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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on 21st March, the 29-year-old entrepreneur announced submitted his resignation, but earlier this month that he had rescinded his resignation as the company's CEO because it was an April Fool Prank, but unfortunately he supposedly failed to properly withdraw befor

We are already aware about the fact that most probably every mobile app is collecting our data in one or the other form. Thanks to Edward Snowden, who provided the secret documents that revealed that the world's most popular Smartphone applications, including gaming apps such as Angry Birds , are telling the government intelligence agencies (NSA) everything about us. We  reported earlier  that how the government intelligence agencies, such as British intelligence agency GCHQ and U.S. intelligence firm NSA, use popular games to collect users' personal data including their GPS location. Yes, the popular game Angry Bird , which is the top-selling paid mobile application in the United States and Europe for the iPhones, Android and has been downloaded more than a billion times by the devoted game players worldwide, who often spend hours squawking and playing the game.  In fact earlier this month,  CBS 60 Minutes  shows that how Rovio shares users' locations. Recently, t

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,

The respected encryption and network security company RSA Security (now a division of EMC), whose respect was already on stack after revelation by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden  revealed that the NSA created a flawed random number generation system ( Dual_EC_DRBG ), Dual Elliptic Curve, which the most trusted security provider company RSA used in its Bsafe security tool.  Until then RSA wasn't able to come up from this aspersion, a new document by Snowden revealed that RSA received $10 million from NSA for keeping Encryption Weak. Researchers from Johns Hopkins , the University of Wisconsin , the University of Illinois  have claimed that the RSA adopted one more NSA recommended tool called Extended Random extension  for secure websites, which actually helps NSA to crack a version of the Dual Elliptic Curve software tens of thousands of times faster,  Reuters reported. Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator ( Dual EC_DRBG ) is a cryptograph

Another leak from  Edward Snowden files, but this time not about the NSA, rather the documents revealed that France's central intelligence agency, the DGSE has complete and unconditional  access to all of  telecom giant  Orange's data, not just metadata . Yes! It is the same  Orange company who threatened to sue the NSA for hacking into the underwater cable that it jointly owns with 15 other companies. According to the French paper Le Monde -- Orange, the leading telecom company in France with more than 26 million customers worldwide cooperated allegedly illegally for years with France's main intelligence agency. DGSE and Agents with military clearance have been working with Orange for at least 30 years. France has a PRISM like surveillance  program to target phone communications, emails and data from tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo. Furthermore, DGSE is also sharing this data with foreign allies like GCHQ.  The revelations c

I am quite sure that you must be syncing your Smartphone with your Computers for transferring files and taking backup of your device. If you are using windows operating system and Android devices, then it's a bad news for you, because FireEye Security Researchers have identified a new piece of windows malware that can also infects your Android Devices. During an investigation of a targeted attack on a US based financial institution, researchers spotted a new version of Windows Remote Access Trojan (RAT) called ' Win-Spy Software Pro v16 ', a spying and monitoring tool.  WinSpy was embedded in macro documents to kick off a spam campaign via a spear phishing email. " The recent surge in Android-based RATs such as Dendroid and AndroRAT shows a spike in the interest of malicious actors to control mobile devices.  GimmeRAT  is another startling example of malicious actors venturing into the Android ecosystem ," security firm said. The Researchers dubbed the

The US intelligence agency NSA ( National Security Agency ) broke the Silence on the claim that it has reportedly  'infected millions of computers around the world with malware' and that it is 'impersonating U.S. Social media or other websites ', emphasized the claim as inaccurate. The document provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden , analyzed by Glenn Greenwald from  The Intercept claimed that the NSA is spreading surveillance malware on computers and networking devices around the world that are capable to spam out millions of pieces of sophisticated malware at a time on a large scale.  Moreover, the report also claimed that the NSA could silently masquerade as legit websites, such as Facebook, or other sites and therefore intercepting victims' online activities, but the agency denied the claims issuing a statement on Thursday. The statement released by the agency notes: " Recent media reports that allege NSA has infected millions of computers

Besides collecting metadata and inserting backdoor to the devices and softwares, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has an eye on each post, picture, message you have ever sent on Facebook. I know you won't be feeling free considering your privacy, but, this is what the NSA is doing to you. The new revelation from the Glenn Greenwald 's desk remove the mask from one more secret surveillance operation carried out by the US intelligence agency NSA, the extensive program dubbed as ' TURBINE ', according to the classified files provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden . Yes, the NSA, who has been working with its dedicated hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations (TAO) from the past several years on enlarging its caliber to infect devices with spyware and creating its own command-and-control servers to manage millions of infected systems at a time. The secret documents presented by The Intercept  website shows that the NSA with its British counterpart G

Last week, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) ruled the National Security Agency (NSA) to do not keep Internet and phone metadata gathered through bulk surveillance programs longer than five years and destroy them. Judge Reggie Walton said, keeping records for more than 5 years " would further infringe on the privacy interests of United States persons whose telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government ," Later, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy and civil liberties group asked the Court to temporarily hold the destroy orders, saying the records may be used as an evidence in its lawsuits challenging the NSA surveillance . U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, who is overseeing an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA), ruled to stop the destruction of millions of Telephone records collected by the National Security Agency's surveillance program and ruled to safeguard th

