surveillance | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Sometimes we wonder that how the National Security Agency ( NSA ) reached such a wide range of its Surveillance operation across the world – which you can measure from several secret documents released by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. This hell parameter of the NSA's operation was not reached by its agents sitting in the NSA headquarter in United States, but by its undercover agents working in foreign companies based in China, Germany, and South Korea to infiltrate and compromise foreign networks and devices, according to documents obtained by The Intercept . NSA INTERCEPTING FOREIGN NETWORKS AND DATA CENTRES The latest document from the Snowden's desk talks about a program called " physical subversion ," under which the NSA's undercover operatives were infiltrating foreign networks to acquire sensitive data and access to systems in the global communications industry and possibly even some American firms. The document describes the details regarding vario

This week Microsoft announced the next version of its Operating system, dubbed WIndows 10, providing Windows 10 Technical Preview release under its " Insider Program " in order to collect feedback from users and help shape the final version of the operating system, but something really went WRONG! " Inside Microsoft's Insider Program you'll get all the latest Windows preview builds as soon as they're available. In return, we want to know what you think. You'll get an easy-to-use app to give us your feedback, which will help guide us along the way ." Microsoft website reads . Well, how many of you actually read the " Terms of Service " and " Privacy Policy " documents before downloading the Preview release of Windows 10? I guess none of you, because most computer users have habit of ignoring that lengthy paragraphs and simply click " I Agree " and then " next ", which is not at all a good practise. Also Read:   Deep Web Search Engines .

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

Users might have praised the technology companies for efforts to encrypt their latest devices that would prevent law enforcement agencies' hands on users' private data, but the FBI is not at all happy with Apple and Google right now. The Federal Bureau of Investigation director, James Comey , said Thursday he was " very concerned " over Apple and Google using stronger or full encryption in their Smartphones and Tablets that makes it impossible for law enforcement to collar criminals. According to Comey, the Silicon Valley tech giants are "marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law." " There will come a day – well it comes every day in this business – when it will matter a great, great deal to the lives of people of all kinds that we be able to with judicial authorization gain access to a kidnapper's or a terrorist or a criminal's device, " Comey told reporters . " I just want to make sure we

Since we are living in an era of Mass surveillance conducted by Government as well as private sector industries, and with the boom in surveillance technology, we should be much worried about our privacy. According to the companies that create surveillance solutions for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the surveillance tools are only for governments. But, reality is much more disappointing. These surveillance industries are so poorly regulated and exceedingly secretive that their tools can easily make their way into the hands of repressive organizations. Private surveillance vendors sell surveillance tools to governments around the world, that allows cellular networks to collect records about users in an effort to offer substantial cellular service to the agencies. Wherever the user is, it pinpoint the target's location to keep every track of users who own a cellphone — here or abroad. We ourselves give them an open invitation as we all have sensors in our

Yahoo! has broke its silence and explained why it handed over its users' data to United States federal officials, thereby promising to expose those court documents which ordered the snooping. The US government threatened Internet giant with a $250,000 fine per day several years ago if it failed to comply with National Security Agency 's notorious PRISM Surveillance program, according to unclassified court documents released by Yahoo! on Thursday. " The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the US Government's surveillance efforts ," the company's general counsel Ron Bell said on Yahoo's Tumblr page . " At one point, the US Government threatened the imposition of $250,000 in fines per day if we refused to comply. " The documents released by Yahoo! shed new lights on the NSA's secret surveillance program PRISM, which was previously leaked from the agency's confidential documents provided by Global su

So far, we all are well aware of the fact that Chinese have had a past filled with cases of Cyber Crime. China is the world's largest exporter of IT goods, but it has been criticized by many countries due to suspected backdoors in its products, including United States which has banned its several major government departments, including NASA, Justice and Commerce Departments, from purchasing Chinese products and computer technology. The new exposure indicates the same. Chinese Government is running a man-in-the-middle (MitM) cyber attack campaign on SSL encrypted traffic between the country's education network and Google. In an effort to monitor its users of China Education and Research Network (CERNET) , Chinese authorities has started intercepting encrypted traffic to and from Google's servers, the non-profit organization GreatFire reported on Thursday. However, just like many other foreign websites, Google is blocked in China. Because Google is one of the vast and v

The United States National Security Agency ( NSA ) is using a massive information sharing platform that allows multiple law enforcement agencies to infiltrate more than 850 billion communications records detailing e-mails, phone calls, instant messages, and phone geolocation, according to the classified documents disclosed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA has built ICREACH, a Google-like search engine that secretly provides data — metadata of both foreigners and citizens on US soil — to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies, including the DEA, FBI, and CIA, The Intercept reported . Many of those surveilled data had not been accused of any illegal activity as well. But until now, it is unclear that exact what mechanism was used by the US intelligence agency to share the massive amounts of surveillance data, as well as number of government agencies it was sharing information with. Although, the classified documents show that the FBI and the D

The United States National Intelligence Agency ( NSA ) or the largest Internet giant Google - According to you, which one is the worse? NSA? But, according to the popular Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch ( @rupertmurdoch ), Google is worse than the NSA. Murdoch, founder of global media holding company News Corporation - the world's second-largest media conglomerate, currently lives in Australia and is once more making the sort of news he'd prefer to be remembered for. The 83-year old tweeted on Sunday, in which he labeled Google worse than the National Security Agency (NSA). The missive was as follows: " NSA privacy invasion bad, but nothing compared to Google. " NSA privacy invasion bad, but nothing compared to Google. — Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) August 17, 2014 In past, Murdoch accused Google of stealing the content of his newspapers (yet never putting in place a robots.txt file that would prevent search engines crawling it) and has always criticis

