The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Hacking group Anonymous claimed to have shut down a computer server belonging to Australia's domestic spy agency ASIO, reportedly briefly closing down access to its public web page. The Australian Security Intelligence Organization acknowledged some disruption to its website. The ASIO website was down for about 30 minutes after the attack and is now operating slowly or not at all. It appears the attack may be ongoing, but ASIO’s technical staff are recovering the situation. Anonymous has been claiming on its Twitter feed over the past few days that it was able to bring down several sites, including ASIO's. It wrote: " asio.gov.au has been down for some time now, And will be for the rest of the day! " It appeared linked to a controversial government plan to store the web history of all Australians for up to two years which was shelved Thursday until after the 2013 elections. The group Anonymous, which is believed to be a loosely affiliated network of “hacktivists”,...

A new cyber surveillance virus has been found in the Middle East that can spy on banking transactions and steal login and passwords, according Kaspersky Lab , a leading computer security firm. After Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame, this one seems to mainly spy on computer users in Lebanon. It’s been dubbed Gauss (although Germanic-linguistic purists will no doubt be complaining that it should be written Gauß). Gauss is a complex cyber-espionage toolkit, highly modular and supports new functions which can be deployed remotely by the operators in the form of plugins. The currently known plugins perform the following functions: Intercept browser cookies and passwords. Harvest and send system configuration data to attackers. Infect USB sticks with a data stealing module. List the content of the system drives and folders Steal credentials for various banking systems in the Middle East. Hijack account information for social network, email and IM accounts. The researchers at Russia-based Ka...

Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered five new samples of the ZeuS-in-the-Mobile (ZitMo) malware package, targeting Android and BlackBerry devices. Zitmo (Zeus in the mobile) is the name given to the mobile versions of Zeus, and it's been around for a couple of years already, mostly infecting Android phones. The Zitmo variant has reportedly been operating for at least two years targeting Android phones by masquerading as banking security application or security add-on. ZitMo gets hold of banking information by intercepting all text messages and passing them on to attackers’ own devices. It gets onto devices inside malicious applications, which users are duped into downloading. In this case, the malicious app was posing as security software called ‘Zertifikat’. Once installed, the packages forward all incoming SMS messages to one of two command and control numbers located in Sweden, with the aim of snaring secure codes and other data. Kaspersky found mobile users ...

26-year-old Slovenian hacker known as Iserdo stands thought to have been behind the Mariposa botnet is on trial in Slovenia, charged with having masterminded an international cybercrime gang. At its height, the Mariposa botnet infected up to 12.7 million PCs, with more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies believed to have been compromised, including 40 major banks. Once a computer had been compromised and brought into the botnet, operators could steal information from innocent users - including credit card details and banking passwords. Computer crime-fighting authorities had succeeded in bringing down the Mariposa botnet at the end of 2009, FBI officials worked with Spanish and Slovenian authorities to track down Mariposa's mastermind, Iserdo. He was said to charge between $500 for basic versions of the botnet code and up to $1,300 for more advanced ones, which included customised features, such as capabilities which allowed its operators to to steal credit cards and onlin...

Security researcher Jonathan Brossard created a proof-of-concept hardware backdoor called Rakshasa that replaces a computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System) and can compromise the operating system at boot time without leaving traces on the hard drive. In short, firmware is software that is stored in non-volatile memory on a computer chip, and is used to initialise a piece of hardware’s functionality. In a PC, the BIOS is the most common example of firmware but in the case of wireless routers, a whole Linux operating system is stored in firmware. Hardware backdoors are lethal for three reasons: They can’t be removed by conventional means (antivirus, formatting). They can circumvent other types of security (passwords, encrypted file systems). They can be injected during manufacturing. Rakshasa, named after a demon from the Hindu mythology, is not the first malware to target the BIOS the low-level motherboard firmware that initializes other hardware components. Rakshasa replac...

