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Let's Encrypt , a project aimed to provide free-of-charge and easier-to-implement way to obtain and use a digital cryptographic certificates (SSL/TLS) to secure HTTPS website, is looking forward to issue its first digital certificates next month. With Let's Encrypt , any webmaster interested in implementing HTTPS for their services can get the certificates for free, which is a great move for encouraging people to encrypt their users' connections to their websites. Let's Encrypt is a combined effort of digital-era rights advocate Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Mozilla Foundation , Cisco Systems , Internet content distributor Akamai Technologies , certificate provider IdenTrust and researchers from the University of Michigan . Generally, the process of implementation of an SSL certificate, including the need to obtain and install a certificate, is complicated for most web developers as it sounds. In most cases, the cost related issues force web adm

The Market of E-commerce websites is at its peak, as today people love to shop online to save their time. However, E-commerce and financial sites stand first in the rundown of potential victims as they manage financial exchanges. The traditional way to target victims of e-commerce sites is to use targeted "phishing" attacks via social media and emails. But… …due to increased awareness among the people about the threat of phishing attacks, hackers have now discovered new way — by malvertising legitimate websites where people assume to be safe and secure. We know: Today, there are many ready-to-use e-commerce platforms available on the Internet that are very easy to install and manage and that too at no extra cost; ' Magento ' is one of the most popular out of them. The most popular, the most targeted: Yes! Security researchers at Sucuri have found a malicious code inside the Magento e-commerce website that was intended to send all the data

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

Are you aware of everything that your users are accessing from your environment? While most of the time, non-work-related Internet browsing is harmless (looking at pictures of cats, online shopping, social media, etc.) there are some instances where you could be an unknowing and unwilling participant in criminal activity. That is, when users hide that activity via the Tor network , or the Dark Net . The Onion Router , better known as " Tor ", an open source project, launched in 2002, is designed to allow a user to browse the Internet anonymously via a volunteer network of more than 5000 relays. It doesn't share your identifying information like your IP address and physical location with websites or service providers. A user that navigate Internet using Tor , it's quite difficult to trace its activities ensuring his online privacy. There are arguably legitimate uses for this technology, such as providing Internet access in repressively regulated countri

Yahoo! has offered $24,000 to a security researcher for finding out and reporting three critical security vulnerabilities in its products including Yahoo! Stores and Yahoo!-hosted websites. While testing all the company's application, Mark Litchfield , a bug bounty hunter who often works with different companies, discovered three critical vulnerabilities in Yahoo!'s products. All the three vulnerabilities have now been fixed by Yahoo!. THREE CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITIES The first and most critical vulnerability gives hackers full administrator access to Yahoo!'s e-commerce platform, Yahoo! Small Business , a portal that allows small business owners to create their own web stores through Yahoo! and sell merchandise. According to the researcher, the flaw in the service allowed him to fully administrator any Yahoo store and thereby gain access to customers' personally identifiable information, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers.

Good news for Internet folks! Get Ready as the entire web you know is about to change. The new and long-awaited version of HTTP took a major step toward becoming a reality on Wednesday – It is been officially finalized and approved. Mark Nottingham, chairman of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group behind creating the standards, announced in a blog post that the HTTP 2.0 specifications have been formally approved. Now, the specifications will go through a last formality – Request for comment and editorial processes – before being published as a standard. LARGEST CHANGE IN HTTP OVER LAST 16 YEARS HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is one of the web standards familiar to most as the https:// at the beginning of a web address. HTTP protocol governs the connections between a user's browser and the server hosting a website, invented by the father of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. HTTP/2 is simply an update to the protocol, but is really a huge deal be

The popular copy and paste website ' Pastebin ' created a decade ago for software developers and even by hackers groups to share source code, dumps and stolen data, has more recently been leveraged by cyber criminals to target millions of users. Compromising a website and then hosting malware on it has become an old tactic for hackers, and now they are trying their hands in compromising vast majority of users in a single stroke. Researchers have discovered that hackers are now using Pastebin to spread malicious backdoor code. According to a blog post published yesterday by a senior malware researcher at Sucuri , Denis Sinegubko, the hackers are leveraging the weakness in older versions of the RevSlider , a popular and a premium WordPress plugin. The plugin comes packaged and bundled into the websites' themes in such a way that many website owners don't even know they have it. In order to exploit the vulnerability, first hackers look for a RevSlider plugin i

