website defacement | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

No fewer than 70 websites operated by the Ukrainian government went offline on Friday for hours in what appears to be a coordinated cyber attack amid heightened tensions with Russia. "As a result of a massive cyber attack, the websites of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a number of other government agencies are temporarily down," Oleg Nikolenko, MFA spokesperson,  tweeted . The Security Service of Ukraine, the country's law-enforcement authority,  alluded  to a possible Russian involvement, pointing fingers at the hacker groups associated with the Russian secret services while branding the intrusions as a supply chain attack that involved hacking the "infrastructure of a commercial company that had access to the rights to administer the web resources affected by the attack." Prior to the update from the SSU, the Ukrainian CERT claimed that the attacks may have exploited a security vulnerability in Laravel-based October CMS ( CVE-2021-32648 ), which cou

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday indicted two hackers for their alleged involvement in defacing several websites in the country following the assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani earlier this January. Behzad Mohammadzadeh (aka Mrb3hz4d), 19, and Marwan Abusrour (aka Mrwn007), 25, have been charged with conspiracy to commit intentional damage to a protected computer for a widespread "cyber-assault" that affected over 1,400 websites with pro-Iranian and pro-Palestinian messages. "The hackers victimized innocent third parties in a campaign to retaliate for the military action that killed Soleimani, a man behind countless acts of terror against Americans and others that the Iranian regime opposed," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers in a statement. The defendants, from Iran and Palestine, respectively, are now wanted by the US authorities and are no longer free to travel outside their countries wi

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

It's one thing for hackers to target websites and proudly announce it on social media platforms for all to see. It's, however, an entirely different thing to leave a digital trail that leads cybersecurity researchers right to their doorsteps. That's exactly what happened in the case of a hacktivist under the name of VandaTheGod, who has been attributed to a series of attacks on government websites since July 2019. In a report shared with The Hacker News, researchers from Check Point said they were able to map VandaTheGod's activity over the years, and eventually zero down the attacker's real identity to a Brazilian individual from the city of Uberlândia. The cybersecurity firm said it notified concerned law enforcement of its findings for further action, adding the social media activities on profiles associated with VandaTheGod came to a halt towards the end of 2019. A Long Social Media Trail VandaTheGod has a long history of going after government we

Matrix—the organization behind an open source project that offers a protocol for secure and decentralized real-time communication—has suffered a massive cyber attack after unknown attackers gained access to the servers hosting its official website and data. Hackers defaced Matrix's website, and also stole unencrypted private messages, password hashes, access tokens, as well as GPG keys the project maintainers used for signing packages. The cyber attack eventually forced the organization to shut down its entire production infrastructure for several hours and log all users out of Matrix.org. So, if you have an account with Matrix.org service and do not have backups of your encryption keys or were not using server-side encryption key backup, unfortunately, you will not be able to read your entire encrypted conversation history. Matrix is an open source end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol that allows anyone to self-host a messaging service on their own servers, powering

OurMine is in headlines once again—this time for defacing WikiLeaks website. The notorious hacking group, OurMine, is known for breaching into high-profile figures and companies' social media accounts, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg , Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey , Google CEO Sundar Pichai , HBO , Game of Thrones and Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN). According to screenshots circulating on Twitter , the official website of WikiLeaks has reportedly been defaced by the OurMine hacking group, who left a message on the site, as shown above. WikiLeaks is a whistleblowing website that since March, has been revealing top CIA hacking secrets under Vault 7 , including the agency's ability to break into different mobile and desktop platforms , security camera live video streams , air-gap computers and many more. There is no indication of WikiLeaks servers and website been compromised, instead it seems their website has been redirected to a hacker-controlled server

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, we reported about how insecure was the mail servers operated by the Trump organization that anyone with little knowledge of computers can expose almost everything about Trump and his campaign. Now, some unknown hackers calling themselves "Pro_Mast3r" managed to deface an official website associated with President Donald Trump's presidential campaign fundraising on Sunday. The hacker, claiming to be from Iraq, reportedly defaced the server, secure2.donaldjtrump.com, which is behind CloudFlare's content management system and security platform. The server appears to be an official Trump campaign server, reported Ars, as the certificate of the server is legitimate, " but a reference to an image on another site is insecure, prompting a warning on Chrome and Firefox that the connection is not secure. " The defaced website displayed an image of a black hat man and included a text message, which reads: Ha