U.S. Prosecutors decided not to pursue crucial criminal charges against journalist and activist Barrett Brown , and dismiss a majority of charges related to sharing a link to a dump of credit card numbers connected to the breach of intelligence firm Stratfor. Supporters say Brown just copied the hyperlink from an the Internet chat room and then reposted the link on his own internet chat room, Project PM , that linked to stolen documents from the US government contractor, Stratfor Global Intelligence , included 860,000 e-mail addresses for Stratfor subscribers and 60,000 credit card details. Just hours after Brown's lawyers filed their comprehensive argument, the DOJ has filed a motion to dismiss all 11 charges, on Thursday.  Apart from computer fraud charges, Brown is also facing prosecution for allegedly threatening an FBI agent and for alleged obstruction of justice. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) , a non-profit organization defending civil libertie

Explosive revelations of massive surveillance programs conducted by government agencies by the former contractor Edward Snowden triggered new debate about the security and privacy of each individual who is connected somehow to the Internet and after the Snowden's disclosures they think that by adopting encrypted communications, i.e. SSL enabled websites, over the Internet, they'll be secure. People do care of their privacy and many have already changed some of their online habits, like by using HTTPS instead of HTTP while they are surfing the Internet. However, HTTPS may be secured to run an online store or the eCommerce Web site, but it fails as a privacy tool. The US researchers have found a traffic analysis of ten widely used HTTPS-secured Web sites " exposing personal details, including medical conditions, financial and legal affairs and sexual orientation. " The UC Berkeley researchers Brad Miller, A. D. Joseph and J. D. Tygar and Intel Labs' researchers, Li

With revelations of NSA spying and some of the most jaw-dropping surveillance leaks, many people feel unencrypted and central-server service is bad in most of the cases, but end-to-end encryption can be used to reduce this problem. Worldwide Government surveillance raises privacy concerns and acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook also made us think about the security concern with chat applications as well; though it was not so secure previously. People who care about having their SMS and Instant messages protected from prying eyes, now they can use end-to-end encrypted services, like  TextSecure .  It is a free Android-based messaging app, completly open-source , easy to use and designed with privacy in mind. Encrypting the stored data on the servers is as important as transferring data over an encrypted connection, but the most important factor of the encryption is that ' who has the decryption key '. If the company has the keys, then Government could snoop through your fi

Spying on the world by injecting sophisticated backdoors in software, systems, and mobile phones, leads to violation of the Privacy and Security of every individual. Yes, we are talking about Surveillance , but this time not about NSA . Instead, Countries including some with poor human-rights records and a much less technically advanced nation are the likely culprits, as they apparently used commercial spyware in making surveillance capabilities that once were the exclusive expertise of the known spy agencies, such as National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ. Citizen lab , a nonprofit research lab has  found traces of a remote hacking tool  in 21 countries , developed by  Hacking Team,  including Ethiopia, Sudan, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia, which the team had already  denied  back in 2013. Hacking Team, also known as HT S.r.l , is an Italian company, which is known for its powerful surveillance software, Remote Code System (RCS) that it sells to Governments and law enforcement

WhatsApp acquisition may have had a negative impact on the reputation of the company, it seems many users are planning to switch the service and a few of them have already done it. In our previous article, we have mentioned that why you should switch from WhatsApp to an encrypted Chat messaging service . Mobile messaging apps often used to deliver sensitive data or used for personal and corporate communications, so the data stored by the service provider should be encrypted end-to-end, which is not yet in the case of WhatsApp. There are many mobile messaging applications like Japan-based  Line , China's  WeChat , Korea-based  KakaoTalk , and Canada's  Kik , India-based  Hike  and many more, but they are not end-to-end encrypted messengers. Time is loudly announcing the need to shift to some alternates which provides end-to-end encryption for communication between two devices and respect your Privacy. There are a number of solutions available includes -  Telegram,  Surespot

The US Government has allotted a large share of its ' Black Budget ' for secret military research and weapons programs, along with surveillance programs, that is harvesting hundreds of millions of Metadata from emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else around the world. To make this happen, NSA has used a number of unethical ways, but labeled as legal solutions.  Today, on February 11th, we all unite to fight against the Government intrusion on the privacy of innocent people worldwide, under one banner of ' The Day We Fight Back ', along with other 7000 websites by hosting a large banner at the bottom of the websites; reading " Dear Internet, we're standing with 300+ nonprofits worldwide in demanding an end to mass, suspicionless surveillance ", asking people of the world to vote against proposed NSA reforms that the American Civil Liberties Union has labeled " Bad for Privacy ". The Banner, you can see at the bottom of this page, e

National Security Agency (NSA) – the one that had ruled over the privacy of the entire world from countries to individuals, the one with master access to read anyone's data, intruded into large fiber networks, and can target anyone, at any time, at any place; but lapsed somewhere in protecting its own privacy and security of the confidential data. If I am wrong, then from where did Snowden gets hold over roughly 1.7 million NSA's confidential files in sequence? According to the Intelligence officials who has investigated the insider theft by Snowden, noticed that he had accessed all these documents using some ' web crawler ', a freely available automated tool also known as spiders, which used to search, index and backup a website, " scraped data out of our systems " he said. " We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence ," he added. He used the web crawler tool against NSA 's internal network and 'probably

After the revelation of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden , we all very well knew the impact of it on the world, but nobody would have estimated that the impact will be so worst. The revelation, not only defaced NSA, but also its counterpart GCHQ , and various other governments which were serving them in the world's spying scandal. Now, after various allegations on NSA , Chaos Computer Club (CCC) , one of the oldest and Europe's largest association of hackers, along with the International League for Human Rights (ILMR), has filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor General's office on Monday. The Chaos Computer club accuses the German government of capitulating to UK, US and other government intelligence agencies and their communications surveillance whims. In a press release they said: " We accuse US, British and German secret agents, their supervisors, the German Minister of the Interior as well as the German Chancellor of illegal and prohibi