Many a time we deal with those strange words and phrases that ask us to type them back in plaintext while signing up for an account. Yes, those increasingly annoying CAPTCHAs !!, which are both time-consuming and sometimes very difficult to read. If you really are tired of these distorted series of characters then there is a good news for you. For the convenience of people, Google has re-introduced a new CAPTCHA system with full makeover called reCAPTCHA , in order to make it easy for users who squint their eyes and make errors while typing. This new CAPTCHA-like system will allow people into websites with only a single click. CAPTCHA actually stands for " Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart " which is used by online services and websites only to verify that you're not a robot and restricts various automated programs to sign-up Email accounts, cracking passwords , spam sending, privacy violation etc. However, now we'l

Another Heartbleed-like vulnerability has been discovered in the decade old but still widely used Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL ) 3.0 cryptographic protocol that could allow an attacker to decrypt contents of encrypted connections to websites. Google's Security Team revealed on Tuesday that the most widely used web encryption standard SSL 3.0 has a major security vulnerability that could be exploited to steal sensitive data. The flaw affects any product that follows the Secure layer version 3, including Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Researchers dubbed the attack as " POODLE ," stands for Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption , which allows an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack in order to decrypt HTTP cookies. The POODLE attack can force a connection to "fallback" to SSL 3.0, where it is then possible to steal cookies, which are meant to store personal data, website preferences or even passwords. Three Google security engineers - Bodo Möll

Yahoo! Contributors Network ( contributor.yahoo.com ), the network of authors that generated the contents such as photographs, videos, articles and their knowledge to more than 600 million monthly visitors, was vulnerable to a Time based Blind SQL Injection vulnerability. Behrouz Sadeghipour, a security researcher reported the Blind SQLi vulnerability in Yahoo! 's website that could be exploited by hackers to steal users' and authors' database, containing their personal information. Behrouz reported this flaw to Yahoo! Security team few months back. The team responded positively and within a month they patched the vulnerability successfully. Unfortunately after that Yahoo! announced to shut down ' Yahoo Contributors Network ' due to its decreasing popularity and removed all the contents from the web, except some of the "work for hire" content may remain on the web. The critical vulnerability was able to expose the database which carried sensitive and personal inform

The official website of the popular cross-platform JavaScript library jQuery (jquery.com) has been compromised and redirecting its visitors to a third-party website hosting the RIG exploit kit , in order to distribute information-stealing malware. JQuery is a free and open source JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It is used to build AJAX applications and other dynamic content easily. The popular JavaScript library is used by 30 percent of websites, including 70 percent of the top 10,000 most visited websites. James Pleger , Director of Research at Risk management software company RiskIQ , reported yesterday that the attack against jQuery.com web servers launched for a short period of time on the afternoon of September 18th. So, the users who visited the website on September 18th may have infected their system with data-stealing malware by redirecting users to the website hosting RIG. Pleger urged those who visited the site durin

Oracle's newly launched Data Redaction security feature in Oracle Database 12c can be easily disrupted by an attacker without any need to use exploit code, a security researcher long known as a thorn in Oracle's side said at Defcon. Data Redaction is one of the new Advanced Security features introduced in Oracle Database 12c. The service is designed to allow administrators to automatically protect sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or health information, during certain operations by either totally obscuring column data or partially masking it. But according to David Litchfield , a self-taught security researcher who found dozens and dozens of critical vulnerabilities in Oracle's products, a close look at this Data Redaction security feature help him found a slew of trivially exploitable vulnerabilities that an attacker don't even need to execute native exploit code to defeat the feature. David Litchfield is a security specialist at Datacomm TSS and th

World's largest Bitcoin poker website ' SealsWithClubs ' has been compromised and around 42,000 users' credentials are at risk. Seals With Club  has issued a  Mandatory Password Reset   warning to their users, according to a statement published on the website. The service admitted their database had been compromised and revealed that the data center used until November was breached, resulting 42,020 hashed password theft. " Passwords were salted and hashed per user, but to be safe every user MUST change their password when they next log in. Please do so at your earliest opportunity. If your Seals password was used for any other purpose you should reset those passwords too as a precaution. " and " Transfers may be disabled for a short period of time.". Seals With Clubs used SHA1 hash functions to encrypt the passwords, but SHA1 is outdated and easy to crack if not salted. ' StacyM ', a user then posted the hashed passwords on a web forum o

