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Facebook's latest screw-up — a programming bug in Facebook website accidentally gave 1,500 third-party apps access to the unposted Facebook photos of as many as 6.8 million users. Facebook today quietly announced that it discovered a new API bug in its photo-sharing system that let 876 developers access users' private photos which they never shared on their timeline, including images uploaded to Marketplace or Facebook Stories. "When someone gives permission for an app to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only grant the app access to photos people share on their timeline. In this case, the bug potentially gave developers access to other photos, such as those shared on Marketplace or Facebook Stories," Facebook said. What's worse? The bug even exposed photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post or didn't finish posting it for some reason. The flaw left users' private data exposed for 12 days, between September 13th an

Shamoon is back… one of the most destructive malware families that caused damage to Saudi Arabia's largest oil producer in 2012 and this time it has targeted energy sector organizations primarily operating in the Middle East. Earlier this week, Italian oil drilling company Saipem was attacked and sensitive files on about 10 percent of its servers were destroyed, mainly in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, but also in India and Scotland. Saipem admitted Wednesday that the computer virus used in the latest cyber attack against its servers is a variant Shamoon—a disk wiping malware that was used in the most damaging cyber attacks in history against Saudi Aramco and RasGas Co Ltd and destroyed data on more than 30,000 systems. The cyber attack against Saudi Aramco, who is the biggest customer of Saipem, was attributed to Iran, but it is unclear who is behind the latest cyber attacks against Saipem. Meanwhile, Chronicle, Google'

"Pay $20,000 worth of bitcoin, or a bomb will detonate in your building" A massive number of businesses, schools, government offices and individuals across the US, New Zealand and Canada on Thursday received bomb threats via emails that caused nationwide chaos, forcing widespread evacuations and police response. The bomb threat emails were apparently sent by spammers, threatening people that someone has planted bombs within their building that will be detonated unless a bitcoin payment of $20,000 is paid by the end of the business day. "I write to inform you that my man has carried the bomb (Tetryl) into the building where your business is located," one of the emails posted to social media read . "It was assembled according to my instructions. It can be hidden anywhere because of its small size, it cannot damage the supporting building structures, but there will be many victims in case of its explosion." "You must pay me by the end of the

Security leaders are in a tricky position trying to discern how much new AI-driven cybersecurity tools could actually benefit a security operations center (SOC). The hype about generative AI is still everywhere, but security teams have to live in reality. They face constantly incoming alerts from endpoint security platforms, SIEM tools, and phishing emails reported by internal users. Security teams also face an acute talent shortage.  In this guide, we'll lay out practical steps organizations can take to automate more of their processes and build an autonomous SOC strategy . This should address the acute talent shortage in security teams, by employing artificial intelligence and machine learning with a variety of techniques, these systems simulate the decision-making and investigative processes of human analysts. First, we'll define objectives for an autonomous SOC strategy and then consider key processes that could be automated. Next, we'll consider different AI and automation

Adobe is closing out this year with its December Patch Tuesday update to address a massive number of security vulnerabilities for just its two PDF apps—more than double the number of what Microsoft patched this month for its several products. Adobe today released patches for 87 vulnerabilities affecting its Acrobat and Reader software products for both macOS and Windows operating systems, of which 39 are rated as critical and 48 important in severity. The security update comes less than a week after Adobe released patches for a critical zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2018-15982) in Flash Player that was actively being exploited in a targeted attack targeting a Russian state health care institution. The critical vulnerabilities addressed today in Acrobat and Reader include three heap-overflow bugs, five out-of-bounds write flaws, two untrusted pointer dereference issues, two buffer errors, and 24 use-after-free bugs. Upon successful exploitation, all of the above critical vulner

Microsoft today, on its year-end December Patch Tuesday, released security updates to patch a total 39 vulnerabilities its Windows operating systems and applications—10 of which are rated as critical and other important in severity. One of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month is listed as publicly known at the time of release, and one is a zero-day reported as being actively exploited in the wild by multiple hacking groups, including FruityArmor and SandCat APTs. Discovered and reported by security researchers at Kaspersky, the zero-day attack exploits an elevation-of-privilege (EoP) bug in the Windows Kernel (ntoskrnl.exe) that could allow malicious programs to execute arbitrary code with higher privileges on the targeted systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8611  and classified important in severity, resides in the Kernel Transaction Manager, which occurs due to improper processing of transacted file operations in kernel mode. The flaw

Developers of phpMyAdmin, one of the most popular and widely used MySQL database management systems, today released an updated version 4.8.4 of its software to patch several important vulnerabilities that could eventually allow remote attackers to take control of the affected web servers. The phpMyAdmin project last Sunday gave an early heads-up about the latest security update through its blog, probably the first time, as an experiment to find if pre-announcements can help website admins, hosting providers and package managers better prepare for the security release. "We are inspired by the workflow of other projects (such as Mediawiki and others) which often announce any security release in advance to allow package maintainers and hosting providers to prepare. We are experimenting to see if such a workflow is suitable for our project," phpMyAdmin release manager Isaac Bennetch told The Hacker News. phpMyAdmin is a free, open-source administration tool for managing

Google today revealed that Google+ has suffered another massive data breach, forcing the tech giant to shut down its struggling social network four months earlier than its actual scheduled date, i.e., in April 2019 instead of August 2019. Google said it discovered another critical security vulnerability in one of Google+'s People APIs that could have allowed developers to steal private information on 52.5 million users, including their name, email address, occupation, and age. The vulnerable API in question is called "People: get" that has been designed to let developers request basic information associated with a user profile. However, software update in November introduced the bug in the Google+ People API that allowed apps to view users' information even if a user profile was set to not-public. Google engineers discovered the security issue during standard testing procedures and addressed it within a week of the issue being introduced. The company said