Whenever an important event takes place, new opportunities for cyber criminals, especially for those who develop attacks based on social engineering, arise. Currently, the whole world has its eyes glued to TV screens watching the London 2012 Olympic Games. Anti-malware and anti-virus solutions provider Webroot has issued a warning that an app app called " London Olympics Widget ," which is described as an app that displays aggregated Olympic news coverage. In fact, it's really just harvesting the user's contact list and device ID while reading up on SMS messages too. The package name is ‘com.games.London.Olympics.widget’. This app has a digital certificate claiming it was developed in New Delhi, India. For this scam, cybercriminals create websites that are very appealing; some even look very professional that they make it seem that you are close to having access to live programming. Researchers explain that the crooks rely on black hat SEO techniques to make sure t...

Website of the Southern Railways www.southernrailway.gov.in has been defaced apparently by Pakistani hackers. The hacker group that calls itself ' Pak Cyber Pyrates ' replaced the home page of the website with a page with content that denounces India's role in Kashmir. Indian and Pakistani hacking groups are engaged in a cyber war of sorts with websites in both the countries being regularly attacked and defaced.

At DEFCON 20, Raphael Mudge the developer of Armitage released the most significant update to Armitage. Armitage is now fully scriptable and capable of hosting bots in acollaborative hacking engagement. Raphael Mudge is the founder of Strategic Cyber LLC, a Washington, DC based company that creates software for red teams. He created Armitage for Metasploit, the Sleep programming language, and the IRC client jIRCii. Previously, Raphael worked as a security researcher for the US Air Force, a penetration tester, and he even invented a grammar checker that was sold to Automattic.  Raphael talk about Cortana scripting language for Cobalt Strike and Armitage. Cortana allows you to write scripts that automate red team tasks and extend Armitage and Cobalt Strike with new features. This technology was funded byDARPA's Cyber Fast Track program and it's now open source . Armitage a red team collaboration tool built on the Metasploit Framework. Cobalt Strike is Ar...

Business networking site LinkedIn has announced it took a hit of up to $1 million due to one of the year's largest reported data breaches . LinkedIn spent between $500,000 and $1 million on forensic work after a large number of passwords were breached, LinkedIn CFO Steve Sordello said on the company's earnings call today. He said the 175-million-member company continued to strengthen its website's security and is expected to add $2 million to $3 million in costs in the current quarter toward those efforts. “ Part of adding value to our members every day means ensuring that their experience on LinkedIn is safe and secure ,” he said. “ Since the breach, we have redoubled our efforts to ensure the safety of member account on LinkedIn by further improving password strengthening measures and enhancing the security of our infrastructure and data. The health of our network as measured by number of growth and engagement remains as strong as it was prior to the incident .” After...

On Friday, Reuters blog platform was hacked with false posts and on Saturday, the @ReutersTech account on Twitter was taken over and renamed @TechMe. False tweets were sent before it was taken down. The first attack came Friday after Syrian hackers loyal to President Bashar al-Assad allegedly gained access to Reuters’ blogging platform, which they used to post a fake interview with rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) leader Riad al-Assad. The interview essentially said the general was withdrawing troops after a battle. Presumably, the same hackers are responsible for also compromising a Reuters Twitter account dedicated to technology news, which has about 17,500 followers. Reuters confirmed the breach today in a tweet on its main Twitter account: Earlier today @ReutersTech was hacked and changed to @ReutersME. The account has been suspended and is currently under investigation Several of the updates posted on the hacked Reuters account, which claimed that rebels in the city of Aleppo ...

Chinese telecoms equipment suppliers have previously been criticized for allegedly being security risks. Huawei is working with British spooks to prove that it has no backdoors in its products which would allow Chinese agents to snuffle Her Majesty's secrets. The U.S. and Australia have made clear their distrust of one of the world’s biggest telecoms company. The Australian government, for instance, banned the company from participating in bids for its national broadband network due to potential spying threats. Huawei, which has grown to become one of today’s dominant telecommunications equipment companies, is likewise constantly under threat because of what some might call China-bashing. Over the past ten years or so, Chinese telecoms firms such as Huawei and ZTE, another telecoms-equipment provider, have expanded from their vast home market to become global players. Huawei is becoming an increasingly powerful global player, capable of going head-to-head with the best in i...

