld carried out the DDoS attacks on behalf of the Anonymous hacker collective against Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) and Wayside Youth & Family Support Network—a nonprofit home treatment facility that provides a range of mental health counselings to children, young adults, and families in Massachusetts. In April 2014, the hacker used a botnet of over 40,000 network routers that he infected with customized malicious software to carry out the DDoS attacks that not only knocke

If your computer has been infected with PyLocky Ransomware and you are searching for a free ransomware decryption tool to unlock or decrypt your files—your search might end here. Security researcher Mike Bautista at Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence unit have released a free decryption tool that makes it possible for victims infected with the PyLocky ransomware to unlock their encrypted files for free without paying any ransom. The decryption tool works for everyone, but it has a huge limitation—to successfully recover your files, you must have captured the initial network traffic (PCAP file) between the PyLocky ransomware and its command-and-control (C2) server, which generally nobody purposely does. This is because the outbound connection—when the ransomware communicates with its C2 server and submit decryption key related information—contains a string that includes both Initialization Vector (IV) and a password, which the ransomware generates randomly to encrypt the file

Security researchers have been warning about a simple technique that cybercriminals and email scammers are already being using in the wild to bypass security features of Microsoft Office 365, including Safe Links, which are originally designed to protect users from malware and phishing attacks. Safe Links has been included by Microsoft in Office 365 as part of its ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) solution that works by replacing all URLs in an incoming email with Microsoft-owned secure URLs. Therefore, every time users click on a link provided in an email, Safe Links first sends them to a Microsoft owned domain, where it immediately checks the original link for anything suspicious. If Microsoft's security scanners detect any malicious element, it then warns the users about it, and if not, it redirects them to the original link. However, researchers at the cloud security company Avanan have revealed how attackers have been bypassing both Office 365's URL reputation check a

It should come as no surprise that cybersecurity is one of the most important and lucrative fields in the world right now, and it's becoming more important every day—thanks to a growing number of cyber attacks that are targeting everything from individuals and startups to Fortune 500 companies and entire government agencies. So it should also come as no surprise that demand for talented and trained cybersecurity professionals who know how to thwart and retaliate against these attacks is skyrocketing. The 2018 Supercharged Cybersecurity Bundle offers a massive trove of resources that will give you the skills you need to join the fight against cybercriminals of all backgrounds, and the entire bundle is available for 95% off at just $29.99. With 10 most popular cyber security books (listed below), spanning 12 hours of in-depth instruction, this bundle walks you through everything from the more theoretical and abstract elements of cybersecurity to its most essential tools and platfo

Microsoft has issued its first Patch Tuesday for this year to address 49 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other products, 7 of which are rated critical, 40 important and 2 moderate in severity. Just one of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month has been reported as being publicly known at the time of release, and none are being actively exploited in the wild. All the seven critical-rated vulnerabilities lead to remote code execution and primarily impact various versions of Windows 10 and Server editions. Two of the 7 critical flaws affect Microsoft's Hyper-V host OS that fails to properly validate input from an authenticated user on a guest operating system, three affect the ChakraCore scripting engine that fails to properly handle objects in memory in Edge, one affects Edge directly that occurs when the browser improperly handles objects in memory, and one impacts the Windows DHCP client that fails to pro

German federal police have arrested a 20-year-old local student for stealing and publishing a massive trove of personal data of hundreds of politicians , journalists and other public figures last month. The young man, whose identity has not been revealed by the police, was arrested after police raided his parent's house in west-central German State of Hesse on Sunday and recovered a computer that the suspect tried to destroy 2 days before the search and a data backup. The suspect, who believed to have acted alone, has admitted of carrying out the mass hacking of German politicians out of anger at their political statements, BKA Federal Criminal Police revealed. "The accused was interrogated on 07.01.2019 by the senior prosecutor and officials of the Federal Criminal Police Office. He comprehensively acknowledged the allegations against him and provided information on his own offenses," the BKA said in a press release . "Due to a lack of grounds for detentio

Well, there's some good news for hackers and vulnerability hunters, though terrible news for tech manufacturers! Exploit vendor Zerodium is now willing to offer significantly higher payouts for full, working zero-day exploits that allow stealing of data from WhatsApp, iMessage and other online chat applications. Zerodium—a startup by the infamous French-based company Vupen that buys and sells zero-day exploits to government agencies around the world—said it would now pay up to $2 million for remote iOS jailbreaks and $1 million for exploits that target secure messaging apps. Get $2 Million for Remotely Jailbreaking An iPhone Previously, Zerodium was offering $1.5 million for persistent iOS jailbreaks that can be executed remotely without any user interaction (zero-click)—but now the company has increased that amount to $2 million. The company is now offering $1.5 million for a remote iOS jailbreak that requires minimal user interaction (i.e., single-click)—the amount h