linux | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The whole world is still dealing with the Mirai IoT Botnet that caused vast internet outage last Friday by launching massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the DNS provider Dyn, and researchers have found another nasty IoT botnet. Security researchers at MalwareMustDie have discovered a new malware family designed to turn Linux-based insecure Internet of Things (IoT) devices into a botnet to carry out massive DDoS attacks. Dubbed Linux/IRCTelnet , the nasty malware is written in C++ and, just like Mirai malware , relies on default hard-coded passwords in an effort to infect vulnerable Linux-based IoT devices. The IRCTelnet malware works by brute-forcing a device's Telnet ports, infecting the device's operating system, and then adding it to a botnet network which is controlled through IRC (Internet Relay Chat) – an application layer protocol that enables communication in the form of text. So, every infected bot (IoT device) connects to a mali

A nine-year-old critical vulnerability has been discovered in virtually all versions of the Linux operating system and is actively being exploited in the wild. Dubbed " Dirty COW ," the Linux kernel security flaw (CVE-2016-5195) is a mere privilege-escalation vulnerability, but researchers are taking it extremely seriously due to many reasons. First, it's very easy to develop exploits that work reliably. Secondly, the Dirty COW flaw exists in a section of the Linux kernel, which is a part of virtually every distro of the open-source operating system, including RedHat, Debian, and Ubuntu, released for almost a decade. And most importantly, the researchers have discovered attack code that indicates the Dirty COW vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild. Dirty COW potentially allows any installed malicious app to gain administrative (root-level) access to a device and completely hijack it within just 5 seconds. Earlier this week, Linus Torvalds admi

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

In past few months, Microsoft opened the source code of a lot of its projects, convincing people that the company loves Linux . But a new report shows that Microsoft is not really a big supporter of Linux. Microsoft has banned Linux on some Windows 10 powered Signature Edition PCs, which provides the cleanest Windows experience on the market. Signature Edition PCs are different from other systems because it is carefully and meticulously configured by Microsoft to run Windows 10 with no bloatware, paid promotional web shortcuts, or other pre-installed apps, for providing better performance. But besides bloatware and other pre-installed apps, Microsoft won't allow you to install Linux (or any operating system) on it. This news is not a rumor as a Reddit user BaronHK reported that he found it impossible to install Linux on the Signature Edition Lenovo Yoga 900 ISK2 UltraBook because Microsoft has locked the SSD in a proprietary RAID mode that can only be read by Window

Around five years after unknown hackers gained unauthorized access to multiple kernel.org servers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel, police have arrested a South Florida computer programmer for carrying out the attack. Donald Ryan Austin , a 27-year-old programmer from of El Portal, Florida, was charged Thursday with hacking servers belonging to the Linux Kernel Organization ( kernel.org ) and the Linux Foundation in 2011, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. The Linux Kernel Organization runs kernel.org servers for distributing the Linux operating system kernel, which is the heart of the operating system, whereas the Linux Foundation is a separate group that supports kernel.org. According to an indictment [ PDF ] unsealed by federal prosecutors on Monday, Austin managed to steal login credentials of one of the Linux Kernel Organization system administrators in 2011 and used them to install a hard-to-detect malware backdoor, dubbe

Linux has turned 25! Dear all, today is August 25, 2016, and it is time for the celebration, as it's the 25th Anniversary of the Linux project, announced by its creator, Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds , on August 25, 1991. Who can forget one of the most famous messages in the computing world posted by Torvalds exactly 25 years ago today, on 25 August 1991: Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat. Since its birth, Linux has become the largest shared technology on the planet and has changed the world in more ways than one can imagine. While not initially designed to be portable, Linux is one of the most widely ported operating system kernels, which runs on a vast range of systems from co

