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Two critical zero-day vulnerabilities have been discovered in the world's 2nd most popular database management software MySQL that could allow an attacker to take full control over the database. Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski has discovered two zero-days, CVE-2016-6662 and CVE-2016-6663, that affect all currently supported MySQL versions as well as its forked such as MariaDB and PerconaDB. Golunski further went on to publish details and a proof-of-concept exploit code for CVE-2016-6662 after informing Oracle of both issues, along with vendors of MariaDB and PerconaDB. Both MariaDB and PerconaDB had fixed the vulnerabilities, but Oracle had not. The vulnerability (CVE-2016-6662) can be exploited by hackers to inject malicious settings into MySQL configuration files or create their own malicious ones. Exploitation Vector The above flaw could be exploited either via SQL Injection or by hackers with authenticated access to MySQL database (via a network conne

Cyber attacks get bigger, smarter, more damaging. P*rnHub launched its bug bounty program two months ago to encourage hackers and bug bounty hunters to find and responsibly report flaws in its services and get rewarded. Now, it turns out that the world's most popular p*rn*graphy site has paid its first bounty payout. But how much? US $20,000! Yes,  P*rnHub  has paid $20,000 bug bounty to a team of three researchers, who gained Remote Code Execution (RCE) capability on its servers using a zero-day vulnerability in PHP – the programming language that powers  P*rnHub 's website. The team of three researchers, Dario Weißer (@haxonaut), cutz and Ruslan Habalov (@evonide), discovered two use-after-free vulnerabilities ( CVE-2016-5771/CVE-2016-5773 ) in PHP's garbage collection algorithm when it interacts with other PHP objects. One of those is PHP's unserialize function on the website that handles data uploaded by users, like hot pictures, on multiple paths,

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

Just yesterday, I wrote a warning article announcing that Drupal – the popular open source content management system – will release patches for several highly critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) bugs that could allow attackers to fully take over any affected site. Below are the three separate Drupal modules that affect up to 10,000 websites: 1. RESTful Web Services – a popular module used for creating REST APIs, which is currently installed on at least 5,804 websites. The vulnerability in RESTWS alters the default page callbacks for entities to provide additional functionality, allowing attackers to "send specially crafted requests resulting in arbitrary PHP execution." Since anonymous users can exploit this vulnerability and there isn't any mitigating factor, users are advised to patch their websites as soon as possible. Admins using RESTful Web Services versions 7.x-2.x prior to 7.x-2.6 and versions 7.x-1.x prior to 7.x-1.7 for their Drupal websites are

The extraordinary ' Panama Papers leak ' from Law firm Mossack Fonseca that exposed the tax-avoiding efforts by the world's richest and most influential members was initially believed to be the result of an unpatched vulnerability in the popular content management systems: Drupal and WordPress. Now, we are quite sure that the Panama Papers, which implicated 72 current and former heads of state, was due to vulnerabilities in Drupal and WordPress that allowed hackers to get into the law firm's system and stole over 11.5 Million files (around 2.6 Terabytes of data). The Drupal Security Team has announced that critical patches to address several security issues in Drupal contributed modules, including several highly critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, will be released today at 16:00 UTC. According to an advisory, the critical arbitrary remote PHP code execution vulnerability ( PSA-2016-001 ) affects up to 10000 Drupal websites. However, "Drupal c

Mozilla has filed a brief with a U.S. District Court asking the FBI to disclose the potential vulnerabilities in its Firefox browser that the agency exploited to unmask TOR users in a criminal investigation. Last year, the FBI used a zero-day flaw to hack TOR browser and de-anonymize users visiting child sex websites. Now, Mozilla is requesting the government to ask the FBI about the details of the hack so that it can ensure the security of its Firefox browser. TOR is an anonymity software that provides a safe haven to human rights activists, government, journalists but also is a place where drugs, child pornography, assassins for hire and other illegal activities has allegedly been traded. TOR Browser Bundle is basically an Internet browser based on Mozilla Firefox configured to protect the user's anonymity via Tor and Vidalia. In 2015, the FBI seized computer servers running the world's largest dark web child pornography site 'Playpen' from a web host in Lenoir, No

