social networks | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Exclusive — If you have an account on Taringa , also known as "The Latin American Reddit," your account details may have compromised in a massive data breach that leaked login details of almost all of its over 28 million users. Taringa is a popluar social network geared toward Latin American users, who create and share thousands of posts every day on general interest topics like life hacks, tutorials, recipes, reviews, and art. The Hacker News has been informed by LeakBase , a breach notification service, who has obtained a copy of the hacked database containing details on 28,722,877 accounts, which includes usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords for Taringa users. The hashed passwords use an ageing algorithm called MD5 – which has been considered outdated even before 2012 – that can easily be cracked, making Taringa users open to hackers. Wanna know how weak is MD5?, LeakBase team has already cracked 93.79 percent (nearly 27 Million) of hashed passwords s...

Yesterday reports revealed that Pavel Durov , the 29-year-old founder of Russia's most popular social networking site VKontakte (VK) - Russia's Facebook, had been fired from his post of general director of Vkontakte. On monday, Durov said that the social networking site VK is now under the complete control of two close allies of President Vladimir Putin. Publicly announcing his firing on his VK page he said, " In this way, today VKontakte goes under the complete control of Igor Sechin and Alisher Usmanov. Probably, in the Russian context, something like this was inevitable, but I'm happy we lasted seven and a half years. We did a lot. And part of what's been done can't be turned back. " Last Month on 21st March, the 29-year-old entrepreneur announced submitted his resignation, but earlier this month that he had rescinded his resignation as the company's CEO because it was an April Fool Prank, but unfortunately he supposedly failed to properly withdraw befor...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

A multinational security firm ' Raytheon ' has secretly developed software called ' RIOT ', capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future Behavior by mining data from social networking websites. The multi billion dollar company, didn't want its concept video revealed, but the Guardian posted it anyway. Raytheon has not yet sold RIOT to any clients but has been shared with the US government as part of a joint research project to develop a Big Data system capable of surveilling large parts of the population. The software can also pull metadata from pictures taken to pinpoint a user's location when the picture was taken. From this and other location data taken from applications i.e Foursquare, the software can predict future movements of users. The video shows how Riot works on a sample Raytheon staff member, tracking his regular visits to Washington Nationals Park and a local gym. RIOT creates unique profiles from publicly available data, inclu...

Government eavesdropping and security agency GCHQ is developing new tools to sift through them for nuggets of useful data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest. All of these are the source of valuable intelligence that the UK's intelligence agencies want to know about. During a visit to Bletchley Park, UK foreign secretary William Hague launched a 'spy drive' to recruit staff for GCHQ and other intelligence agencies, a National Cipher Challenge for schools, and a £480,000 grant to the home of WW2 code-breaking. " The work involves devising algorithms, testing them and general problem solving in the broad field of language and text processing. This pioneering research work is open to specialist in mathematical/statistics, computational linguists (eg speech recognition and/or language processing) and language engineering ." Job Description explains . " Using data-mining techniques, you will help us to find meaningful patterns and relationships in large ...

Gathering evidence on Facebook has become a standard legal practice, so a social sting operation was inevitable. This method led the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to apprehend a would-be terrorist in Baltimore. An FBI informant initially contacted 21-year-old Antonio Martinez after he publicly posted about his desire for jihad on Facebook earlier this fall, according to AFP. The U.S. Justice Department released a prepared statement that AFP cited: "An affidavit filed in support of the criminal complaint alleges that on September 29, 2010, Martinez publicly posted on his Facebook account a statement calling for violence to stop the oppression of Muslims, and that on October 1, 2010, he publicly posted a message stating that he hates any person who opposes Allah and his prophet." The FBI set Martinez up with a fake car bomb, then apprehended him when he attempted to detonate it remotely. The faux explosive was rigged in a vehicle parked outside a U.S. military recrui...