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In what considered to be the largest system hack in the country's history and a massive attack on the financial sector, several banks in Poland have been infected with malware. What's surprising? The source of the malware infection is their own financial regulator, the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) -- which, ironically, is meant to keep an eye out for the safety and security of financial systems in Poland. During the past week, the security teams at several unnamed Polish banks discovered malicious executables on the workstations of several banks. The KNF confirmed that their internal systems had been compromised by someone " from another country, " although no specifications were provided. After downloads of suspicious files that were infecting various banking systems had been discovered on the regulator's servers, the KNF decided to take down its entire system " in order to secure evidence. " Here's what happened: An

Last week, WordPress patched three security flaws, but just yesterday the company disclosed about a nasty then-secret zero-day vulnerability that let remote unauthorized hackers modify the content of any post or page within a WordPress site. The nasty bug resides in Wordpress REST API that would lead to the creation of two new vulnerabilities: Remote privilege escalation and Content injection bugs. Wordpress is the world's most popular content management system (CMS) used on millions of websites. The CMS recently added and enabled REST API by default on WordPress 4.7.0. Flaw lets Unauthorised Hacker Redirect Visitors to Malicious Exploits The vulnerability is easy to exploit and affects versions 4.7 and 4.7.1 of the Wordpress content management system (CMS), allowing an unauthenticated attacker to modify all pages on unpatched sites and redirect visitors to malicious exploits and a large number of attacks. The vulnerability was discovered and reported by Marc-Alexandr

Follow this real-life network attack simulation, covering 6 steps from Initial Access to Data Exfiltration. See how attackers remain undetected with the simplest tools and why you need multiple choke points in your defense strategy. Surprisingly, most network attacks are not exceptionally sophisticated, technologically advanced, or reliant on zero-day tools that exploit edge-case vulnerabilities. Instead, they often use commonly available tools and exploit multiple vulnerability points. By simulating a real-world network attack, security teams can test their detection systems, ensure they have multiple choke points in place, and demonstrate the value of networking security to leadership. In this article, we demonstrate a real-life attack that could easily occur in many systems. The attack simulation was developed based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, Atomic Red Team,  Cato Networks ' experience in the field, and public threat intel. In the end, we explain why a holistic secur

It's more than two and half years since the discovery of the critical OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability , but the flaw is still alive as it appears that many organizations did not remediate properly to the serious security glitch. It was one of the biggest flaws in the Internet's history that affected the core security of as many as two-thirds of the world's servers i.e. half a million servers at the time of its discovery in April 2014. However, the critical bug still affects more than 199,500 systems even after 2 years and 9 months have already passed, according to a new report published today on Shodan, a search engine that scans for vulnerable devices. Over 199,500 Systems Still Vulnerable to Heartbleed Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160) was a serious bug in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension that allowed attackers to read portions of the affected server's memory, potentially revealing users data that the server isn't intended to re

Former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has been appointed as a cyber security advisor for the President-elect Donald Trump, but it appears that he never actually checked the security defenses of his own company's website. Giuliani is going to head a new Cybersecurity Working group for the President-elect, and "will be sharing his expertise and insight as a trusted friend concerning private sector cyber security problems and emerging solutions developing in the private sector," the Trump's Transition Team announced Thursday. Trump administration has appointed Giuliani after citing his 16 years of experience "providing security solutions in the private sector," but the news met online criticism with many users on Twitter asking: 'What does the former New York mayor know about cyber security?' As the news broke, online users started scanning his website " www.giulianisecurity.com " and found that the site for Giuliani Sec

The company that sells digital forensics and mobile hacking tools to others has itself been hacked. Israeli firm Cellebrite , the popular company that provides digital forensics tools and software to help law enforcement access mobile phones in investigations, has had 900 GB of its data stolen by an unknown hacker. But the hacker has not yet publicly released anything from the stolen data archive, which includes its customer information, user databases, and a massive amount of technical data regarding its hacking tools and products. Instead, attackers are looking for possible opportunities to sell the access to Cellebrite system and data on a few selected IRC chat rooms, the hacker told Joseph Cox, contributor at Motherboard , who was contacted by the hacker and received a copy of the stolen data. Meanwhile, Cellebrite also admitted that it recently experienced "unauthorized access to an external web server," and said that it is "conducting an investigation