With the growing number of cyber attacks and data breaches, a significant number of companies and organizations have started Bug Bounty Programs to encourage hackers and security researchers to find and responsibly report bugs in their services and get a reward. Now, even pornography sites are starting to embrace bug bounty practices in order to safeguard its user's security. The world's most popular pornography site PornHub has launched a bug bounty program for security researchers and bug hunters who can find and report security vulnerabilities in its website. Partnered with HackerOne, PornHub is offering to pay independent security researchers and bug hunters between $50 and $25,000, depending upon the impact of vulnerabilities they find. Also Read: 10-year-old Boy becomes the youngest Bug Bounty Hacker . HackeOne is a bug bounty startup that operates bug bounty programs for companies including Yahoo, Twitter, Slack, Dropbox, Uber, General Motors – and even th

There is no doubt that data breaches are on the rise. Hardly a day goes without headlines about any significant data breach. According to the latest ' Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2016 ' report published by UK government, two-thirds of the biggest firm in the UK have experienced at least a cyber attacks or data breaches within the past 12 months. Here's today, I am writing about top 4 data breaches reported in last 24 hours, threatened your data privacy and online security. 1. Kiddicare Hacked! 794,000 Accounts Leaked Kiddicare has admitted that the company has suffered a data breach, which led to the theft of sensitive data belonging to 794,000 users, including phone numbers and residential addresses. Kiddicare, company that sells child toys and accessories across the United Kingdom, became aware of the data breach after its customers started receiving suspicious text messages – most likely part of a phishing campaign – that attempted to pilfer them to click on a li

A security researcher responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in the poorly secured web domains of a Florida county elections, but he ended up in handcuffs on criminal hacking charges and jailed for six hours Wednesday. Security researcher David Michael Levin, 31, of Estero, Florida was charged with three counts of gaining unauthorized access to a computer, network, or electronic instrument. On 19 December last year, Levin tested the security of Lee County website and found a critical SQL injection vulnerability in it, which allowed him to access site's database, including username and password. Levin was reportedly using a free SQL testing software called Havij for testing SQL vulnerabilities on the state elections website. According to Levin, he responsibly reported vulnerabilities to the respective authorities and helped them to patch all loopholes in the elections website. Video Demonstration of the Elections Website Hack Meanwhile, Levin demonstrates his finding via

A serious zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in ImageMagick , a widely popular software tool used by a large number of websites to process user's photos, which could allow hackers to execute malicious code remotely on servers. ImageMagick is an open-source image processing library that lets users resize, scale, crop, watermarking and tweak images. The ImageMagick tool is supported by many programming languages, including Perl, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby and is being deployed by Millions of websites, blogs, social media platforms, and popular content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Drupal. Slack security engineer Ryan Huber disclosed a zero-day flaw (CVE-2016–3714) in the ImageMagick image processing library that allows a hacker to execute malicious code on a Web server by uploading maliciously-crafted image. For example, by uploading a booby-trapped selfie to a web service that uses ImageMagick, an attacker can execute malicious code on the website&#

How to Hack Facebook? That's the most commonly asked question during this decade. It's a hacker dream to hack Facebook website for earning bug bounty or for any malicious purpose. Facebook security team recently found that someone, probably a blackhat hacker with malicious intent, has breached into its server and installed a backdoor that was configured to steal Facebook employees' login credentials. Since the backdoor discovered in the Facebook's corporate server, not on its main server, Facebook user accounts are not affected by this incident. Though the company would have never known about the backdoor if a whitehat hacker had never spotted the backdoor script while hunting for vulnerabilities. Also Read: Ever Wondered How Facebook Decides, How much Bounty Should be Paid? Security researcher Orange Tsai of Taiwanese security vendor DEVCORE accidentally came across a backdoor script on one of Facebook's corporate servers while finding bugs to earn cash reward fr