After the allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency ( NSA ) not only conducted mass surveillance on German citizens, but also spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's own personal mobile phone for years, surveillance has become a big issue for Germany. So big, that Germany itself started spying on U.S. According to the reports came from the German media on Friday, the German foreign intelligence agency known as Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) hacked into at least one call during Hillary Clinton's time in office as US Secretary of State. However, the time and location have not been disclosed, but Clinton's phone calls were interrupted during her phone conversations, according to the joint investigation done by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and German regional public broadcasters NDR and WDR. Although, after the story broke, some sources from the German government have denied the allegations of Clinton's phone calls interception and said that t

Majority of my articles are related to government spying, privacy and security issues of your online stuffs and also measures that you can adopt in protecting yourself from being spied on. But, your all efforts will soon be of no use - someone is about to secretly track your every footstep. Google will soon get an eye in the space that will be enough powerful to see your face, thanks to the new satellite, WorldView-3 satellite, which is scheduled to launch later today (11:30 a.m. PST) from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base atop an Atlas 5 rocket by Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services, according to Motherboard . DIGITAL EYE IN SPACE WorldView-3 satellite is developed by a US-based company DigitalGlobe , one of the world's leading global content providers of high-resolution earth imagery, supplying most online mapping services to the US government and NASA. The satellite contains : Exelis-built 1.1 meter aperture telescope  Primary visible/SWIR sensor B

The ultra secure NSA-Proof Blackphone titled as, " world's first Smartphone which places privacy and control directly in the hands of its users, " has been rooted within 5 minutes at the BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas this weekend. Blackphone , a joint venture between encrypted communications firm Silent Circle and Spanish Smartphone maker Geeksphone , has a fully customized version of Android known as PrivatOS and pre-installed with lots of privacy-enabled applications, which claims to offer its users a high-end security at consumer level. A security researcher with twitter handle @TeamAndIRC took only 5 minutes to achieve root access on the Blackphone without having the need to unlock the device' bootloader. The hacker even mocked Blackphone's team by saying that "It is apparent no one ran CTS [ compatibility test suite ] on this device." The so-called " secure " Android phone that was promising security given the fact that its basically a suite of secure

FinFisher spyware, a spyware application used by government and law enforcement agencies for the purpose of surveillance, appears to have been hacked earlier this week and a string of files has been dumped on the Internet. The highly secret surveillance software called " FinFisher " sold by British company Gamma International can secretly monitors computers by turning ON webcams, recording everything the user types with a keylogger, and intercepting Skype calls, copying files, and much more. A hacker has claimed on Reddit and Twitter that they'd infiltrated the network of one of the world's top surveillance & motoring technology company Gamma International, creator of FinFisher spyware, and has exposed 40GB of internal data detailing the operations and effectiveness of the FinFisher suite of surveillance platforms. The leaked information was published both on a parody Gamma Group Twitter account ( @GammaGroupPR ) and Reditt by the hacker that began publishi

Just few days after the announcement that Russian government will pay almost 4 million ruble (approximately equal to $111,000) to the one who can devise a reliable technology to decrypt data sent over the Tor , now the government wants something which is really tough. APPLE & SAP, HAND OVER YOUR SOURCE CODES Russian government has asked Apple to provide the access to the company's source code in an effort to assure its iOS devices and Macintoshes aren't vulnerable to spying. Not just this, the government has demanded the same from SAP as well, which is an enterprise software that manages business operations and customer relationships. Russia proposed this idea last Tuesday when Communications Minister Nikolai Nikiforov met SAP's Russian managing director Vyacheslav Orekhov , and Apple's Russian general manager Peter Engrob Nielsen, and suggested that both the companies give Russian government access to their source code. APPLE iOS BACKDOOR CONTROVERSIES The idea

A well known iPhone hacker and forensic scientist has unearthed a range of undocumented and hidden functions in Apple iOS mobile operating system that make it possible for a hacker to completely bypass the backup encryption on iOS devices and can steal large amounts of users' personal data without entering passwords or personal identification numbers. Data forensics expert named Jonathan Zdziarski has posted the slides ( PDF ) titled " Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices " showing his findings, from his talk at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference held in New York on Friday. Jonathan Zdziarski, better identified as the hacker " NerveGas " in the iPhone development community, worked as dev-team member on many of the early iOS jailbreaks and is also the author of five iOS-related O'Reilly books including " Hacking and Securing iOS Applications ." The results of his overall research on the iOS

The 31-year-old former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has warned that during surveillance, among other things, NSA system administrators also intercepted and routinely passed the photos of people in "sexually compromising" situations among other NSA employees. In a video interview, NSA whistleblower speaks with the Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and reporter Ewen MacAskill in Moscow, which was then published by the Guardian on Thursday. WOOOH!! ATTRACTIVE NUDIE PICS - PASS IT ON TO BILL TOO " You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old. They've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records, " he said in the video interview. " During the course of their daily work they stumble upon something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense – for example, an intimate photo of someone o

Botnets - a secretly compromised networks of ordinary home and office computers with rogue software or "malware" that are controlled by an individual criminal or a group - has dramatically increased over the past several years and are considered to pose the biggest threat to the Internet. Cyber criminals have brushed-up their hacking skills and are using Botnets as a cyber weapon to carry out multiple crimes like DDoS attacks (distributed denial of service), mass spamming, page rank and advertising revenue manipulation, mining bitcoins, cyber espionage and surveillance etc. 18 BOTNET INFECTIONS PER SECOND According to the director of FBI's cyber division, Joseph Demarest, Botnet has become one of the biggest enemies of the Internet today, and therefore its impact has been significant. Yesterday during a hearing before a U.S. Senate committee, he says that every second 18 computers worldwide are part of botnet armies, which amounts to over 500 million comp