A German Security researcher has demonstrated a critical  vulnerability on Ebay website, world's biggest eStore. According to David Vieira-Kurz  discovered Remote code execution flaw " due to a type-cast issue in combination with complex curly syntax ", that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the EBay's web server. In a demo video, he exploited this RCE flaw on EBay website, and managed to display output of phpinfo()  PHP function on the web page, just by modifying the URL and injecting code in that. According to an explanation on his blog , he noticed a legitimate URL on EBay: https://sea.ebay.com/search/?q=david&catidd=1  . . and modified the URL to pass any array values including a payload: https://sea.ebay.com/search/?q[0]=david&q[1]=sec{${ phpinfo() }}&catidd=1 Video Demonstration: But it is not clear at this moment that where the flaw resides on Ebay server, because how a static GET parameter can be converted to accept like an array

When coders and online security researchers find errors in websites or software, the companies behind the programs will often pay out a bounty to the person who discovered the issue. The programs are intended to create an incentive for researchers to privately report issues and allow vendors to release fixes before hackers take advantage of flaws. A 17-year-old German student says he found a security flaw in PayPal's website but was denied a reward because he's too young. On PayPal's website, the company lists the terms for rewarding people who find bugs, but mentions nothing about the age of the discoverer.  The details of the vulnerability, i.e cross-site scripting flaw (XSS), is posted on Full Disclosure section. In Past we have seen that many times PayPal tried to cheat with new security researchers by replying various reasons on reporting bugs i.e "already reported by someone else", "domain / sub-domain is not under bounty program", &q

In recent months the DDoS world has shifted from complex small scale Botnet attacks to much larger network based DDoS attacks , perpetrated largely by hijacked web servers. How many of these hijacked servers are out there remains to be seen. However, Incapsula recently got a very good idea of just how large these DDoS cannons are getting. Last Saturday Incapsula mitigated a rather small, 4Gbps DDoS attack, but this time it had a different pattern that attracted our attention. At first sight the attack seemed rather simple, generating 8 million DNS queries per second, to many domains, from spoofed IP addresses (using real domain name servers' IPs). But this time it included a hint about where it was coming from: all that traffic was coming from the same source. Probably on the same network, maybe even the same device. Tracing it to a single Source - TTL Giveaway Incapsula were able to trace the attack to a single source because this time the attackers slipped-u

Incapsula announced this week that they're offering an intriguing Backdoor Protection feature for sites using their cloud-based website security and performance services. What's a Backdoor? A backdoor is a malicious function that enables hackers to remotely operate a site or server, even after whatever exploit they used for initial access has been patched. Installing a backdoor is often the first thing a hacker will do after gaining access to your site - so if you've been hacked before, there's a good chance you've already got one. Hackers love backdoors because they provide easy return access to the site. Once installed, backdoors can used to distribute spam and malware, launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, or to help steal valuable data like credit card numbers. Recently, Incapsula reported how during the ongoing DDoS attacks against United States banks, a backdoor was used to turn a compromised site into a unwilling foot-soldier in the hackers Zombie Bo

The number one concern of Internet users is that a web site will keep personal information safe and secure. If you are a site owner, giving importance to security is not only for your own protection but for your users' as well. Despite you have the right to set contents to your contracts and terms of service, you still have a portion of liabilities in case your user encountered information and financial thefts as he perform activities within your website. E-commerce usually involves the processing of credit cards and sensitive customer information so security is very important. Online communities and ecommerce websites are mostly the target places of hackers. Toward this end, many users look for a website to display a third party seal as evidence of security. Using a web site seal is a good idea. But providing true web site security requires more than just a seal it also requires using several kinds of security controls managed by a security program to back the seal's p

The Internet has created many new global business opportunities for enterprises conducting online commerce. However, the many security risks associated with conducting e-commerce have resulted in security becoming a major factor for online success or failure. Whether you are an individual or a company, you should approach online security in the same way that you would approach physical security for your home or business. Not only does it make you feel safer but it also protects people who visit your home, place of business, or website. It is important to understand the potential risks and then make sure you are fully protected against them. In the fast-paced world of technology, it is not always easy to stay abreast of the latest advancements. For this reason it is wise to partner with a reputable Internet security company. Here we have a very cool guide from  Symantec , This guide will de-mystify the technology involved and give you the information you need to make the