Update: A hacker yesterday claimed to have hacked the FBI's website running on Plone CMS, but it seems it wasn't hacked using any zero-day vulnerability in Plone. We contacted Plone security team and updated this story (see below) with official statements. A hacker, using Twitter handle CyberZeist , has claimed to have hacked the FBI's website (fbi.gov) and leaked personal account information of several FBI agents publically. CyberZeist had initially exposed the flaw on 22 December, giving the FBI time to patch the vulnerability in its website's code before making the data public. The hacker exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the Plone CMS , an Open Source Content Management software used by FBI to host its website, and leaked personal data of 155 FBI officials to Pastebin , including their names, passwords, and email accounts. CyberZeist tweeted multiple screenshots as proof of his claims, showing his unauthorized access to server and database files usi

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in PHPMailer , which is one of the most popular open source PHP libraries to send emails used by more than 9 Million users worldwide. Millions of PHP websites and popular open source web applications, including WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, and Joomla comes with PHPMailer library for sending emails using a variety of methods, including SMTP to their users. Discovered by Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers , the critical vulnerability ( CVE-2016-10033 ) allows an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code in the context of the web server and compromise the target web application. "To exploit the vulnerability an attacker could target common website components such as contact/feedback forms, registration forms, password email resets and others that send out emails with the help of a vulnerable version of the PHPMailer class," Golunski writes in the advisory published today. Golunski respo

Indian embassy websites in seven different countries have been hacked, and attackers have leaked personal data, including full name, residential address, email address, passport number and phone number, of Indian citizens living abroad. This incident is extremely worrying because it involves diplomatic personnel working in the embassies that have always been a favorite target of state-sponsored hackers launching cyber espionage campaigns. Security pen-testers who go by the name Kapustkiy and Kasimierz have claimed responsibility for the hack and told The Hacker News that the reason behind the hack was to force administrators to consider the cyber security of their websites seriously. In Pastebin link shared on their Twitter account , the hackers claimed to have hijacked Indian Embassy websites in Switzerland, Italy, Romania, Mali, South Africa, Libya, and Malawi and leaked personal details of hundreds of Indians, including students studying abroad. The pair exploited a si

The hacker group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, who previously claimed to have leaked a portion of the NSA's hacking tools and exploits, is back with a Bang! The Shadow Brokers published more files today, and this time the group dumped a list of foreign servers allegedly compromised by the NSA-linked hacking unit, Equation Group, in various countries to expand its espionage operations. Top 3 Targeted Countries — China, Japan, and Korea The data dump  [ Download / File Password: payus ] that experts believe contains 306 domain names, and 352 IP addresses belong to at least 49 countries. As many as 32 domains of the total were run by educational institutes in China and Taiwan. A few target domains were based in Russia, and at least nine domains include .gov websites. The top 10 targeted countries include China, Japan, Korea, Spain, Germany, India, Taiwan, Mexico, Italy, and Russia. The latest dump has been signed by the same key as the first Shadow Brokers' dump of

2016 is the year of data breaches that has made almost every major companies victims to the cyber attacks, resulting in compromise of over billion of online users accounts. Weebly and Foursquare are the latest victims of the massive data breach, joining the list of "Mega-Breaches" revealed in recent months, including LinkedIn , MySpace , VK.com , Tumblr , Dropbox , and the biggest one -- Yahoo . Details for over 43 Million users have been stolen from the San Francisco-based website building service Weebly, according to breach notification site LeakedSource, who had already indexed a copy of the stolen data that it received from an anonymous source. In addition, LeakedSource posted details of the cyber attack in its blog post on Thursday explaining what happened. The attack believed to have been carried out in February 2016. "Unlike nearly every other hack, the Co-founder and CTO of Weebly Chris Fanini fortunately did not have his head buried deeply in the san

Over two months ago, the world's third largest Bitcoin Exchange Bitfinex lost around $72 Million worth of Bitcoins in a major hack. Shortly after the company encountered a $72,000,000 Bitcoin theft, an unnamed Bitfinex user from Cambridge, Massachusetts, filed a police report in September, alleging that $1.3 Million of funds were stolen from his account. Since then the Cambridge police have handed the case over to the FBI, which is working with the Bitcoin exchange as well as European authorities to recover funds stolen from the Bitfinex user, Coindesk reports . The individual claimed that he held $3.4 Million in Bitcoin in his personal wallet hosted by the Bitfinex Bitcoin exchange. But following the August's Bitfinex breach, he was left with $2.1 Million in his account. Bitfinex then notified the individual of his initial loss of approximately $1.3 Million in Bitcoin, but after the company issued IOU tokens as an emergency measure to keep the exchange operating, the l

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,

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&#