Hong Kong police said Sunday they had arrested a 21-year-old man believed to be a member of the international hacker group Anonymous, after he reportedly said on social networking site Facebook that he would hack several government websites. “ The Internet is not a virtual world of lawlessness ,” a police spokesman said, adding that the man was required to report back to the police in October. He faces up to five years imprisonment if found guilty.The man is a member of the global hacker group Anonymous, the South China Morning Post said. The group is said to have 20 members in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory, which guarantees civil liberties not seen on the mainland, including freedom of speech. The police spokesman declined to confirm his link to Anonymous. The last posting on the “Anonymous HK” Facebook page on July 22 urged authorities to show “respect” to citizens.

Is your iCloud account secured by a good password? Please Don’t rely on the cloud. Here's a terrifying tale of modern hacking. Mat Honan, a reporter at tech site Gizmodo, was playing with his daughter when his phone went dead. Thinking it was a software glitch, he rebooted, and went to log in to his iCloud. But his password wouldn't work. He was "irritated, but not alarmed", and connected his iPhone to his MacBook Air to restore from backup. On opening his laptop, an iCal message popped up telling him his Gmail account information was wrong. The screen went grey, and he was asked for a four-digit pin, which he didn't have. By now he knew something was up, but had no idea just how much damage the hacker had done. After presumably brute-forcing his way into iCloud, the hacker was able change the password of and gain access to Mat’s Google account, remote wipe his Macbook Air, iPhone, and iPad, get into his Twitter and then use that to get access to the Gizmodo US ...

This Sunday, The Capital , New Delhi plays host to an International The Hackers Conference where blackhat hackers will discuss the challenges of cyber safety with security agencies. Your Smartphone is an always-on and always-connected digital extension of your life which will be used by attackers to covertly steal your sensitive data and spy on you. Mahesh , An Independent Security Researcher and Android Developer/Hacker will demonstrate " Android Spy Agent ". This application allows us to remotely access the entire victim’s personal information and even though the confidential data available in the android cell phone. The type of personal information includes the victim’s contacts, call logs, messages, browser’s history, GPS location and much more information directly available on the victim’s cell phone.  Many-a-times we think that is there any way by which we can read the private sms of anyone. So here is the solution Mr. Mahesh will present in...

Security researchers are expected to disclose new vulnerabilities in near field communication (NFC), mobile baseband firmware, HTML5 and Web application firewalls next week at the Black Hat USA 2012 security conference. The Black Hat session aim to expose sometimes shocking vulnerabilities in widely used products. They also typically show countermeasures to plug the holes. Two independent security consultants will give a class called " Advanced ARM exploitation ," part of a broader five-day private class the duo developed. In a sold-out session, they will detail hardware hacks of multiple ARM platforms running Linux, some described on a separate blog posting. The purpose of the talk is to reach a broader audience and share the more interesting bits of the research that went into developing the Practical ARM Exploitation and presenters Stephen Ridley and Stephen Lawler demonstrate how to defeat XN, ASLR, stack cookies, etc. using nuances of the ARM architecture on Linux. I...

Android's DNS resolver is vulnerable to DNS poisoning due to weak randomness in its implementation. Researchers Roee Hay & Roi Saltzman from IBM Application Security Research Group demonstrate that how an attacker can successfully guess the nonce of the DNS request with a probability thatis su cient for a feasible attack. Android version 4.0.4 and below are Vulnerable to this bug. Weakness in its pseudo-random number generator (PRNG), which makes DNS poisoning attacks feasible. DNS poisoning attacks may endanger the integrity and con dentiality of the attacked system. For example, in Android, the Browser app can be attacked in order to steal the victim's cookies of a domain of the attacker's choice. If the attacker manages to lure the victim to browse to a web page controlled by him/her, the attacker can use JavaScript, to start resolving non-existing sub-domains. Upon success, a sub-domain points to the attacker's IP, which enables the latter to steal wild card...