Former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys , who was convicted last year of helping the Anonymous group of hackers, has been sentenced to 24 months in prison for computer hacking charges. Keys was found guilty last year in October of giving Anonymous login credentials that allowed the group to deface the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Media-owned newspaper, back in 2013. After leaving the job at Tribune Company-owned Sacramento KTXL Fox 40 in 2010, Keys posted login credentials for the company's content management system (CMS) on a chatroom where hacking collective Anonymous planned out their operations. The hacking collective then logged into the CMS and defaced an LA Times article that remained defaced for about 40 minutes before a journalist noticed and changed it back – though Keys still denies all allegations. Keys faced a possible sentence of up to 25 years for three counts of hacking charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Although the US Attorne

Are you also the one who downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th? You may have been Infected! Linux Mint is one of the best and popular Linux distros available today, but if you have downloaded and installed the operating system recently you might have done so using a malicious ISO image. Here's why: Last night, Some unknown hacker or group of hackers had managed to hack into the Linux Mint website and replaced the download links on the site that pointed to one of their servers offering a malicious ISO images for the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon Edition . "Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it," the head of Linux Mint project Clement Lefebvre said in a surprising announcement dated February 21, 2016. Who are affected? As far as the Linux Mint team knows, the issue only affects the one edition, and that is Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition. The situation happened last night, s

That's a lot of Login credentials fetch by a single hacker. The FBI believes a single hacker who goes by the moniker Mr.Grey has stolen login credentials for over 1.2 Billion online accounts – apparently the biggest heist of log-in credentials the FBI has investigated thus far. Yeah, that's not Fifty, but 1.2 Billion Shades of Grey . The information came from the court documents the federal agents submitted to support its search warrant request in 2014, Reuters reported . The cyber security firm ' Hold Security ' initially reported the theft of the credentials last year. It found out that Russian hacking group CyberVor has stolen 1.2 Billion login details and an additional 500 Million email accounts. Botnet Breach These data were said to have been harvested from over 420,000 websites via botnets looking for SQL injection flaws ; the same technique recently used to hack TalkTalk . Botnets are usually employed to attack an individual targ

Joomla – one of the most popular open source Content Management System (CMS) software packages, has reportedly patched three critical vulnerabilities in its software. The flaws, exist in the Joomla version 3.2 to 3.4.4, include SQL injection vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to take admin privileges on most customer websites. The patch was an upgrade to Joomla version 3.4.5  and only contained security fixes. The vulnerability, discovered by Trustwave SpiderLabs researcher Asaf Orpani and Netanel Rubin of PerimeterX, could be exploited to attack a website with SQL injections. SQL injection ( SQLi ) is an injection attack wherein a bad actor can inject/insert malicious SQL commands/query (malicious payloads) through the input data from the client to the application. The vulnerability is one of the oldest, most powerful and most dangerous flaw that could affect any website or web application that uses an SQL-based database. The recent SQLi in Jooml

Bitcoin Cloud Mining service Cloudminr.io has been hacked and its whole users database is on sale for 1 Bitcoin . The unknown hackers have successfully taken full control of the website's server and defaced the homepage of the website. Users visiting the website are greeted with a defaced homepage showing the partial database of around 1000 clients including their usernames and unencrypted passwords in completely plain text format. This clearly indicates that the company is not following the best security practices to secure their users private data as the passwords were not even hashed before storing into the database. Hackers offering around 80,000 users database for 1BTC The database of 1000 users shown on the website homepage is just a sample given by the hackers while they have compromised around 80,000 users database in total from the cloud mining service. The hackers are offering the entire database of thousands of users for the just 1BTC , w