If you are using the Internet, there are the possibilities that you are open to attack. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) implementation in all Linux systems deployed since 2012 ( version 3.6 and above of the Linux kernel ) poses a serious threat to Internet users, whether or not they use Linux directly. This issue is troubling because Linux is used widely across the Internet, from web servers to Android smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Researchers have uncovered a serious Internet flaw, which if exploited, could allow attackers to terminate or inject malware into unencrypted communication between any two vulnerable machines on the Internet. The vulnerability could also be used to forcefully terminate HTTPS encrypted connections and downgrade the privacy of secure connections, as well as also threatens anonymity of Tor users by routing them to certain malicious relays. The flaw actually resides in the design and implementation of the Request for Comments: 5961 ( RF

No software is immune to being Hacked! Not even Linux. The Ubuntu online forums have been hacked, and data belonging to over 2 Million users have been compromised, Canonical just announced. The compromised users' data include their IP addresses, usernames, and email addresses, according to the company, who failed to apply a patch to secure its users' data. However, users should keep in mind that the hack did not affect the Ubuntu operating system, or it was not due to a vulnerability or weakness in the OS. Instead, the breach only affected the Ubuntu online forums that people use to discuss the OS, said BetaNews, who initially reported the news. "There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums site," Jane Silber, Chief Executive Officer at Canonical wrote in a blog post . "We take information security and user privacy very seriously, follow a strict set of security practices and this incident has triggered a thorough investigation." "C

You might be aware of Microsoft and Canonical's partnership to integrate " Bash on Ubuntu on Windows 10 ," which is typically a non-graphical Ubuntu running over Windows Subsystem for Linux . Windows 10 doesn't officially support graphical Linux desktop applications. But, now we have noticed a very interesting ticket titled "Run Any Desktop Environment in WSL" raised at Github  repository, in which a user who goes by name Guerra24 has managed to run the graphical version of Ubuntu Linux, i.e. Ubuntu Unity on Windows 10. It's not " Microsoft Linux ." BASH or Bourne Again Shell is capable of handling advanced command line functionalities. Microsoft has provided support for Bash on Windows 10 as an expansion of its command-line tool family, so don't get confused. The Bash on Windows 10 feature is designed only for developers who want to run Linux terminal utilities without any OS dependencies. However, this feature downloads and installs

Information security and privacy are consistently hot topics after Edward Snowden revelations of NSA's global surveillance that brought the world's attention towards data protection and encryption as never before. Moreover, just days after Windows 10 's successful launch last summer, we saw various default settings in the Microsoft's newest OS that compromise users' privacy , making a large number of geeks, as well as regular users, migrate to Linux. However, the problem is that majority of users are not friendly to the Linux environment. They don't know how to configure their machine with right privacy and security settings, which makes them still open to hacking and surveillance. However, this gaping hole can be filled with a  Debian-based  Security-focused Linux operating system called Subgraph OS: A key solution to your Privacy Fear. Subgraph OS is a feather weighted Linux flavor that aims to combat hacking attacks easier, even on fai

Are you also the one who downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th? You may have been Infected! Linux Mint is one of the best and popular Linux distros available today, but if you have downloaded and installed the operating system recently you might have done so using a malicious ISO image. Here's why: Last night, Some unknown hacker or group of hackers had managed to hack into the Linux Mint website and replaced the download links on the site that pointed to one of their servers offering a malicious ISO images for the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon Edition . "Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it," the head of Linux Mint project Clement Lefebvre said in a surprising announcement dated February 21, 2016. Who are affected? As far as the Linux Mint team knows, the issue only affects the one edition, and that is Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition. The situation happened last night, s

The 21st century is witnessing a great change over in the daily life of folks with the advent of IoT devices that are capable of talking to each other without any human intervention. Yeah! Now you do not have to individually cascade an instruction to each of your home devices to accomplish a task. All have gone automated with the actuators and sensors which are infused into the home appliances. The fact is that your IoT devices would only comply within the family of same manufacturers. For example, if you have a Samsung smart refrigerator, and your wearable device is from Apple or any other vendors, then it couldn't sync as both are from different genres. No need to worry now! Zephyr: Future of IoTs The Linux Foundation has broken all the barriers of compatibility issues by releasing a Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) for Internet of Things devices , dubbed " Zephyr ". This OS enables connected devices to communicate with the same protocol.

