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Iran claims to have repelled a fresh cyber attack on its industrial units in a southern province. In the last few years, various Iranian industrial, nuclear and government bodies have recently come under growing cyber attacks, widely believed to be designed and staged by the US and Israel . A power plant and other industries in southern Iran have been targeted by the Stuxnet computer worm , an Iranian civil defense official says. Iran's news agency reported that the worm attacked the Culture Ministry's Headquarters for Supporting and Protecting Works of Art and Culture and was reportedly sent from Dallas via switches in Malaysia and Vietnam. This recent Stuxnet attack was successfully defeated, according to local Iranian civil defense chief Ali Akbar Akhavan. " We were able to prevent its expansion owing to our timely measures and the cooperation of skilled hackers ," Akhavan said. The sophisticated worm spreads via USB drives and through four prev...

One of the biggest security holes are passwords, as every password security study shows. A very fast network logon cracker which support many different services, THC-Hydra is now updated to 7.4 version. Hydra available for Linux, Windows/Cygwin, Solaris 11, FreeBSD 8.1 and OSX, Currently supports AFP, Cisco AAA, Cisco auth, Cisco enable, CVS, Firebird, FTP, HTTP-FORM-GET, HTTP-FORM-POST, HTTP-GET, HTTP-HEAD, HTTP-PROXY, HTTPS-FORM-GET, HTTPS-FORM-POST, HTTPS-GET, HTTPS-HEAD, HTTP-Proxy, ICQ, IMAP, IRC, LDAP, MS-SQL, MYSQL, NCP, NNTP, Oracle Listener, Oracle SID, Oracle, PC-Anywhere, PCNFS, POP3, POSTGRES, RDP, Rexec, Rlogin, Rsh, SAP/R3, SIP, SMB, SMTP, SMTP Enum, SNMP, SOCKS5, SSH (v1 and v2), Subversion, Teamspeak (TS2), Telnet, VMware-Auth, VNC and XMPP. Change Log New module: SSHKEY - for testing for ssh private keys (thanks to deadbyte(at)toucan-system(dot)com!) Added support for win8 and win2012 server to the RDP module Better...

Trojan.Stabuniq geographic distribution by unique IP address Security researchers from Symantec have identified a new Trojan that appears to be targeting financial institutions. Dubbed Trojan.Stabuniq , the malware has been collecting information from infected systems potentially for the preparation of a more damaging attack. According to researchers , roughly 40 IP addresses infected with the Stabuniq Trojan, 40% per cent belong to financial institutions who are mostly based in Chicago and New York. The malware appears to be spread by a phishing attack through spam e-mail containing a link to the address of a server hosting a Web exploit toolkit . Such toolkits are commonly used to silently install malware on Web users' computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in outdated browser plug-ins like Flash Player , Adobe Reader , or Java. These attacks can be very simple, such as a written email from a prince in Nigeria asking for bank account...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

We have seen for the past couple years the cyber wasteland become something that is not dominated by young ambitious hackers anymore. The age of the Wild West is over and the big boys want a piece of the action. With so many infrastructures connected to the web these days it is only natural for more powerful and interested concerns to take their skills to the web. We are seeing the beginnings of true cyber war and it is something that is not going to be stop anytime soon. In the past, what we have seen mostly is governments stay behind the scenes and do defense when it comes to the cyber war. If the government did go on the offensive it would be in secret only discovered when some security firm would get lucky and find some code that would hint to government influence . But these days it is not like that anymore. Everyone knows that the governments of the world are going all out when it comes to cyber war. And the worst part about it is that when it comes to regular civilian...

(DDI) Vulnerability Research Team (VRT) for reported a critical vulnerability in VMware View Server , that  is a directory traversal vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to retrieve arbitrary files from affected View Servers. Exploitation of this issue may expose sensitive information stored on the server. VMware has issued a patch for its VMware View product. It is listed as ' VMSA-2012-0017 ' in security advisory. This vulnerability affects both the View Connection Server and the View Security Server; VMware recommends that customers immediately update both servers to a fixed version of View. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project has assigned the name CVE-2012-5978 to this issue. VMware's update to VMware View is available for free to license holders of the product and can be downloaded here . Disabling the Security Server will prevent exploitation of this vulnerability over untrusted remote networks or It m...