A scientist working at the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran said computer systems have been hit by a cyber-attack which forced them to play AC/DC’s Thunderstruck at full volume in the middle of the night. The attack came to light after a researcher at security firm F-Secure received a string of emails from a Iran's atomic energy organisation." I am writing you to inform you that our nuclear program has once again been compromised and attacked by a new worm with exploits which have shut down our automation network at Natanz and another facility Fordo near Qom. " " It does sound really weird ," he said. "If there was an attack, why would the attacker announce themselves by playing ' Thunderstruck? " If true, this attack is the third hacking attempt aimed at Tehran’s controversial nuclear program. It sounds like the AEOI may have been hit with an infrastructure-targeting malware attack, similar to those that have plagued the Middle East since 201...

The Vulnerability reported on 06/12/2012, dubbed as " CVE-2012-0217 " - according to that Some 64-bit operating systems and virtualization software running on Intel CPU hardware are vulnerable to a local privilege escalation attack. The vulnerability may be exploited for local privilege escalation or a guest-to-host virtual machine escape. FreeBSD/amd64 runs on CPUs from different vendors. Due to varying behaviour of CPUs in 64 bit mode a sanity check of the kernel may be insufficient when returning from a system call. Successful exploitation of the problem can lead to local kernel privilege escalation, kernel data corruption and/or crash. Inj3ct0r team today released related private exploit on their website , which allow normal FreeBSD users to Privilege Escalation. All systems running 64 bit Xen hypervisor running 64 bit PV guests onIntel CPUs are vulnerable to this issue. However FreeBSD/amd64 running on AMD CPUs is not vulnerable to thisparticular problem.Systems w...

“ Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life ” said Confucius. These would be the words that describe Marius Corîci the most. In 2003 he started doing business in the plumbing industry and co-founded ITS Group, a franchise for Romstal Company, the biggest plumbing installations retailer from South-Eastern Europe. In 2007 he moved into Artificial Intelligence field and founded Intelligentics, a group for Natural Language Processing. Now, he is very focused on infosec and got involved in all the biggest independent security projects in Romania: S3ntinel , Hack Me If You Can , Hack a Server and DefCamp . Marius considers himself a serial entrepreneur and is very passionate about Artificial Intelligence. Never a quitter, always a perfectionist, looking for challenges that will change the world we live in. He believes in people and the power of great teams, and he intends to start blogging in the near future. What determined you to shift your attention towar...

Four months after the gaming site Gamigo warned users about a hacker intrusion that accessed some portions of its users’ credentials, more than 8 million usernames, emails and and encrypted passwords from the site have been published on the Web, according to the data breach alert service PwnedList. The list of passwords, which were scrambled using a one-way cryptographic hash algorithm, were published earlier this month to a forum on the password-cracking website Inside Pro . According to forbe," The list also contained 8.2 million unique e-mail addresses, including 3 million American accounts from the US, 2.4 million accounts from Germany, and 1.3 million accounts from France ." Gamigo warned users in early March that an attack on the Gamigo database had exposed hashed passwords and usernames and possibly other, unspecified additional personal data. The site required users to change their account passwords. PwnedList founder Steve Thomas said, “ It’s the largest leak I’v...

The Biggest Hacking Mania has arrived - ' The Hackers Conference 2012 '.  In this first of its kind conference in India, Blackhat hackers drawn from around the world will demonstrate how they access a victim's personal information, and even confidential data available on the Android cell phone. The conference will be held on July 29 at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. The use of Linux as an operating system is increasing rapidly, thanks partly topopular distributions such as ‘RedHat’ and ‘Suse’. So far, there are very few Linuxfile infectors and they do not pose a big threat yet. However, with more desktopsrunning Linux, and probably more Linux viruses, the Linux virus situation couldbecome a bigger problem. 17 years old hacker, Aneesh Dogra will talk on " How to make a Linux ELF Virus (That works on your latest linux distribution) " at ' The Hackers Conference 2012 ' . Linux or Unix has the reputation of being "not so buggy", and of be...

Dmitry Olegovich Zubakha, a  Russian  man accused of launching distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks on Amazon.com, has been arrested this week by authorities in Cyprus based on an international warrant, the Department of Justice revealed. Zubakha, a native of Moscow, was indicted for two denial of service attacks in 2008 on the Amazon.com website. The indictment, unsealed Thursday, also details denial of service attacks on Priceline.com and eBay. " Orders from Amazon.com customers dropped significantly, as legitimate customers were unable to access the website and complete their e-commerce transactions during the pendency of the attack ," read an indictment unsealed in district court in western Washington on Thursday. The botnet involved requested "large and resource-intensive web pages" on a magnitude of between 600 and 1,000 percent of normal traffic levels, according to the indictment. The hacker is charged with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage...

