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BMC Vulnerability Exposes Admin Password of 32,000 Servers in Plaintext on the Internet

BMC Vulnerability Exposes Admin Password of 32,000 Servers in Plaintext on the Internet

Jun 20, 2014
A Flaw has been discovered in the motherboards manufactured by the server manufacturer Supermicro, has left more than 30,000 servers vulnerable to hackers that could allow them to remotely compromise the management interface of unpatched servers. The vulnerability actually resides in the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) in the WPCM450 line of chips incorporated into the motherboards. Security Researcher at CARInet Security Incident Response Team, discovered that Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) of Supermicro motherboards contain a binary file that stores remote login passwords in clear text and the file is available for download simply by connecting to the specific port, 49152. Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) is the central part of the microcontroller that resides on server motherboard or in the chassis of a blade server or telecom platform. The BMC links to a main processor and other onboard elements via a simple serial bus. Baseboard management contr
Millions of LinkedIn Users at Risk of Man-in-the-Middle Attack

Millions of LinkedIn Users at Risk of Man-in-the-Middle Attack

Jun 19, 2014
Two year back in 2012, one of the most popular online social networking sites Linkedin spent between $500,000 and $1 million on forensic work after millions of its users' account passwords were compromised in a major security data breach. But, it seems that the company hasn't learned any lesson from it. WHAT IS MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLE (MitM) ATTACK Before moving on to the story, let us discuss some emerging and common threats against the social networking sites nowadays. If we talk about less publicized but more danger, then Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack is the most common one. By attempting MitM attack, a potential attacker could intercept users' internet communication, steal sensitive information and even hijack sessions. Though MitM attacks are popular and have existed for years, a major categories of today's largest websites and social networking sites still haven't taken the necessary steps to safeguard their users' personal and sensitive data from the vulnerabil
Navigating the Threat Landscape: Understanding Exposure Management, Pentesting, Red Teaming and RBVM

Navigating the Threat Landscape: Understanding Exposure Management, Pentesting, Red Teaming and RBVM

Apr 29, 2024Exposure Management / Attack Surface
It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,
Popular URL Shortener 'Bitly' User Accounts Reportedly Compromised

Popular URL Shortener 'Bitly' User Accounts Reportedly Compromised

May 09, 2014
The famous URL shortening service is facing a data breach . The very popular URL shortening service Bitly, has issued an urgent security warning saying that its users' account credentials may have been compromised, according to a blog post published yesterday. " We have reason to believe that Bitly account credentials have been compromised; specifically, users' email addresses, encrypted passwords, API keys and OAuth tokens ," Bitly CEO Mark Josephson wrote in a blog post . At this point, however, there is no indication that hackers have broken into any user accounts, he said. Bitly was founded in 2008, allows users to shorten links and making it to share on other sites easier for users. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens more than one billion links per month and powers over 10,000 custom short URLs and offers an enterprise analytics platform that helps web publishers and brands grow their social media traffic. Bitly users' acc
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Routers TCP 32764 Backdoor Vulnerability Secretly Re-Activated Again

Routers TCP 32764 Backdoor Vulnerability Secretly Re-Activated Again

Apr 20, 2014
At the beginning of this year, we reported about the secret backdoor 'TCP 32764' discovered in several routers including, Linksys, Netgear, Cisco and Diamond that allowed an attacker to send commands to the vulnerable routers at TCP port 32764 from a command-line shell without being authenticated as the administrator. The Reverse-engineer from France Eloi Vanderbeken , who discovered this backdoor has found that although the flaw has been patched in the latest firmware release, but SerComm has added the same backdoor again in another way. To verify the released patch, recently he downloaded the patched firmware version 1.1.0.55 of Netgear DGN1000 and unpacked it using binwalk tool. He found that the file 'scfgmgr' which contains the backdoor is still present there with a new option " -l ", that limits it only for a local socket interprocess communication (Unix domain socket), or only for the processes running on the same device. On further investigation via reverse en
HeartBleed Bug Explained - 10 Most Frequently Asked Questions

HeartBleed Bug Explained - 10 Most Frequently Asked Questions

Apr 15, 2014
Heartbleed – I think now it's not a new name for you, as every informational website, Media and Security researchers are talking about probably the biggest Internet vulnerability in recent history. It is a critical bug in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension that allows attackers to read portions of the affected server's memory, potentially revealing users data, that the server did not intend to reveal. After the story broke online, websites around the world flooded with the heartbleed articles, explaining how it works, how to protect, and exactly what it is. Yet many didn't get it right. So based on the queries of Internet users, we answered some frequently asked questions about the bug. 1.) IS HEARTBLEED A VIRUS? Absolutely NO, It's not a virus. As described in our previous article , The Heartbleed bug is a vulnerability resided in TLS heartbeat mechanism built into certain versions of the popular open source encryption standard Open
How to Protect yourself from the 'Heartbleed' Bug