This week Corey and Marty over at FixMeStick shared the specs of their recently released FixMeStick PRO with me. This Pro is the best remote malware remediation product we've seen. It retails for $299.99 per year, or $209.99 for the first 50 'The Hacker News' readers ( use coupon code  'THNFIX ' for 30% Discount ), and can be used an unlimited number of times on an unlimited number of PCs per year. The price is per year because the FixMeStick contains three anti-virus engines licensed from three anti-virus companies keeping three malware definition databases up to date etc... Finds: Three anti-virus engines working together to find the widest range of infections. Removes: 'Computer on a stick' architecture provides a separate and clean operating system to fix Windows operating systems. Delivers: Highest confidence remediation. Remote Access: Remote access independent of the host operating system, i.e. out-of-band remote management, like a remote access...

U.S. intelligence sources confirmed that, Official websites of Al-Qaida were knocked offline two weeks back and still down due to DDoS attack. According to source , " This is one of the longest disruptions the organization has experienced since it set up its online distribution system in 2006. Al-Qaida also was hit by a massive cyber attack in late 2008, from which the online network never recovered ." The websites are forced to offline, just before the release of a film titled as " Salil al-Sawarim 3 ", which is actually the propaganda video of Iraqi soldiers with dead insurgents by Al-Qaida. From last few months, online jihadists are discussing the release and had been sharing images and footage from the production. The cyber attack comes as the U.S. State Department, according to a senior official. The cyber attack on Al-Qaida network delayed the release of movie. According to another source, the last version " Salil As-Sawarim 2 " mov...

Anonymous Croatia hacking crew yesterday deface two Croatian Banks websites and add Anonymous Logo on home pages. The hackers left a message saying: " We are Anonymous. We don't forgive. We don't forget. You were stealing enough from people. Soon the other banks will fall ". Karlovacka Banka (kaba.hr) and samoborska banka (sabank.hr) websites were hacked last morning. Defaced page had a background music with lyrics " No, No more sorrow I've paid for your mistakes Your time is borrowed Your time has come to be replaced " In Talk with ' The Hacker News ' member, hacker give statement ," You have been stealing for too long. Soon more banks will fail. " "This operation will go under  #OpBanks and we are going to hack more banks" hacker said.

Sudoku is one such game that I believe will benefit your brain, but now not for your system. Peter Szabo from SophosLabs have identified a piece of malware that resides behind a Microsoft Excel-based Sudoku generator. The Malware developed in Visual Basic requires macros, a scripting language that allows users to create equations based on values in different columns and rows. Microsoft disable macros by default , because in past macros were the weapon of choice for cyber criminals . But in order for the generator to work, the user must activate macros. Unfortunately, while the user is enjoying the Sudoku, the macro is installing malware in the targeted machine. Keyboard and mouse macros allow sequences of keystrokes and mouse actions to be transformed into shorter commands and also it can easily gathers system information by using the ipconfig, systeminfo like commands. Once the bug has collected a machine's IP address, running processes, ins...

One of the ' The Hacker News ' reader inform us today about porn content on some Indian Government websites. After analyzing such websites, we came across more than 30 sub domains belongs to ' entegramam.gov.in ' . Where ' entegramam' means "My village" and all sub domains of this website are names of the different cities of Kerala state. The websites are in Malayalam language and most of the sites are powered by Joomla and Drupal (older vulnerable versions) with discussion forums on them. On our further analyze we found that time stamp of the Porn articles posted on forum dated back to " 2012/08/30 16:00 ".  That means, Government websites hosting Child Porn content from last four months and authorities or  the moderators of the website are not aware about the issue. On a simple Google search, one can found all such pages : site:gov.in "nude"  for further reports and analyzing. Google also giving notification...