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Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to blackmailing Uber , LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016. In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday, Brandon Charles Glover (26) of Florida and Vasile Mereacre (23) of Toronto admitted they accessed and downloaded confidential corporate databases on Amazon Web Services using stolen credentials. After downloading the data, the duo contacted affected companies to report security vulnerabilities and demanded money in exchange for the deletion of the data, according to a press release published by the US Justice Department. "I was able to access backups upon backups, me and my team would like a huge reward for this," the hackers said to the victim company in an email. "Please keep in mind, we expect a big payment as this was hard work for us, we already helped a big corp which paid close to 7 digits, all

A story has been making the rounds on the Internet since yesterday about a cyber attack on an Indian nuclear power plant. Due to some experts commentary on social media even after lack of information about the event and overreactions by many, the incident received factually incorrect coverage widely suggesting a piece of malware has compromised "mission-critical systems" at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant . Relax! That's not what happened. The attack merely infected a system that was not connected to any critical controls in the nuclear facility. Here we have shared a timeline of the events with brief information on everything we know so far about the cyberattack at Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in Tamil Nadu. From where this news came? The story started when Indian security researcher Pukhraj Singh tweeted that he informed Indian authorities a few months ago about an information-stealing malware, dubbed Dtrack, which successfully hit "extre

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

Finally, for the very first time, an encrypted messaging service provider is taking legal action against a private entity that has carried out malicious attacks against its users. Facebook filed a lawsuit against Israeli mobile surveillance firm NSO Group on Tuesday, alleging that the company was actively involved in hacking users of its end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messaging service. Earlier this year, it was discovered that WhatsApp had a critical vulnerability that attackers were found exploiting in the wild to remotely install Pegasus spyware on targeted Android and iOS devices. The flaw (CVE-2019-3568) successfully allowed attackers to silently install the spyware app on targeted phones by merely placing a WhatsApp video call with specially crafted requests, even when the call was not answered. Developed by NSO Group, Pegasus allows access to an incredible amount of data from victims' smartphones remotely, including their text messages, emails, WhatsApp chats,

As Japan gears up for the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo for the next year, the country needs to brace itself for sophisticated cyberattacks, especially from state-sponsored hackers. Microsoft has issued a short notice, warning about a new wave of highly targeted cyberattacks by a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers attempting to hack over a dozen anti-doping authorities and sporting organizations around the world. The attacks are originating from the 'Strontium' Russian hacking group, widely known as Fancy Bear or APT28, and are believed to be linked to the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The Fancy Bear hacking group, also known as APT28, Sofacy, X-agent , Sednit , Sandworm , and Pawn Storm, is believed to be linked to Russian military intelligence agency GRU and has been in operation since at least 2007. Over these past three decades, the group has been credited to many high profile hacking incidents, like hacking the US presidential elections

Protection from cyberattacks begins way before attackers launch their weapons on an organization. Continuously monitoring the environment for security weaknesses and addressing such, if found, is a proven way to provide organizations with immunity to a large portion of attacks. Among the common weaknesses that expose organizations to cyberattacks, the most prominent are software vulnerabilities in systems and applications that attackers relentlessly take advantage of. To assist in the discovery of such vulnerabilities, Cynet now offers organizations a 14 days free access to its Cynet 360 platform in which they can leverage its built-in vulnerability assessment tools. A vulnerability is a bug in the software that enables a threat actor to manipulate it for malicious purposes. For example, a vulnerability in Word enables attackers to craft a Word document in such a manner that when a user double clicks to open it, it transparently opens a connection between the user computer an

Cybersecurity researchers claim to have discovered a previously undocumented backdoor specifically designed for Microsoft SQL servers that could allow a remote attacker to control an already compromised system stealthily. Dubbed Skip-2.0 , the backdoor malware is a post-exploitation tool that runs in the memory and lets remote attackers connect to any account on the server running MSSQL version 11 and version 12 by using a "magic password." What's more? The malware manages to remain undetected on the victim's MSSQL Server by disabling the compromised machine's logging functions, event publishing, and audit mechanisms every time the "magic password" is used. With these capabilities, an attacker can stealthily copy, modify, or delete the content stored in a database, the impact of which varies from application to application integrated with targeted servers. "This could be used, for example, to manipulate in-game currencies for financial gai