How to Protect yourself from the 'Heartbleed' Bug

Apr 10, 2014
Millions of websites, users' passwords, credit card numbers and other personal information may be at risk as a result of the Heartbleed security flaw , a vulnerability in widely used cryptographic library ' OpenSSL '. [ READ DETAILS HERE ] Netcraft survey says that about half a million widely trusted active websites on the internet are vulnerable to the heartbleed bug, which means the information transmitting through hundreds of thousands of websites could be vulnerable, despite the protection offered by encryption techniques. According to Netcraft, " the heartbeat extension was enabled on 17.5% of SSL sites, accounting for around half a million certificates issued by trusted certificate authorities. These certificates are consequently vulnerable to being spoofed (through private key disclosure), allowing an attacker to impersonate the affected websites without raising any browser warnings. " Among the trusted names running OpenSSL is Yahoo!, which has been
How Heartbleed Bug Exposes Your Passwords to Hackers

How Heartbleed Bug Exposes Your Passwords to Hackers

Apr 10, 2014
Are you safe from the critical bug Heartbleed?? OpenSSL- the encryption technology used by millions of websites to encrypt the communication and is also used to protect our sensitive data such as e-mails, passwords or banking information.  But a tiny, but most critical flaw called " Heartbleed " in the widely used OpenSSL opened doors for the cyber criminals to extract sensitive data from the system memory. WHAT IS HEARTBLEED? SSL and TLS are known to provide communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as websites, email, instant messaging (IM), including some virtual private networks (VPNs). Heartbleed is a critical bug ( CVE-2014-0160 ) is in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS (transport layer security protocols) and DTLS ( Datagram TLS ) heartbeat extension (RFC6520). This bug was independently discovered by a team of security enginee
25 Million 'NAVER' Accounts Breached using Stolen Data

25 Million 'NAVER' Accounts Breached using Stolen Data

Mar 27, 2014
A 31-year-old South Korean has been recently accused by the police for the allegation of infiltrating and hacking the accounts of 25 million users of   Naver , one of the popular search portal in South Korea. On Wednesday, the Asian National Police Agency revealed that the suspect purchased the private information of 25 million users, including names, residential numbers, Internet IDs and passwords from a Korean-Chinese, back in August last year, Korea Herald reported. The suspect surnamed  ' Seo ', supposedly used the purchased information to hack into the accounts of Naver users and sent out spam messages and other ' illicit emails ' to the account holders. He had made an illegal profit of some 160 million won ( $148,000 ) using this, according to the report. Also a hacker surnamed  ' Hong ', has been arrested by the police who was suspected to develop the hacking program that automatically enter users' IDs and passwords, which was apparently used by
360 Million Stolen Credential FOR SALE on Underground Black Market

360 Million Stolen Credential FOR SALE on Underground Black Market

Feb 27, 2014
Your Financial Credentials are on SALE on the Underground Black Market without your Knowledge… sounds like a nightmare, but it's TRUE. Cyber security firm, Hold Security, said it has traced over 360 million stolen account credentials that are available for Sale on Hacker's black market websites over past three weeks. The credentials include usernames, email addresses, and passwords that are in unencrypted in most cases, according to the report released on Tuesday. It is not known till now from where these credentials exactly were stolen, but the security researchers estimated that these credentials are a result of multiple breaches. Since the banking credentials are one of the most ' valuable bounties ' for the cyber criminals, and the ways to steal these credentials can be directly from the companies and from the services in which users entrust data as well. According to Hold Security, in addition to the sale of 360 million credentials, the cyber criminals are  s
Ultrasonic Password Security for Google Accounts

Ultrasonic Password Security for Google Accounts

Feb 18, 2014
Does a Strong Password Guarantee you the Security of your Online Account? If yes, then you should once check out our ' Data breaches ' section on the website. A Startup Company,  SlickLogin  has developed a technology that enables you to login into online accounts using Ultrasonic sound, instead of entering username and password on your. The company claims its technology offers " military-grade security " that replaces passwords in the two-step process simply by placing your Phone next to their laptop or tablet. When you sign-in via SlickLogin enabled website, the computer will play a sound which is encrypted into Ultrasonic Sound, inaudible to the human ear, but your Smartphone can hear it. The Smartphone Sends data back to the SlickLogin Servers for authentication and grants immediate access. Each sound is different, unique and cannot be reused to hack an account. Recently, Google has acquired this two month old Israeli Startup, " Today
Crowd-Funding site Kickstarter Hacked! It's time to change your Password

Crowd-Funding site Kickstarter Hacked! It's time to change your Password

Feb 16, 2014
If you have an account at the popular crowd funding site Kickstarter , it's time to change your account's password. Kickstarter's CEO Yancey Strickle r says that the company has been hacked by an unknown hacker earlier this week. Kickstarter said in a blog post that no credit card information was stolen in Data Breach , but users' personal information has been compromised and they also haven't found evidence of unauthorized activities on accounts. Data accessed and stolen by hackers included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords of the users. Facebook usernames and logins were not compromised for those who use that log-in system to get on Kickstarter. According to a Kickstarter's team member, the older users' passwords were encrypted using salted SHA1  and newer users' passwords are encrypted with a stronger hashing algorithm called ' bcrypt '. Hackers could attempt to crack the encrypted pa
Snapchat user accounts vulnerable to Brute-Force Attack

