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The Nasdaq stock exchange and the Republic of Estonia have announced the use of Blockchain-based technology to allow shareholders of companies to e-vote in shareholder meetings even when they're abroad, according to Nasdaq's press release. Global stock market giant is developing an electronic shareholder voting system implemented on the top of Blockchain technology that underpins Bitcoins . Blockchain – the public and decentralized ledger technology underpins all Bitcoin transactions and logs each transfer of an asset in an encrypted "block" that is added to a permanent, transparent chain showing every deal associated with that asset. Even some of the world's major banks are also considering the adoption of the Blockchain technology. In the mid of last year, 9 of the World's renowned Banks, including JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, Goldman Sachs and Barclays , collaborated with New York-based financial tech firm R3 to create a new fram...

Hacking of computers, smartphones and networks in the United Kingdom or abroad by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is LEGAL , the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal ( IPT ) ruled. So, the UK is giving clean chit to its intelligence agency to spy on its people as well as people living abroad. Now, How is that okay? The British spying nerve center GCHQ has won a major court case in defense of the agency's persistent hacking programs.  After revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden about the extent of spying by the US and the UK, Privacy International and seven Internet Service Providers (ISPs) launched a legal challenge against the GCHQ's hacking operations. The case alleged that the British spying agency was breaking European law and violating fundamental warrant protections by its too intrusive and persistent surveillance actions. GCHQ Admitted its Hacking Practices Though GCHQ "neither confirm nor deny" the e...

The teenage hacker, who calls himself a member of hacktivist group " Cracka with Attitude ," behind the series of hacks on the United States government and its high-level officials, including CIA director, might have finally got arrested. In a joint effort, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and British police reportedly have arrested a 16-year-old British teenager who they believe had allegedly: Leaked the personal details of tens of thousands of FBI agents and US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees. Hacked into the AOL emails of CIA director John Brennan . Hacked into the personal email and phone accounts of the US spy chief James Clapper . Broke into the AOL emails of the FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano . Federal officials haven't yet released the identity of the arrested teenager, but the boy is suspected of being the lead hacker of Cracka With Attitude, who calls himself Cracka, the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SER...

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has admitted that it used controversial cell phone spying tool " Stingrays " more than 1,000 times since 2008 without warrants. In the documents obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) , the NYPD acknowledged that the department has used Stingrays to intercept personal communications and track the locations of nearby mobile phone users. What are Stingrays? In my previous article , I have explained the scope of Stingrays along with its working, how it cracks encryption and how the police agencies are using these cell phone spying devices equipped in its military surveillance technology DRTBox  in order to: Track people Intercept thousands of cellphone calls Quietly eavesdrop on conversations Eavesdrop on emails and text messages Stingrays are small cell phone surveillance devices that work by imitating cellphone towers, forcing all nearby phones to connect to them and revealing the owners' locat...

Browsing the Web in ' Private Mode ' is not as private as you think. Microsoft has patched the Private Browsing Leakage bug in its newest Edge browser with the latest update . When we talk about Browsers, only one thing which does not strike our mind is Internet Explorer or IE. Even there were some trolls on Internet Explorer (IE) waving over the social medias such as "The best web browser to download other browsers." In fact, it was justified as everyone downloads a new browser with IE in their newly installed Operating System. Due to the continual taunts, Microsoft had scrapped the entire IE and made a new browser called " Edge Browser " (Codenamed "Spartan"). Edge was shipped as the default browser (along with IE) with Windows 10 devices and grabbed the attention of many eye pupils as it included all the features that other mainstream browsers have. Well, History Repeats Itself In January this year, it was...

A pair of new security vulnerabilities has been discovered in the framework used by a wide variety of Mac apps leaves them open to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks. The framework in question is Sparkle that a large number of third-party OS X apps, including Camtasia, uTorrent, Duet Display and Sketch, use to facilitate automatic updates in the background. Sparkle is an open source software available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license by the Sparkle Project with the help of numerous of valuable contributors. The framework supports Mac OS X versions 10.7 through 10.11 and Xcode 5.0 through 7.0. The Sparkle vulnerabilities, discovered by Radek, a security researcher, in late January and reported by Ars reporter, affect Apple Mac apps that use: An outdated and vulnerable version of the Sparkle updater framework. An unencrypted HTTP channel to receive info from update servers. What's the Issue? The first loophole is due to the improper implemen...

The last year's ISIS-linked terror attacks in Paris and California has sparked debate on Encryption, and the intelligent agencies started reviving their efforts to weaken encryption on various encrypted products and services. But, there is some Good News! California Congressman and Texas Republican are now challenging state-level proposals to restrict US citizens' ability to encrypt their smartphones. On Wednesday, California Congressman Ted Lieu , one of four members of Congress, and Texas Republican Blake Farenthold , a member of the House Oversight and House Judiciary committees, introduced a new bill in Congress that… …attempts to ban states efforts to implement their own anti-encryption policies at a state level while a national debate on Encryption is ongoing. The bill, called " Ensuring National Constitutional Rights for Your Private Telecommunications Act of 2016 " – in short, " ENCRYPT Act of 2016 " – would stop states fr...

Do you know: There is a vast section of the Internet which is hidden and not accessible through regular search engines and web browsers. This part of the Internet is known as the Deep Web , and it is about 500 times the size of the Web that we know. What is DEEP WEB? Deep Web  is referred to the data which are not indexed by any standard search engine such as Google or Yahoo. The 'Deep Web' refers to all web pages that search engines cannot find, such as user databases, registration-required web forums, webmail pages, and pages behind paywalls. Then, there's the Dark Web or Dark Net – a specific part of that hidden Deep Web. Deep Web and Dark Web are the intriguing topics for the Netizens all around. But when you hear the term 'Deep Web' or 'Dark Web,' you usually categorize them into one. If yes, then you are wrong. What is DARK WEB? Dark Web is where you can operate without been tracked, maintaining total anonymity....

Google had also joined the path of Apple, Facebook, and Youtube to kill the "Adobe Flash Player" by announcing that the company is banning Flash banner support from its Adwords Advertising platform. "To enhance the browsing experience for more people on more devices, the Google Display Network and DoubleClick Digital Marketing are now going 100% HTML5" Google says. It's been two decades since Adobe Flash has ruled the Web Space Animation Arena, which was the de facto standard for playing the online videos. Flash Player had been famous for Zero-day exploits which are a potential threat to online users. Even Adobe tried to maintain equilibrium by releasing a countless number of patches frequently (that got hiked), for instant reported vulnerabilities, but this had annoyed both customers and companies. The endless troubleshooting of the Flash Player plugins never resolved the vulnerabilities. To put a full stop on this issue... many major t...

Myth: By disabling all privacy compromising and telemetry features on Windows 10 will stop Microsoft to track your activities. Fact: Even after all telemetry features disabled, Windows 10 is phoning home more than you could ever think of. Ever since the launch of Microsoft's newest operating system, Windows 10 is believed to be spying on its users. I wrote a number of articles to raise concern about Windows 10 privacy issues , including its controversial data mining features  and privacy invasion features . The only solution believed to cope up with these issues is to disable all the telemetry features or use an automated tool to disable all privacy-infringing features in just one click. But unfortunately, all these efforts got wasted because Microsoft still tracks you, even after you tighten your Windows 10 privacy to an extreme level, claims the recent analysis conducted by a Voat user CheesusCrust. Traffic Analysis Reveals Extent of Windows 10 Spying ...