social engineering | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

It seems like the new American President's Twitter account could easily be hacked due to security blunders he made with the most powerful Twitter account in the world, experts warned. Days after we got to know that the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump was still using his old, insecure Android smartphone, it has now been revealed that the official @POTUS Twitter account was linked to a private Gmail account. Since we are already aware of the potential scandal with government officials using outside email systems following the hack of private e-mail servers of Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush , the choice of using private, non-government email address by Trump has raised serious concerns about the security of the White House's closely watched account. To gain control of the official @POTUS Twitter account, which may or may not is secured with some form of two-factor authentication , all an attacker needs to do is hack the email address associated with the acc

Almost one and a half years ago after the massive leakage of celebrities' photographs — famous as " The Fappening " or "Celebgate" scandal — a man had been charged with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, facing up to 5 years in prison as a result. The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Tuesday that it charged Ryan Collins, 36, of Pennsylvania for illegally accessing the Gmail and iCloud accounts of various celebrities, including Jennifer Lawrence and Kim Kardashian , and leaked their photos onto 4chan. Social Engineering Helped Hacker Stole Celebs' Pics Collins was trapped by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and in the process of the trial, the hacker revealed that… The Fappening did not involve Apple's iCloud services being compromised through password cracking or brute-forcing, but rather it was the result of simple Social Engineering , in the form of Phishing Attacks. Yes, The Fappening scandal was the re

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

For most of us Hacking is Technological in Nature. But, we usually forget the most important element of hacking that makes a successful hack from 10% to over 90%... ... The Human Element . And here the Social Engineering comes in. Social Engineering deals with non-technical kind of intrusion and manipulation that relies heavily on human interaction rather than technology. Social Engineering is popular because the human element is frequently the weakest part of a system and most prone to mistakes. Most businesses and organizations spend a ton of money on the latest shiny technology that promises to fix their security issues while humans are giving hackers the easiest way to get in. Impact of Social Engineering  Social Engineering has been the primary cause of a number of the most high profile cyber-attacks in recent years. The impact of it on an organisation could result in economic loss, loss of Privacy, temporary or permanent Closure, loss of goodwill

Employees are the weakest link when it comes to enterprise security, and unfortunately hackers realized this years ago. All an attacker needs to use some social engineering tactics against employees of companies and organizations they want to target. A massive 91% of successful data breaches at companies started with a social engineering and spear-phishing attack. A phishing attack usually involves an e-mail that manipulates a victim to click on a malicious link that could then expose the victim's computer to a malicious payload. So what is the missing link to manage the problem of employees being Social engineered? The answer is very simple – Educate your Employees and reinforce good security procedures at the same time. Phish your Employees! Yes, you heard me right… by this I mean that you should run a mock phishing campaign in your organization and find out which employees would easily fall victim to the phishing emails. Then step everyone through Internet

We all have been receiving spam phone calls and messages on almost daily basis from scammers who want to pilfer your money and personal information, but a new type of social engineering hack that makes use of just your mobile number to trick you is a little scarier. Security firm Symantec is warning people about a new password recovery scam that tricks users into handing over their webmail account access to the attackers. In order to get into your email account, an attacker does not need any coding or technical skills. All an attacker needs your email address in question and your cell phone number. Since the process to reset the password is almost similar to all mail services, this new password recovery scam affects all popular webmail services including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook among others. Symantec has provided a video explanation of how this new hack attack works. The trick is as simple as it sounds: if you want to reset someone's email account password, all y

Security researchers have uncovered an active cyber attack campaign that has successfully stolen more than $1 Million from a variety of targeted enterprise organizations using spear phishing emails, malware and social engineering tricks. The campaign, dubbed " The Dyre Wolf " by researchers from IBM's Security Intelligence division, targets businesses and organizations that use wire transfers to transfer large sums of money, even if the transaction is protected by 2-factor authentication. A MIXTURE OF MALWARE, SOCIAL ENGINEERING & DDoS Nowadays, cybercriminals not only rely on banking Trojans to harvest financial credentials, but also using sophisticated social engineering tactics to attack big corporations that frequently conduct wire transfers to move large sums. " An experienced and resource-backed [cyber criminal] gang operates Dyre ," John Kuhn, Senior Threat Researcher at IBM Managed Security Service, wrote in a blog post published Th