Bitweasil lead developer going to Demonstrate an open source Tool called " Cryptohaze " at DEF CON 20 . The Cryptohaze Multiforcer supports CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU code (SSE, AVX, etc). All of this is aimed at either the pentester who can't spray hashes to the internet, or the hacker who would rather not broadcast what she obtained to pastebin scrapers. " Yes, that's 154B - as in Billion. It was done entirely with AMD hardware, and involved 9x6990, 4x6970, 4x5870, 2x5970, and 1x7970 - for a total of 31 GPU cores in 6 physical systems ." BitWeasil posted . WebTables is a new rainbow table technology that eliminates the need to download rainbow tables before using them, and the new Cryptohaze Multiforcer is an open source, GPLv2, network enabled platform for password cracking that is easy to extend with new algorithms for specific targets.  Bitweasil Bitweasil is the primary developer on the open source Cryptohaze tool suite, which implements network-cluster...

Hacker with nickname " mr.hack3r420 " has successfully compromise the web server of Reliance Communications ( rcom.co.in ) as shown in image ( screenshot taken by THN team and we make link hidden to save site from further misuse of damage ). Hacker most probably get this access because of Information disclosure Vulnerability in Reliance website.Most of the Folders on website are visible to everyone publicly and there is a interesting file called "Upload_AppId_VId.php" available , using which hacker may be able to upload his own php shell on the server to get access to FTP and Linux User account. This is not the first time Reliance become the victim, a few months back, hacker named "ISAC" was able to access  Reliance Communications ISP  server, and he release the list of all blocked sites by Reliance to Protest against Internet Censorship.

There was an incident that a group claiming to be the cyber hacker or hacktivist group Anonymous has threatened Dahabshiil an international funds transfer company and the leading bank in Somalia, but the international funds transfer company based in the Middle East, says Anonymous was not responsible for the attack on its banking systems. According to the report, The group alleged it was the hacktivist group Anonymous, and threatened to destroy Dahabshiil within two months if the company did not stop what the group alleged as supporting terrorist organizations and terrorists in Somalia and across the world. A group claiming to be Anonymous published thousands of account numbers, names and details online. The hackers claimed it had installed " cyber bombs " within financial institutions around the world and threatened to trigger them if the Dahabshiil did not confess within two months. In the statement the Anonymous group released, the group alleged that it was investig...

A researcher specializing in smart grids has released an open-source tool designed to assess the security of smart meters. Dubbed ' Termineter ,' the framework would allow users, such as grid operators and administrators, to test smart meters for vulnerabilities. It claims will let security researchers and penetration testers verify the security of electric utility smart meters being installed in millions of homes around the country. Termineter uses the serial port connection that interacts with the meter's optical infrared interface to give the user access to the smart meter's inner workings. The user interface is much like the interface used by the Metasploit penetration testing framework. It relies on modules to extend its testing capabilities. Spencer McIntyre, of the SecureState Research & Innovation Team, will perform the first live public demonstration of the Termineter framework during his presentation, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Sma...

Security firm Zimperium developer of Android app zANTI (Android application Toolkit) now have World Best Hacker " Kevin Mitnick " in their Team. In a Press Release , Itzhak “Zuk” Avraham said " Zimperium is honored and excited to announce our newest member of the advisory board, world renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick.We are thrilled to have Kevin on board and feel that his leadership and consultancy will help Zimperium to get to the next level,through corporate efficiency, brand recognition and better quality solutions for our clients! " Zimperium Ltd. is a privately owned start-up located in Tel Aviv, Israel; whichdesigns and develops cutting edge Intellectual Property in the field ofinformation security and mobile technology. The company was founded in 2010. " Mobile devices are the new target-rich environment. Based on lessons learned in the early days of the personal computer,businesses should adopt a proactive approach to mobile security so they don'...