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These are unprecedented times, and everyone is going through a testing period, with more than 3 billion people locked down all over the world. Businesses are scrambling to stay afloat and are forced to move digital in a very short span of time without much preparation. As these businesses move digital, cyber threats are more real than ever. Every day we are hearing news about hackers taking advantage of the situation. Cybersecurity company Indusface that holds expertise in keeping applications over the internet secure has decided to step up and do our bit to the society. During this unprecedented time, Indusface has announced to support organizations affected by COVID-19 by offering professional cybersecurity protection to their online businesses at free of cost for at least a month. Indusface already provides a Free Forever Website security assessment service, and as part of this additional offering, businesses can get 30 days of its paid offering without any charges. Cus

The most popular free certificate signing authority Let's Encrypt is going to revoke more than 3 million TLS certificates within the next 24 hours that may have been issued wrongfully due to a bug in its Certificate Authority software. The bug, which Let's Encrypt confirmed on February 29 and was fixed two hours after discovery, impacted the way it checked the domain name ownership before issuing new TLS certificates. As a result, the bug opened up a scenario where a certificate could be issued even without adequately validating the holder's control of a domain name. The Certification Authority Authorization (CAA), an internet security policy, allows domain name holders to indicate to certificate authorities (CAs) whether or not they are authorized to issue digital certificates for a specific domain name. Let's Encrypt considers domain validation results good only for 30 days from the time of validation, after which it rechecks the CAA record authorizing t

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

Let's Encrypt, a free, automated, and open certificate signing authority (CA) from the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), has said it's issued a billion certificates since its launch in 2015. The CA issued its first certificate in September 2015, before eventually reaching 100 million in June 2017. Since late last year, Let's Encrypt has issued at least 1.2 million certificates each day. The development comes as over 80 percent of the web page loads have begun using HTTPS worldwide , and 91 percent in the US alone. HTTPS, the default means of secure communication on the internet, comes with three benefits: authentication, integrity, and encryption. It allows HTTP requests to be transmitted over a secure encrypted channel, thus protecting users from an array of malicious activities, including site forgery and content manipulation. "Since 2017, browsers have started requiring HTTPS for more features, and they've greatly improved the way

An election campaigning website operated by Likud―the ruling political party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu―inadvertently exposed personal information of all 6.5 million eligible Israeli voters on the Internet, just three weeks before the country is going to have a legislative election. In Israel, all political parties receive personal details of voters before the election, which they can't share with any third party and are responsible for protecting the privacy of their citizens and erasing it after the elections are over. Reportedly, Likud shared the entire voter registry with Feed-b, a software development company, who then uploaded it a website (elector.co.il) designed to promote the voting management app called 'Elector.' According to Ran Bar-Zik , a web security researcher who disclosed the issue, the voters' data was not leaked using any security vulnerability in the Elector app; instead, the incident occurred due to negligence by the softw

If you haven't recently updated your Drupal-based blog or business website to the latest available versions, it's the time. Drupal development team yesterday released important security updates for its widely used open-source content management software that addresses a critical and three "moderately critical" vulnerabilities in its core system. Considering that Drupal-powered websites are among the all-time favorite targets for hackers, the website administrators are highly recommended to install the latest release Drupal 7.69, 8.7.11, or 8.8.1 to prevent remote hackers from compromising web servers. Critical Symlinks Vulnerability in Drupal The only advisory with critical severity includes patches for multiple vulnerabilities in a third-party library, called ' Archive_Tar ,' that Drupal Core uses for creating, listing, extracting, and adding files to tar archives. The vulnerability resides in the way the affected library untar archives with sym

Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered details of two new vulnerabilities in the GoAhead web server software, a tiny application widely embedded in hundreds of millions of Internet-connected smart devices. One of the two vulnerabilities, assigned as CVE-2019-5096, is a critical code execution flaw that can be exploited by attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable devices and take control over them. The first vulnerability resides in the way multi-part/form-data requests are processed within the base GoAhead web server application, affecting GoAhead Web Server versions v5.0.1, v.4.1.1, and v3.6.5. According to the researchers at Cisco Talos, while processing a specially crafted HTTP request, an attacker exploiting the vulnerability can cause use-after-free condition on the server and corrupt heap structures, leading to code execution attacks. The second vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-5097, also resides in the same component of the GoAhead Web Server and can be

In a coordinated global law enforcement operation, Europol has taken down more than 30,500 websites for distributing counterfeit and pirated items over the Internet and arrested three suspects. Among other things, the seized domains reportedly offered various counterfeit goods and pirated products and services, including pirated movies, illegal television streaming, music, electronics, cracked software downloads, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and other illicit products. However, it should be noted that the seized web domains do not include any major pirate websites on the Internet. During the investigation, international law enforcement officials: shut down a total of 30,506 web domains, arrested three suspects, seized 26,000 luxury clothes and perfumes, seized 363 liters of alcoholic beverages, and seized an unspecified number of hardware devices. The officials also identified and froze more than €150,000 from several bank accounts and online payment platforms. Th