Lots of Linux distributions are offered free of cost on the Internet by a number of companies, non-commercial organizations and by many individuals as well, and now, the notorious Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has announced their own Linux distribution known as SEANux . A Linux distribution is a coordinated collection of software consisting of a customized version of the kernel together with hundreds of open source (i.e., free) utilities, installers, programming languages and application programs. Some of the most popular distributions are Fedora (formerly Red Hat), SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Tails OS and Mint Linux. SEA (Syrian Electronic Army) is the same group of hackers who made the headlines in past year by launching advance phishing attacks against media organisations, usually Western media outlets. The group is reportedly aligned with president Bashar al-Assad and had purposely targeted social media accounts of a number of high-profile media outlets inclu

If we talk about old days, a hacker often rely on the natural helpfulness as well as weaknesses of people whom he wanted to target. This tactic to break into a computer network by gaining the confidence of an authorized user and get them to reveal information that compromises the network's security is known as Social Engineering . WHAT IS SOCIAL ENGINEERING Social engineering is nothing but a non technical kind of intrusion that relies heavily on human interaction and involves manipulating people so they give up confidential information. Social engineering was very effective those old days as well as today, as major targets are made victims using this old trick only and it is also one of the important components of many types of exploits like: Virus writers use social engineering tactics to persuade people to run malicious email attachments Phishers use social engineering tactics to convince people to disclose their sensitive information such as banking credentia

Scammers have again targeted more than one billion active users of the popular social networking giant Facebook, to infect as many victims as possible. Not by serving fake post, neither by providing malicious video link, instead this time scammers have used a new way of tricking Facebook users into injecting or placing malicious JavaScript or client-side code into their web browsers. This malicious code could allow an attacker to gain access to victims' accounts, thereby using it for fraud, to send spams, and promoting further attacks by posting the scam on timeline to victims' friends. This technique is known as Self Cross-site Scripting or Self XSS. Self-XSS (Self Cross-Site Scripting) scam is a combination of social engineering and a browser vulnerability , basically designed to trick Facebook users' into providing access to their account. Once an attacker or scammer gets access to users' Facebook account, they can even post and comment on things on users' behalf.

Zeus Trojan is one of the most popular families of Banking Trojan, which was also used in a targeted malware campaign against a Salesforce.com customer at the end of the last month and researchers found that the new variant of Zeus Trojan has web crawling capabilities that are used to grab sensitive business data from that customer's CRM instance. 'GameOver' Banking Trojan is also a variant of Zeus financial malware that spreads via phishing emails. GameOver Zeus Trojan makes fraudulent transactions from your bank once installed in your system with the capability to conduct Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack using a botnet , which involves multiple computers flooding the financial institution's server with traffic in an effort to deny legitimate users access to the site. TAREGET - EMPLOYMENT WEBSITES Now, a new variant of GameOver Zeus Trojan has been spotted, targeting users of popular employment websites with social engineering attacks , implemented t

The year begins with the number of new variants of malware that were discovered by various security researchers. The new variants are more complex, sophisticated and mostly undetectable. Two years back in 2012, the FBI warned us about the ' GameOver ' banking Trojan, a variant of Zeus financial malware that spreads via phishing emails. GameOver makes fraudulent transactions from your bank once installed in your system with the capability to conduct Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attack using a botnet, which involves multiple computers flooding the financial institution's server with traffic in an effort to deny legitimate users access to the site. But that wasn't the end; a new variant of the same family of banking Trojan has been discovered by researchers that are being delivered by cyber criminals to users' machines, making it easier for the banking malware to evade detection and steal victim's banking credentials. Malcovery's Gary Warner explains

During a CBS Interview show " 60 Minutes ", The National Security Agency (NSA) officials claimed that China has developed a BIOS based malware that can remotely destroy any computer. Obviously NSA is struggling to repair its image and in an effort to justify their extensive Surveillance programs, The NSA Director General Keith Alexander and Information Assurance Director Debora Plunkett made a number of claims. During that interview NSA officials said that they had foiled a malware attack that could have taken down the U.S. economy. " One of our analysts actually saw that the nation state had the intention to develop and to deliver, to actually use this capability to destroy computers ," Plunkett said. They have mentioned that this malware was distributed via social engineering and targeted emails, although the NSA director mentioned that their researchers worked with computer manufacturers and able to close the respective vulnerability . " This is t