In an effort to mitigate a large class of potential cross-site scripting issues in Firefox, Mozilla has blocked execution of all inline scripts and potentially dangerous eval-like functions for built-in "about: pages" that are the gateway to sensitive preferences, settings, and statics of the browser. Firefox browser has 45 such internal locally-hosted about pages , some of which are listed below that you might have noticed or used at some point: about:config — panel to modify Firefox preferences and critical settings. about:downloads — your recent downloads done within Firefox. about:memory — shows the memory usage of Firefox. about:newtab — the default new tab page. about:plugins — lists all your plugins as well as other useful information. about:privatebrowsing — open a new private window. about:networking — displays networking information. To be noted, these changes do not affect how websites from the Internet work on the Firefox browser, but going forwar

A 7-year-old critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in iTerm2 macOS terminal emulator app—one of the most popular open source replacements for Mac's built-in terminal app. Tracked as CVE-2019-9535 , the vulnerability in iTerm2 was discovered as part of an independent security audit funded by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) and conducted by cybersecurity firm Radically Open Security (ROS). "MOSS selected iTerm2 for a security audit because it processes untrusted data, and it is widely used, including by high-risk targets (like developers and system administrators)," Mozilla says. According to a blog post published today by Mozilla, the RCE flaw resides in the tmux integration feature of iTerm2, which, if exploited, could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands by providing malicious output to the terminal. As shown in the video demonstration, potential attack vectors for this vulnerability include connecting

After releasing a patch for a critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability late last month, vBulletin has recently published a new security patch update that addresses 3 more high-severity vulnerabilities in its forum software. If left unpatched, the reported security vulnerabilities, which affect vBulletin 5.5.4 and prior versions, could eventually allow remote attackers to take complete control over targeted web servers and steal sensitive user information. Written in PHP, vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package that powers over 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. Discovered by application security researcher Egidio Romano, the first vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-17132 , is a remote code execution flaw, while the other two are SQL injection issues, both assigned a single ID as CVE-2019-17271 . vBulletin RCE and SQLi Flaws The RCE flaw resides in the w

Almost every application contains security vulnerabilities, some of which you may find today, but others would remain invisible until someone else finds and exploits them—which is the harsh reality of cybersecurity and its current state. And when we say this, Signal Private Messenger —promoted as one of the most secure messengers in the world—isn't any exception. Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich discovered a logical vulnerability in the Signal messaging app for Android that could allow malicious caller to force a call to be answered at the receiver's end without requiring his/her interaction. In other words, the flaw could be exploited to turn on the microphone of a targeted Signal user's device and listen to all surrounding conversations. However, the Signal vulnerability can only be exploited if the receiver fails to answer an audio call over Signal, eventually forcing the incoming call to be automatically answered on the receiver's device

Another day, another revelation of a critical unpatched zero-day vulnerability, this time in the world's most widely used mobile operating system, Android. What's more? The Android zero-day vulnerability has also been found to be exploited in the wild by the Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group—infamous for selling zero-day exploits to governments—or one of its customers, to gain control of their targets' Android devices. Discovered by Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone, the details and a proof-of-concept exploit for the high-severity security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2215, has been made public today—just seven days after reporting it to the Android security team. The zero-day is a use-after-free vulnerability in the Android kernel's binder driver that can allow a local privileged attacker or an app to escalate their privileges to gain root access to a vulnerable device and potentially take full remote control of the device. Vulnerable Android D

The infamous eGobbler hacking group that surfaced online earlier this year with massive malvertising campaigns has now been caught running a new campaign exploiting two browser vulnerabilities to show intrusive pop-up ads and forcefully redirect users to malicious websites. To be noted, hackers haven't found any way to run ads for free; instead, the modus operandi of eGobbler attackers involves high budgets to display billions of ad impressions on high profile websites through legit ad networks. But rather than relying on visitors' willful interaction with advertisements online, eGobbler uses browser (Chrome and Safari) exploits to achieve maximum click rate and successfully hijack as many users' sessions as possible. In its previous malvertising campaign, eGobbler group was exploiting a then-zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-5840) in Chrome for iOS back in April , which allowed them to successfully bypass browser's built-in pop-up blocker on iOS devices and hij