Snapchat user accounts vulnerable to Brute-Force Attack

Feb 11, 2014
Snapchat , a Smartphone application that lets users share snapshots with friends is catching fire among teenagers. It was first hacked in December when 4.6 million Snapchat users were exposed in a database breach. Later, the denial-of-service attack and CAPTCHA Security bypass were discovered by other researchers within last two-three weeks. Snapchat has no Vulnerability Reward Program, but still many penetration testers are working hard and free of cost to make the application more secure by disclosing flaws. Interestingly, this is not the end of vulnerabilities, Mohamed Ramadan , a security researcher with Attack-Secure from Egypt, has spotted a new vulnerability on Snapchat that allow an attacker to brute-force login credentials of the users. Brute-force is a process of trying multiple passwords against a username until you get a correct password. " This vulnerability allows anyone who knows your SnapChat email to brute force your account's password without any
Yahoo Mail hacked; Change your account password immediately

Yahoo Mail hacked; Change your account password immediately

Jan 31, 2014
A really bad year for the world's second-largest email service provider, Yahoo Mail ! The company announced today, ' we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts ', user names and passwords of its email customers have been stolen and are used to access multiple accounts. Yahoo did not say how many accounts have been affected, and neither they are sure about the source of the leaked users' credentials. It appears to have come from a third party database being compromised, and not an infiltration of Yahoo's own servers. " We have no evidence that they were obtained directly from Yahoo's systems. Our ongoing investigation shows that malicious computer software used the list of usernames and passwords to access Yahoo Mail accounts. The information sought in the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected accounts' most recent sent emails. " For now, Yahoo is taking proactive actions t
Malicious Russian Tor Exit Relays Intercepting encrypted Traffic of Facebook Users

Malicious Russian Tor Exit Relays Intercepting encrypted Traffic of Facebook Users

Jan 24, 2014
Tor is one of the best and freely available privacy software that lets people communicate anonymously online through a series of nodes that is designed to provide anonymity for users and bypass Internet censorship. When you use the Tor software, your IP address remains hidden and it appears that your connection is coming from the IP address of a Tor exit relay or nodes , which can be anywhere in the world. An exit relay is the final relay that Tor traffic passes through before it reaches its destination. According to a recent report ' Spoiled Onions: Exposing Malicious Tor Exit Relays ', published by security researchers Phillip Winter and Stefan Lindskog revealed that almost 20 exit relays in the Tor anonymity network that attempted to spy on users' encrypted traffic using man-in-the-middle techniques. Both Researchers spent more than four months studying on the Tor exit nodes using their own scanning software called " exitmap " and detected su
Starbucks' iOS app storing user credentials in plain text

Starbucks' iOS app storing user credentials in plain text

Jan 17, 2014
Watch out, coffee drinkers. If you are one of those 10 million Starbucks customers, who purchases drinks and food directly from their Smartphones, this news is for you! If you use Starbucks' official iOS app, you should know that the company is not encrypting any of your information, including your password. The app allows the Starbucks customers to check their balance, transaction history, fund transfer, and store location, etc. A Security researcher Daniel E. Wood found a vulnerability (CVE-2014-0647) in STARTBUCKS v2.6.1. iOS mobile application, that stores your credential details and GPS locations in plain text format into the file system. To extract the information from the mobile, an attacker just needs to connect the device to a computer and accessing ' session . clslog ' file from the location given below: /Library/Caches/ com . crashlytics . data/ com . starbucks . mystarbucks /session . clslog The vulnerability , however, requires that the hacker has physical
Exclusive: More than 200,000 Algerian TP-LINK Routers are vulnerable to Hackers

Exclusive: More than 200,000 Algerian TP-LINK Routers are vulnerable to Hackers

Jan 16, 2014
More than 15.2% of the Algerian population use Internet service which is provided by around 30 Internet Service Providers and one of the largest shares is served by Algerie Telecom .  Algerie Telecom provides  TP-LINK TD-W8951ND  Router to most of their home customers who Opt-In for Internet services and each of which has ZYXEL embedded firmware installed in it. ABDELLI Nassereddine, penetration tester and Algerian Computer Science Student has reported highly critical unauthorized access and password disclosure vulnerabilities in the Routers provided by Algerie Telecom. He told ' The Hacker News ' that the vulnerabilities can be exploited by any remote hacker just by exploiting a very simple loophole in the firmware. First, he found that an unauthorized access is available to ' Firmware/Romfile Upgrade'  Section on the Router's panel that can be accessed without any login password i.e. https://IP//rpFWUpload.html This page actually allows a user to upgrade
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