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With just two days before the presidential election, WikiLeaks late Sunday night published a new trove of emails apparently hacked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The most recent dump of more than 8,000 emails came after the whistleblowing site, on a daily basis over last four weeks, has already leaked over 50,000 emails stolen from the key figure in the DNC – Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. However, this time, not everything went as planned by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks early Monday morning announced on Twitter that shortly after the release of hacked DNC emails the organization was the target of a major Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. What's more?  Soon after WikiLeaks reported the DDoS attack on its email publication servers, Twitter also went down, and the outage lasts for at least 30 minutes. According to a status monitor, the Twitter outage began at around 6.45am GMT and continued for nearly half an hour, though report...

Almost 20,000 Tesco Bank customers have had their money stolen from their accounts after the banking arm of UK's biggest retailer fall victim to a hacking attack this weekend. As a result of the hack, Tesco Bank has frozen online transactions in an attempt to protect its customers from, what it described as, the " online criminal activity. " However, customers can still use their debit and credit cards for cash withdrawals and card-based payments. Tesco Bank has not disclosed any details of the cyber attack or how accounts had been compromised, but Benny Higgins, chief executive of Tesco, confirmed that the hack affected 40,000 of its 136,000 accounts, half of which had already been used to withdraw money fraudulently over the weekend. The bank would not disclose the total amount stolen from the accounts, but confirmed that the amount stolen was a " big number but not a huge number. " If you have been affected by this incident, don't worry! Higgins has apo...

China has long been known for its strict censorship policies, which has already made it difficult for foreign companies to do business in the world's most populous country of more than 1.35 Billion people. Now, the Chinese government has approved a broad new controversial cybersecurity regulations that would further strengthen the country's censorship regime, making it more difficult for technology companies to operate in the country. Made public on Monday, the legislation, passed by China's rubber-stamp parliament and set to go into effect in June 2017, aims at combating growing threats like hacking and terrorism, but actually comes with data localization, real-name requirements, and surveillance. The Cybersecurity Law requires instant messaging services and other internet operators to force users to register with their real names and personal information, which restricts anonymity of a user online. The proposed law also includes requirements for ' Data Locali...

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Indian embassy websites in seven different countries have been hacked, and attackers have leaked personal data, including full name, residential address, email address, passport number and phone number, of Indian citizens living abroad. This incident is extremely worrying because it involves diplomatic personnel working in the embassies that have always been a favorite target of state-sponsored hackers launching cyber espionage campaigns. Security pen-testers who go by the name Kapustkiy and Kasimierz have claimed responsibility for the hack and told The Hacker News that the reason behind the hack was to force administrators to consider the cyber security of their websites seriously. In Pastebin link shared on their Twitter account , the hackers claimed to have hijacked Indian Embassy websites in Switzerland, Italy, Romania, Mali, South Africa, Libya, and Malawi and leaked personal details of hundreds of Indians, including students studying abroad. The pair exploited a si...

On Thursday, we compiled a story based on research published by a British security expert reporting that some cyber criminals are apparently using Mirai Botnet to conduct DDoS attacks against the telecommunication companies in Liberia, a small African country. In his blog post , Kevin Beaumont claimed that a Liberian transit provider confirmed him about the DDoS attack of more than 500 Gbps targeting one undersea cable servicing Internet connectivity for the entire country. Later, some media outlets also confirmed that the DDoS attack caused Internet outage in some parts of the country, citing 'slow Internet' and 'total outage' experienced by some local sources and citizens. "The DDoS is killing our business. We have a challenge with the DDoS. We are hoping someone can stop it. It's killing our revenue. Our business has frequently been targeted" an employee with one Liberian mobile service provider told PC World . Network firm Level 3 confirmed Zack Whittaker ...

Security researchers have discovered a way to target a huge number of Android and iOS apps that could allow them to remotely sign into any victim's mobile app account without any knowledge of the victim. A group of three researchers – Ronghai Yang, Wing Cheong Lau, and Tianyu Liu – from the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found [ PPT ] that most of the popular mobile apps that support single sign-on (SSO) service have insecurely implemented OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is an open standard for authorization that allows users to sign in for other third-party services by verifying existing identity of their Google, Facebook, or Chinese firm Sina accounts. This process enables users to sign-in to any service without providing additional usernames or passwords. How are app developers required to implement OAuth? (Right Way) When a user logs into a third party app via OAuth, the app checks with the ID provider, let's say, Facebook, that it has correct authentication details. I...

Today, most of you surf the web unaware of the fact that websites collect your data and track your locations and makes millions by sharing your search histories, location data, and buying habits with advertisers and marketers. And if this isn't enough, there are hackers and cyber criminals out there who have the ability to easily steal your sensitive and personal data from the ill-equipped websites. In short, the bitter truth is that you have no or very little online privacy. To resolve this issue, you need a Virtual Private Network (VPN). If you are worried about online Privacy and have not thought about using a VPN, it might be time to get one. But, the question is: What are the best anonymous VPN services? Unfortunately, not all VPNs are as anonymous as they claim to be. Some VPN services keep extensive logs of their users' browsing activities, including IP-addresses for weeks, which nullify the point of using a VPN for privacy. Want Privacy While You Surf...

When we started our brand new THN Deals Store last week on the special occasion of company's 6th Anniversary, we introduced its very first product, Professional Hacking Certification Package, and received great response from our readers. Thank you! If you have not yet, you can still get this deal — Computer Hacker Professional Certification Package — at 96% discount. This Package offers you all the material and training you require to help pass any of five professional hacker certifications, including CISSP, CISM, CISA, Ethical Hacker and Forensics Investigator to become certified penetration tester. It is a very well known fact that nobody can teach you hacking directly. You need to learn some programming languages to get started, as well as to have knowledge of some basic platforms. I frequently receive emails and messages on what programming language should we learn? So the answer is — Python . But, Why Python? Because it is an excellent programming language that ha...

Image Source: Libelium Here's a new danger to your smartphone security: Your mobile device can be hijacked and tracked without your knowledge. Remember Stingrays ? The controversial cell phone spying tool, also known as " IMSI catchers ," has long been used by law enforcement to track and monitor mobile users by mimicking a cellphone tower and tricking their devices to connect to them. Sometimes it even intercepts calls and Internet traffic, sends fake texts, and installs spyware on a victim's phone. Setting up such Stingrays-type surveillance devices , of course, is expensive and needs a lot of efforts, but researchers have now found a new, cheapest way to do the same thing with a simple Wi-Fi hotspot. Yes, Wi-Fi network can capture IMSI numbers from nearby smartphones, allowing almost anyone to track and monitor people wirelessly. IMSI or international mobile subscriber identity is a unique 15-digit number used for authentication of a person when movi...

Note — We have published  an updated article on what really happened behind the alleged DDoS attack against Liberia using Mirai botnet. Someone is trying to take down the whole Internet of a country, and partially succeeded, by launching massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using a botnet of insecure IoT devices infected by the Mirai malware. It all started early October when a cyber criminal publicly released the source code of Mirai – a piece of nasty IoT malware designed to scan for insecure IoT devices and enslaves them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks. Just two weeks ago, the Mirai IoT Botnet caused vast internet outage by launching massive DDoS attacks against DNS provider Dyn, and later it turns out that just 100,000 infected-IoT devices participated in the attacks. Experts believe that the future DDoS attack could reach 10 Tbps, which is enough to take down the whole Internet in any nation state. One such inc...