A critical security vulnerability has been discovered and fixed in the popular open-source Exim email server software, which could allow a remote attacker to simply crash or potentially execute malicious code on targeted servers. Exim maintainers today released an urgent security update— Exim version 4.92.3 —after publishing an early warning two days ago, giving system administrators an early head-up on its upcoming security patches that affect all versions of the email server software from 4.92 up to and including then-latest version 4.92.2. Exim is a widely used, open source mail transfer agent (MTA) developed for Unix-like operating systems like Linux, Mac OSX or Solaris, which runs almost 60 percent of the Internet's email servers today for routing, delivering and receiving email messages. This is the second time in this month when the Exim maintainers have released an urgent security update. Earlier this month, the team patched a critical remote code execution flaw (

A Pakistani hacker who previously made headlines earlier this year for selling almost a billion user records stolen from nearly 45 popular online services has now claimed to have hacked the popular mobile social game company Zynga Inc . With a current market capitalization of over $5 billion, Zynga is one of the world's most successful social game developers with a collection of hit online games—including FarmVille, Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, and Café World—with over a billion players worldwide. Going by the online alias Gnosticplayers, the serial hacker told The Hacker News that this time, he managed to breach " Words With Friends ," a popular Zynga-developed word puzzle game, and unauthorisedly access a massive database of more than 218 million users. According to the hacker, the data breach affected all Android and iOS game players who installed and signed up for the 'Words With Friends' game on and before 2nd September this year.

An iOS hacker and cybersecurity researcher today publicly released what he claimed to be a "permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit," in other words, an epic jailbreak that works on all iOS devices ranging from iPhone 4s (A5 chip) to iPhone 8 and iPhone X (A11 chip). Dubbed Checkm8, the exploit leverages unpatchable security weaknesses in Apple's Bootrom (SecureROM), the first significant code that runs on an iPhone while booting, which, if exploited, provides greater system-level access. "EPIC JAILBREAK: Introducing checkm8 (read "checkmate"), a permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit for hundreds of millions of iOS devices," said axi0mX while announcing the publicly release of the exploit on Twitter. The new exploit came exactly a month after Apple released an emergency patch for another critical jailbreak vulnerability that works on Apple devices including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR and the 2019 iPad Mini and iPad Air, running iOS 12.4 and i

Watch out Windows users! There's a new strain of malware making rounds on the Internet that has already infected thousands of computers worldwide and most likely, your antivirus program would not be able to detect it. Why? That's because, first, it's an advanced fileless malware and second, it leverages only legitimate built-in system utilities and third-party tools to extend its functionality and compromise computers, rather than using any malicious piece of code. The technique of bringing its own legitimate tools is effective and has rarely been spotted in the wild, helping attackers to blend in their malicious activities with regular network activity or system administration tasks while leaving fewer footprints. Independently discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Microsoft and Cisco Talos, the malware — dubbed " Nodersok " and " Divergent " — is primarily being distributed via malicious online advertisements and infecting users using

Following the release of iOS 13 and iPadOS earlier this week, Apple has issued an advisory warning iPhone and iPad users of an unpatched security bug impacting third-party keyboard apps. On iOS, third-party keyboard extensions can run entirely standalone without access to external services and thus, are forbidden from storing what you type unless you grant "full access" permissions to enable some additional features through network access. However, in the brief security advisory , Apple says that an unpatched issue in iOS 13 and iPadOS could allow third-party keyboard apps to grant themselves "full access" permission to access what you are typing—even if you deny this permission request in the first place. It should be noted that the iOS 13 bug doesn't affect Apple's built-in keyboards or third-party keyboards that don't make use of full access. Instead, the bug only impacts users who have third-party keyboard apps—such as popular Gboard, Grammarl