The same "Vigilante-style Hacker," who previously hacked more than 10,000 routers to make them more secure, has once again made headlines by compromising more than 70,000 home routers and apparently forcing their owners to make them secure against flaws and weak passwords. Just like the infamous hacking group Lizard Squad , the group of white hat hackers, dubbed the White Team , is building up a sizeable botnet consisting of hundreds of thousands of home routers, but for a good purpose. Lizard Squad , the same group responsible for Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft Xbox Live outages , uses their botnets to launch DDoS ( Distributed Denial of Service ) attacks against target websites to flood them with traffic and knock them offline. Hacking Routers to Make them More Secure Challenged by Lizard Squad's maliocus work, the White Team of vigilante hackers built their own peer-to-peer botnet that infects routers to close off vulnerabilities , such

A Few Months Back, Microsoft impressed the world with ' Microsoft loves Linux ' announcements, including, development of a custom Linux-based OS for running Azure Cloud Switch and selecting Ubuntu as the operating system for its  Cloud-based Big Data services . Also Read:  Microsoft Drops a Cloud Data Center Under the Ocean . Now, a renowned Windows Hacker and computer expert, who goes by the name ' WalkingCat ', discovered that the latest version of Windows 10 may have a Linux subsystem secretly installed inside. According to his tweets, hacker spotted two mysterious files, LXss.sys and LXCore.sys, in the most latest Windows 10 Redstone Build 14251 , which are suspected to be part of Microsoft's Project Astoria . Project Astoria , also known as Windows Bridge for Android , is a toolkit that allows running Android apps on Windows 10 Mobile devices. The naming convention for latest discovered files is very similar to the Android Subsystem files from Proj

Hackers enjoy much playing with PlayStation and Xbox, rather than playing on them. And this time, they have done some crazy things with Sony's PlayStation gaming console. It appears that a console-hacking that goes by the name of Fail0verflow have managed to hack PlayStation 4 (PS4) to run a Linux kernel-based operating system. Fail0verflow announced this week that they successfully cracked the PlayStation 4 and managed to install a full version of Linux on the system, turning the PlayStation 4 into a real PC . With this latest PS4 hack, the console-hacking group gave the homebrew software community hope that Sony's popular game console will soon become a valuable tool in their arsenal. Group Managed to Run Game Boy Advance and Pokémon on PS4 What's even more interesting? The hacking group didn't stop with Linux. The group also managed to install an emulator for the Game Boy Advance and a version of Pokémon , dubbing it the "PlayStat

Ian Murdock , the founder the Debian Linux operating system and the creator of apt-get, has passed away. Yes, it is very sad to announce that Ian Murdock is not between us. His death has touched the entire software community. He was just 42. The announcement of Murdock death came out via a blog post on Docker website, where Murdock was working as a member of the technical staff. The cause of death is unclear at present, but Murdock tweeted the same day that he would commit suicide that night. His Twitter account had since been deleted. However, at that time, some people speculated that Murdock's account had been hacked and that the tweets were not by him. Murdock posted some Tweets  on Monday suggesting he had been involved in a police case and has been beaten by the police and charged with battery. However, neither Docker, nor the San Francisco Police Department immediately commented on Murdock's actual cause of death. Murdock developed Debian in Augu

Hackers, Government Agencies and sophisticated malware, are collecting every piece of Digital data that we transmit through our Computers, Smartphones or Internet-enabled Gadgets. No matter how secure you think you might be, something malicious can always happen. Because, " With the right tools and Talent, a Computer is an open book. " Many people ask, How to stay safe and secure online? And, Answer is... ...Knowledge of Cyber threats, little Smartness and a Secure Operating System. Which Operating System is the Most Secure? Nearly every Operating System is designed with Security as a requirement, but believe me… there can't be a truly Secure Operating System. If you are Interested in Security and Hacking, you have probably already heard of various security-focused Operating Systems like Tails , Whonix and Kali Linux . All these operating systems, including Windows, Linux, BSD, even OSX, are all based on a Monolithic Kernels, and it requir