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Every parent should think twice before handing out Internet-connected toys or smart toys to their children, as these creepy toys pose a different sort of danger: privacy and data security risks for kids who play with them. This same incident was happened over a year ago when Hong Kong toymaker VTech was hacked , which exposed personal details, including snaps of parents and children and chat logs, of about 6.4 million children around the world. Now, in the latest security failing of the internet-connected smart toys, more than 2 Million voice recordings of children and their parents have been exposed, along with email addresses and passwords for over 820,000 user accounts. And What's even Worse? The hackers locked this data and held it for Ransom. California-based Spiral Toys' line of internet-connected stuffed animal toys, CloudPets , which allow children and relatives to send recorded voicemails back and forth, reportedly left the voice messages recorded between pare...

This month has yet been kind of interesting for cyber security researchers, with Google successfully cracked SHA1 and the discovery of Cloudbleed bug in Cloudflare that caused the leakage of sensitive information across sites hosted behind Cloudflare. Besides this, Google last week disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) library, which affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10. While the Windows vulnerability has yet to be patched by the company, Google today released the details of another unpatched Windows security flaw in its browser, as Microsoft did not act within its 90-day disclosure deadline. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-0037), discovered and disclosed by Google Project Zero team's researcher Ivan Fratric, is a so-called " type confusion flaw " in a module in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer that potentially leads to arbitrary code exec...

Wi-Fi enabled devices — widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT) — are populating offices and homes in greater and greater numbers. From smartphones to connected printers and even coffee makers, most of these IoT devices have good intentions and can connect to your company's network without a problem. However, as the Internet of Things (IoT) devices are growing at a great pace, they continue to widen the attack surface at the same time, giving attackers a large number of entry points to affect you some or the other way. The attackers can use your smart devices to gain backdoor entry to your network, giving them the capability to steal sensitive data, such as your personal information, along with a multitude of other malicious acts. An interesting attack scenario has recently been demonstrated by one of the renowned hackers, Jayson Street , who said all it is needed is to walk around with the right device to get into someone's device. Before we jump into the te...

A severe security vulnerability has been discovered in the CloudFlare content delivery network that has caused big-name websites to expose private session keys and other sensitive data. CloudFlare, a content delivery network (CDN) and web security provider that helps optimize safety and performance of over 5.5 Million websites on the Internet, is warning its customers of the critical bug that could have exposed a range of sensitive information, including passwords, and cookies and tokens used to authenticate users. Dubbed Cloudbleed , the nasty flaw is named after the Heartbleed bug that was discovered in 2014, but believed to be worse than Heartbleed. The vulnerability is so severe that it not only affects websites on the CloudFlare network but affects mobile apps as well. What exactly is "Cloudbleed," how it works, how are you affected by this bug, and how you can protect yourself? Let's figure it out. What is Cloudbleed? Discovered by Google Project Ze...

British police have arrested a suspect in connection with the massive attack on Deutsche Telekom that hit nearly 1 Million routers last November. Late last year, someone knocked down more than 900,000 broadband routers belonging to Deutsche Telekom users in Germany, which affected the telephony, television, and internet service in the country. Now, Germany's federal criminal police force (BKA) revealed today that the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) reportedly arrested a 29-year-old British suspect at Luton airport in London on Wednesday, who is accused of being the mastermind behind the last year's attack. In a statement , the German police said the last year's attack was especially severe and was carried out to compromise the home routers to enroll them in a network of hijacked machines popularly known as Botnet, and then offer the DDoS services for sale on dark web markets. But ultimately, the attack created a denial-of-service situation, which resulted i...

SHA-1, Secure Hash Algorithm 1, a very popular cryptographic hashing function designed in 1995 by the NSA, is officially dead after a team of researchers from Google and the CWI Institute in Amsterdam announced today submitted the first ever successful SHA-1 collision attack. SHA-1 was designed in 1995 by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a part of the Digital Signature Algorithm. Like other hashes, SHA-1 also converts any input message to a long string of numbers and letters that serve as a cryptographic fingerprint for that particular message. Collision attacks appear when the same hash value (fingerprint) is produced for two different messages, which then can be exploited to forge digital signatures, allowing attackers to break communications encoded with SHA-1. The explanation is technologically tricky, but you can think of it as attackers who surgically alters their fingerprints in order to match yours, and then uses that to unlock your smartphone. The researchers h...

Another privilege-escalation vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that dates back to 2005 and affects major distro of the Linux operating system, including Redhat, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu. Over a decade old Linux Kernel bug ( CVE-2017-6074 ) has been discovered by security researcher Andrey Konovalov in the DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) implementation using Syzkaller , a kernel fuzzing tool released by Google. The vulnerability is a use-after-free flaw in the way the Linux kernel's "DCCP protocol implementation freed SKB (socket buffer) resources for a DCCP_PKT_REQUEST packet when the IPV6_RECVPKTINFO option is set on the socket." The DCCP double-free vulnerability could allow a local unprivileged user to alter the Linux kernel memory, enabling them to cause a denial of service ( system crash ) or escalate privileges to gain administrative access on a system. "An attacker can control what object that would be and overwrite...

Next time when you accidentally or curiously land up on a website with jumbled content prompting you to download a missing font to read the blog by updating the Chrome font pack… …Just Don't Download and Install It. It's a Trap! Scammers and hackers are targeting Google Chrome users with this new hacking scam that's incredibly easy to fall for, prompting users to download a fake Google Chrome font pack update just to trick them into installing malware on their systems. Here's What the Scam is and How it works: It's a "The 'HoeflerText' font wasn't found" scam. Security firm NeoSmart Technologies recently identified the malicious campaign while browsing an unnamed WordPress website that had allegedly already been compromised, possibly due to failing to apply timely security updates. The scam is not a new one to identified by NeoSmart. It has been making rounds since last month . The hackers are inserting JavaScript into poorl...

Microsoft on Tuesday released security update (KB 4010250) to patch flaws in Adobe Flash Player for its customers using Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1 and later, as well as Edge for Windows 10, but two already disclosed flaws remain unpatched. Just last week, Microsoft announced that its February patches would be delayed until March due to a last minute issue, a move that led to Google publishing details of an unpatched Windows bug . However, the software giant emailed a handful of big business to alert them to the incoming patches on Monday, advising them to update their systems as soon as possible. The security patches are now available to all Windows customers over Windows Update, and " No other security updates are scheduled for release until the next scheduled monthly update release on March 14, 2017 ," Microsoft says. Bulletin MS17-005 for Adobe Flash Player addresses remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities for some currently supported Windows systems....

This newly discovered bugs in Java and Python is a big deal today. The two popular programming languages, Java and Python, contain similar security flaws that can be exploited to send unauthorized emails and bypass any firewall defenses. And since both the flaws remain unpatched, hackers can take advantage to design potential cyber attack operations against critical networks and infrastructures. The unpatched flaws actually reside in the way Java and Python programming languages handle File Transfer Protocol (FTP) links, where they don't syntax-check the username parameter, which leads to, what researchers call, protocol injection flaw. Java/Python FTP Injection to Send Unauthorized SMTP Emails In a blog pos t published over the past week, security researcher Alexander Klink detailed the FTP protocol injection vulnerability in Java's XML eXternal Entity (XXE) that allows attackers to inject non-FTP malicious commands inside an FTP connection request. To demonst...