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How many times it has happened to you when you look for something online and the next moment you find its advertisement on almost every other web page or social media site you visit? Web-tracking is not new. Most of the websites log its users' online activities, but a recent study from Princeton University has suggested that hundreds of sites record your every move online, including your searches, scrolling behavior, keystrokes and every movement. Researchers from Princeton University's Centre for Information Technology Policy (CITP) analyzed the Alexa top 50,000 websites in the world and found that 482 sites, many of which are high profile, are using a new web-tracking technique to track every move of their users. Dubbed " Session Replay ," the technique is used even by most popular websites, including The Guardian, Reuters, Samsung, Al-Jazeera, VK, Adobe, Microsoft, and WordPress, to record every single movement a visitor does while navigating a web page,...

Uber is in headlines once again—this time for concealing last year's data breach that exposed personal data of 57 million customers and drivers. On Tuesday, Uber announced that the company suffered a massive data breach in October 2016 that exposed names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers of 57 million Uber riders and drivers along with driver license numbers of around 600,000 drivers. However, instead of disclosing the breach, the company paid $100,000 in ransom to the two hackers who had access to the data in exchange for keeping the incident secret and deleting the information, according to a report published by Bloomberg. Uber said none of its own systems were breached, rather two individuals outside the company inappropriately accessed and downloaded 57 million Uber riders' and drivers' data that was stored on a third-party cloud-based service. The cyberattack exposed the names and driver license numbers of some 600,000 drivers in the United States, and t...

Do you own an Android smartphone? If yes, then you are one of those billions of users whose smartphone is secretly gathering location data and sending it back to Google. Google has been caught collecting location data on every Android device owner since the beginning of this year (that's for the past 11 months)—even when location services are entirely disabled, according to an investigation conducted by Quartz. This location-sharing practice doesn't want your Android smartphone to use any app, or turn on location services, or even have a SIM card inserted. All it wants is to have your Android device to be connected to the Internet. The investigation revealed that Android smartphones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers, and this data could be used for " Cell Tower Triangulation "—a technique widely used to identify the location of a phone/device using data from three or more nearby cell towers. Each time your Android device come...

In past few months, several research groups have uncovered vulnerabilities in the Intel remote administration feature known as the Management Engine (ME) which could allow remote attackers to gain full control of a targeted computer. Now, Intel has admitted that these security vulnerabilities could "potentially place impacted platforms at risk." The popular chipmaker released a security advisory on Monday admitting that its Management Engine (ME), remote server management tool Server Platform Services (SPS), and hardware authentication tool Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) are vulnerable to multiple severe security issues that place millions of devices at risk. The most severe vulnerability (CVE-2017-5705) involves multiple buffer overflow issues in the operating system kernel for Intel ME Firmware that could allow attackers with local access to the vulnerable system to " load and execute code outside the visibility of the user and operating system. " The...

Again some bad news for cryptocurrency users. Tether, a Santa Monica-based start-up that provides a dollar-backed cryptocurrency tokens, has claimed that its systems have been hacked by an external attacker, who eventually stole around $31 million worth of its tokens. With a market capitalization of $673 million, Tether is the world's first blockchain-enabled platform to allow the traditional currency to be used like digital currency. Tether serves as a proxy for the US dollar, Euro (and soon Japanese yen) that can be sent between exchanges including Bitfinex, Poloniex, Omni, GoCoin and other markets. According to an announcement on the company's official website posted today, the unknown hacker stole the tokens (worth $30,950,010) from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19 and sent them to an unauthorized Bitcoin address. The stolen tokens will not be redeemed, but the company is in the process of attempting token recovery in order to prevent them from enter...

Even after so many efforts by Google for making its Play Store away from malware, shady apps somehow managed to fool its anti-malware protections and infect people with malicious software. A team of researchers from several security firms has uncovered two new malware campaigns targeting Google Play Store users, of which one spreads a new version of BankBot , a persistent family of banking Trojan that imitates real banking applications in efforts to steal users' login details. BankBot has been designed to display fake overlays on legitimate bank apps from major banks around the world, including Citibank, WellsFargo, Chase, and DiBa, to steal sensitive information, including logins and credit card details. With its primary purpose of displaying fake overlays, BankBot has the ability to perform a broad range of tasks, such as sending and intercepting SMS messages, making calls, tracking infected devices, and stealing contacts. Google removed at least four previous versions...

Security researchers have discovered a new, sophisticated form of malware based on the notorious Zeus banking Trojan that steals more than just bank account details. Dubbed Terdot, the banking Trojan has been around since mid-2016 and was initially designed to operate as a proxy to conduct man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, steal browsing information such as stored credit card information and login credentials and injecting HTML code into visited web pages. However, researchers at security firm Bitdefender have discovered that the banking Trojan has now been revamped with new espionage capabilities such as leveraging open-source tools for spoofing SSL certificates in order to gain access to social media and email accounts and even post on behalf of the infected user. Terdot banking trojan does this by using a highly customized man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy that allows the malware to intercept any traffic on an infected computer. Besides this, the new variant of Terdot...

Refuting allegations that its anti-virus product helped Russian spies steal classified files from an NSA employee's laptop, Kaspersky Lab has released more findings that suggest the computer in question may have been infected with malware. Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab on Thursday published the results of its own internal investigation claiming the NSA worker who took classified documents home had a personal home computer overwhelmed with malware. According to the latest Kaspersky report, the telemetry data its antivirus collected from the NSA staffer's home computer contained large amounts of malware files which acted as a backdoor to the PC. The report also provided more details about the malicious backdoor that infected the NSA worker's computer when he installed a pirated version of Microsoft Office 2013 .ISO containing the Mokes backdoor, also known as Smoke Loader. Backdoor On NSA Worker's PC May Have Helped Other Hackers Steal Classi...

The OnePlus Saga Continues… Just a day after the revelation of the hidden Android rooting backdoor pre-installed on most OnePlus smartphones, a security researcher just found another secret app that records tons of information about your phone. Dubbed OnePlusLogKit , the second pre-installed has been discovered by the same Twitter user who goes by the pseudonym " Elliot Alderson " and discovered the controversial " EngineerMode " diagnostic testing application that could be used to root OnePlus devices without unlocking the bootloader. OnePlusLogKit is a system-level application that is capable of capturing a multitude of things from OnePlus smartphones, including: Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth, and GPS location logs, Modem signal and data logs, hot and power issue logs, list of the running processes, list of running service and battery status, media databases, including all your videos and images saved on the device. Unlike EngineerMode (which was found ...

Remember BlueBorne? A series of recently disclosed critical Bluetooth flaws that affect billions of Android, iOS, Windows and Linux devices have now been discovered in millions of AI-based voice-activated personal assistants, including Google Home and Amazon Echo . As estimated during the discovery of this devastating threat, several IoT and smart devices whose operating systems are often updated less frequently than smartphones and desktops are also vulnerable to BlueBorne. BlueBorne is the name given to the sophisticated attack exploiting a total of eight Bluetooth implementation vulnerabilities that allow attackers within the range of the targeted devices to run malicious code, steal sensitive information, take complete control, and launch man-in-the-middle attacks. What's worse? Triggering the BlueBorne exploit doesn't require victims to click any link or open any file—all without requiring user interaction. Also, most security products would likely not be abl...