Gaana.com -- One of India's most popular music streaming service with more than 10 Million registered users and 7.5 Million monthly visitors -- has reportedly been hacked, exposing the site's user information database. A Pakistani hacker, who claimed responsibility for the hack, claims that details of over 10 Million users of Gaana service including their username, email addresses, MD5-encrypted password, date of births, and other personal information has been stolen and made available in a searchable database. At the time of writing, Gaana website is currently down for maintenance without any official statement provided yet. As of now, the site displays, "Site is down due to server maintenance. We will be back shortly. Kindly bear with us till then." Details of 10 Million Users Available in a Searchable Database: The hacker, nicknamed Mak Man , posted the link to a searchable database of Gaana user details on his Facebook page, with images of t

Drupal , one of the widely used open source content management system is recommending its users to update their software to the latest versions 6.35 and 7.35 after the company discovered two moderately critical vulnerabilities that may allow an attacker to hack Drupal websites. According to a security advisory published yesterday, a flaw found in the Drupal core could allow a potential hacker under certain circumstances to bypass security restrictions by forging the password reset URLs. ACCESS BYPASS / PASSWORD RESET URLs VULNERABILITY Successful exploitation of this Access Bypass vulnerability could leverage the hacker to gain unauthorized access to user accounts without knowing their password. This vulnerability is considered as moderately critical in which an attacker can remotely trick a registered user of Drupal based website, such as an administrator, into launching a maliciously crafted URL in an attempt to take control of the target server. AFFECTED DRUPA

About two weeks back, over 40,000 organizations running MongoDB were found unprotected and vulnerable to hackers. Now, once again the users of MongoDB database are at risk because of a critical zero-day vulnerability making rounds in underground market. MongoDB , one of the leading NoSQL databases, is an open-source database used by companies of all sizes, across all industries for a wide variety of applications. By leveraging in-memory computing, MongoDB provides high performance for both reads and writes. 'PhPMoAdmin' ZERO-DAY VULNERABILITY Hacker known by the online moniker, "sp1nlock" has found a zero-day vulnerability in ' phpMoAdmin ', a free, open-source, written in PHP, AJAX-based MongoDB GUI (graphical user interface) administration tool that allows you to easily manage noSQL database MongoDB. According to multiple posts available on the exploit selling underground forums, the phpMoAdmin is vulnerable to a Zero-Day Remote Code Exec

Hackers claiming affiliation with the hacktivist group "Anonymous" have allegedly leaked more than 13,000 username and password combinations for some of the worlds most popular websites, including Amazon, Xbox Live and Playstation Network . The stolen personal information was released in a massive text document posted to the Internet file-sharing website Ghostbin  (now deleted) , on Friday. The document contains a huge number of usernames and passwords, along with credit card numbers and expiration dates. The news came just a day after the hacker group Lizard Squad compromised Sony's Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox Live gaming networks on Christmas day, which is estimated to have affected Xbox's 48 million subscribers and PlayStation's 110 million users, making it a total of more than 150 million users worldwide. However, data breach of 13,000 users is not the biggest data breach we've ever seen. When millions of passwords are used for sites ar

Surprisingly, from yesterday a cartoon picture of the supreme leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) named Kim Jong-un appearing on The Pirate Bay website 's homepage, but WHY? At the beginning of this month, The Pirate Bay — an infamous Torrent website predominantly used to share copyrighted material such as films, TV shows and music files, free of charge — went dark from the internet during a raid operation carried out by Swedish Police. However, a number of clones and rumors of rebirths of the infamous The Pirate Bay (TPB) appeared online, but the official domain of The Pirate Bay ( ThePirateBay.se ) remained inaccessible, until last week. ThePirateBay.se , the official domain of TPB returned to life, but without an archive of torrent files and now showing a ticking clock, with the Jolly Roger (skull and crossbones Pirate flag) waving in the background, and an image with apparently random characters with the filename AES.png , hintin