We distilled 30 independent reports dedicated to cybersecurity and cybercrime predictions for 2020 and compiled the top 5 most interesting findings and projections in this post. Compliance fatigue will spread among security professionals Being a source of ongoing controversy and debate, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was finalized on 11th January 1, 2019. Driven by laudable objectives to protect Californians' personal data, prevent its misuse or unconsented usage by unscrupulous entities, the law imposes formidable monetary penalties of up to $7,500 per intentional violation and $2,500 per unintentional violation. The Act is enforceable against organizations that process or handle personal data of California residents, regardless of the geographical location of the former. Akin to the EU GDPR, data subjects are empowered with a bundle of rights to control their personal data and its eventual usage. The pitfall is that if every US state introduces its own s

Cyberattacks on small and midsized companies in 2019 cost $200,000 per company on average, mercilessly putting many of them out of business, says CNBC in its analysis of a recent Accenture report. In light of the global cybersecurity skills shortage, the number is set to soar in 2020. Solely in the UK, over 50,000 British SMEs could collapse next year following a cyberattack. This article brings a list of free tools that are already being used to combat these alarming challenges and enabling SMEs to arm themselves against a wide range of cyber offenders. Website Security Test with GDPR and PCI DSS Compliance Scan The problem: It would be hard to come across an SME without a website, or at least a web page on the Internet. Such websites are habitually poorly protected, becoming low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. Even if the website does not store or handle any payment transactions or otherwise sensitive information, once breached, access to it can be sold in Dark Web mark

Mozilla, in partnership with Facebook, Cloudflare, and other IETF community members, has announced technical specifications for a new cryptographic protocol called " Delegated Credentials for TLS ." Delegated Credentials for TLS is a new simplified way to implement "short-lived" certificates without sacrificing the reliability of secure connections. In short, the new TLS protocol extension aims to effectively prevent the misuse of stolen certificates by reducing their maximum validity period to a very short span of time, such as a few days or even hours. Before jumping into how Delegated Credentials for TLS works, you need to understand the current TLS infrastructure, and of course, about the core problem in it because of which we need Delegated Credentials for TLS. The Current TLS Infrastructure More than 70% of all websites on the Internet today use TLS certificates to establish a secure line of HTTPS communication between their servers and visitors,

Attention readers, if you are using Chrome on your Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, you need to update your web browsing software immediately to the latest version Google released earlier today. With the release of Chrome 78.0.3904.87, Google is warning billions of users to install an urgent software update immediately to patch two high severity vulnerabilities, one of which attackers are actively exploiting in the wild to hijack computers. Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the Chrome security team only says that both issues are use-after-free vulnerabilities, one affecting Chrome's audio component ( CVE-2019-13720 ) while the other resides in the PDFium ( CVE-2019-13721 ) library. The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory corruption issues that allows corruption or modification of data in the memory, enabling an unprivileged user to escalate privileges on an affected system or software. Thus, both flaws could enable remote attackers

Another day, another massive data breach—this time affecting a leading web technology company, as well as both of its subsidiaries, from where millions of customers around the world have purchased domain names for their websites. The world's top domain registrars Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com disclosed a security breach that may have resulted in the theft of customers' account information. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Web.com is a leading web technology company that owns both Network Solutions and Register.com. The companies offer web services like web hosting, website design, and online marketing to help people build their own websites. What happened? — In late August 2019, a third-party gained unauthorized access to a "limited number" of the company's computer systems and reportedly accessed millions of records for accounts of current and former customers with Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com.

If you're running any PHP based website on NGINX server and have PHP-FPM feature enabled for better performance, then beware of a newly disclosed vulnerability that could allow unauthorized attackers to hack your website server remotely. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11043 , affects websites with certain configurations of PHP-FPM that is reportedly not uncommon in the wild and could be exploited easily as a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw has already been released publicly. PHP-FPM is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation that offers advanced and highly-efficient processing for scripts written in PHP programming language. The main vulnerability is an "env_path_info" underflow memory corruption issue in the PHP-FPM module, and chaining it together with other issues could allow attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on vulnerable web servers. The vulnerability was spotted by Andrew Danau, a security researcher at Wallarm while hun

A team of German cybersecurity researchers has discovered a new cache poisoning attack against web caching systems that could be used by an attacker to force a targeted website into delivering error pages to most of its visitors instead of legitimate content or resources. The issue could affect sites running behind reverse proxy cache systems like Varnish and some widely-used Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) services, including Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, and CDN77. In brief, a Content Distribution Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that sit between the origin server of a website and its visitors to optimize the performance of the website. A CDN service simply stores/caches static files—including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos—from the origin server and delivers them to visitors more quickly without going back to the originating server again and again. Each of the geographically distributed CDN se