intercept sms | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A group of Chinese hackers carrying out political espionage for Beijing has been found targeting telecommunications companies with a new piece of malware designed to spy on text messages sent or received by highly targeted individuals. Dubbed " MessageTap ," the backdoor malware is a 64-bit ELF data miner that has recently been discovered installed on a Linux-based Short Message Service Center (SMSC) server of an unnamed telecommunications company. According to a recent report published by FireEye's Mandiant firm, MessageTap has been created and used by APT41 , a prolific Chinese hacking group that carries out state-sponsored espionage operations and has also been found involved in financially motivated attacks. In mobile telephone networks, SMSC servers act as a middle-man service responsible for handling the SMS operations by routing messages between senders and recipients. Since SMSes are not designed to be encrypted, neither on transmitting nor on the telec...

Another day, another significant data breach. This time the victim is Reddit... seems someone is really pissed off with Reddit's account ban policy or bias moderators. Reddit social media network today announced that it suffered a security breach in June that exposed some of its users' data, including their current email addresses and an old 2007 database backup containing usernames and hashed passwords. According to Reddit, the unknown hacker(s) managed to gain read-only access to some of its systems that contained its users' backup data, source code, internal logs, and other files. In a post published to the platform Wednesday, Reddit Chief Technology Officer Christopher Slowe admitted that the hack was a serious one, but assured its users that the hackers did not gain access to Reddit systems. "[The attackers] were not able to alter Reddit information, and we have taken steps since the event to further lock down and rotate all production secrets and API k...