A phishing attack is a complex combination of technology and psychology. There are numerous ways in which people are being made fools and they can be conned by hitting on unsecured website links. Sophos experts detected this week an intriguing case of phishing against the Italian postal service Poste Italiane , the scheme attracted the researcher's attention due the reuse of an old social engineering trick. The brand Poste Italiane includes postal, Financial and payment services in its product portfolio and was considered top brand victims by recent F-Secure Threat report. The number of attacks against Poste Italiane is remarkable, the purpose is always to induce its customers into unwittingly submitting their credentials to fake login sites. In the recent attack criminals sent the classic email containing an HTML attachment which the recipient is enticed into opening. " To activate the "Security web Postepay " you need to : - Downlo

IT Security is the name of the game and no matter how big or small the size of your organization, you will always invest enough on securing certain aspects of your IT network. In many organizations, it starts with monitoring your network for vulnerabilities that may enter the network to access potentially sensitive information in the form of security attacks . For example, you may have firewalls as your first line of defense, followed by vulnerability management, intrusion detection and prevention systems, managing your network configurations and so on.  These are crucial because: Your routers can be easily breached without proper configuration and restrictions.  If a firewall isn't configured correctly, a hacker can easily spot a port that is accidentally left open and can gain access to the network.  Rogue access points, botnet malware and social engineering can make your wireless a porthole into your LAN. Why Logs? The very purpose of IT security is to be

A Russian Exploit writer and underground Hacker who goes by the handle " fil9 " put up an Android Firefox Zero-Day Exploit for Sale in an open Exploit Market. Author claims a Zero Day vulnerability in Firefox for Android, which works on Firefox versions 23/24/26 (Nightly). The advertisement was spotted by Joshua, Malware Intelligence Analyst at Malwarebytes. Hacker Selling exploit with a starting price of $460 only. According to the proof of concept video uploaded by the Hacker, the exploit forces the mobile Firefox browser to download and execute a malicious app, on just visiting a malicious link only. What's worrisome is that many major websites are compromised frequently and a large number of visitors of those hacked sites can fall victim to this attack. " The biggest problem in this situation is that Firefox automatically executes certain known files once they're downloaded, and doesn't give users an option to disable this. Without some sort of

A dangerous variant of the Ramnit malware has been discovered targeting the UK's financial sector. Trusteer claims to have discovered an interesting trojan based attack technique that injects highly convincing and interactive real-time messages into the user Web stream that they encounter when logging into a UK online banking session. The Ramnit worm was discovered in 2010, but in 2011 researchers spotted a new strain that had incorporated source code from the notorious Zeus banking trojan. Cyber criminals are stepping up their use of social engineering techniques to bypass increasingly security-aware users of online banking and e-commerce sites.   The malware reportedly avoids detection by going into an idle sleep mode until its intended victim logs into their online bank account, at which point it activates and presents them with a fraudulent phishing message. Ramnit circumvented the OTP feature at the target bank using a 'Man in the Browser' attack to in

You can install the industry's strongest and most expensive firewall. You can educate employees about basic security procedures and the importance of choosing strong passwords. You can even lock-down the server room, but how do you protect a company from the threat of social engineering attacks? For any of you that are involved in security awareness efforts, you know what I am talking about. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen today or it might already have happened. In a recent disclosure  posted by renowned hacker and developer  DarkCoderSc (Jean-Pierre LESUEUR) explained that how one can easily Socially Engineer Microsoft Skype Support team to get access to any skype account. From a social engineering perspective, employees are the weak link in the chain of security measures in place. He simply used the weakness of Skype password recovery system itself. One simply need to request a new password to Skype support and asking to change the password. After  

Customer service software provider Zendesk announced a security breach, that affected three major Zendesk clients i.e Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter and allowed hackers into their systems. The hacks come just days after Apple , Twitter and Facebook revealed that their employees computers fell victim to unauthorized access. The company believes the hacker downloaded the email addresses of Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest customers who attempted to get support from the companies.  Stolen information might be exploited via social-engineering attacks. " Our ongoing investigation indicates that the hacker had access to the support information that three of our customers store on our system. We believe that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who contacted those three customers for support, as well as support email subject lines. We notified our affected customers immediately and are working with them to assist in their response. " Zendesk discov