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Mohamed Ramadan from Attack-Secure discovered a critical vulnerability in Etsy's iPhone application. Etsy is a social commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items as well as art and craft supplies. Any attacker on the same network can sniff traffic (including user password) invisibly without any warning from Etsy app. Its is very similar to the man in the middle attack reported in iPhone Instagram app a few days back. Bug Hunting ! Because Etsy having a Security Bug Bounty Program , so first Mohamed was trying to find a vulnerability in Etsy website , later he found that they have enough good security. Because Etsy mobile apps are eligible in bug bounty program, so next try was on Mobile apps. Mohamed finally  downloaded the latest version 2.2 and installed that on his iPhone 4S with iOS 6 and also on his ipad. Then he configured his Burp Suite proxy 1.5 to listen on all interfaces on port 8080 in invisible mode....

Cui, a fifth year grad student from the Columbia University Intrusion Detection Systems Lab and co-founder of Red Balloon Security, has demonstrated an attack on common Cisco-branded Voice over IP (VoIP) phones that could easily eavesdrop on private conversations remotely. The vulnerability Cui demonstrated was based on work he did over the last year on what he called ‘ Project Gunman v2 ’, where a laser printer firmware update could be compromised to include additional, and potentially malicious, code. The latest vulnerability is based on a lack of input validation at the syscall interface. Cui said, “ allows arbitrary modification of kernel memory from userland, as well as arbitrary code execution within the kernel. This, in turn, allows the attacker to become root, gain control over the DSP , buttons, and LEDs on the phone. ” While he did not specify the precise vulnerability, Cui said it allowed him to patch the phone's software with arbitrary pieces of code, and that t...

A vulnerability in different versions of Microsoft‘s widely used browser Internet Explorer can allow hackers to track the movements of your mouse. Microsoft is investigating reports of a mouse-tracking flaw that puts virtual keyboards and keypads at risk to remote monitoring. Spider.io, a UK-based company in the advertising analytics field, alleged that two unnamed companies are improperly using a flaw that allows them to track whether display advertisements, sometimes buried far down in web pages, are actually viewed by users. Almost every US-based user of Internet Explorer will have their mouse cursor tracked via this exploit almost every day they browse the web. Microsoft has confirmed that every version of Internet Explorer, from version 6 dating back to 2001 up to 10, released this year, is vulnerable. How this works ? All a hacker needs to do is, buy a ad space on any webpage and wait until a user visits it. If the tab remains open, the hacker has continuous access to use...

This Friday I was working with my co-security researcher " Christy Philip Mathew " in +The Hacker News  Lab for testing the Cookie Handling Vulnerabilities in the most famous email services i.e Hotmail and Outlook. Well, both are merged now and part of the same parent company - Microsoft, the software giant.  Vulnerability allows an attacker to Hijack accounts in a very simple way, by just exporting & importing cookies of an user account from one system to attacker's system, and our results shows that even after logout by victim, the attacker is still able to reuse cookies at his end. There are different way of stealing cookies, that we will discuss below. In May 2012, another Indian security researcher Rishi Narang claimed similar vulnerability in Linkedin website. Vulnerability Details Many websites including Microsoft services uses cookies to store the session information in the user's web browser. Cookies are responsible for main...

A former University of Georgia (UGA) student under investigation for allegedly hacking into the school’s computerized personnel records system committed suicide last month. Stell attended classes at UGA between 2005 and 2007. The Data breach was carried out around two months back near 15th October and that may have led to compromised Full names and Social Security numbers, along with additional sensitive data of 8,500 current and former school employees. According to reports , an investigation into the security breach was ongoing when the suspect, Charles Staples Stell , 26, was found dead at his home in Athens on Nov. 7. The UGA Police Department's computer forensics team was investigating the hack. They said, There is no evidence that the compromised data were used to commit additional crimes. The employee files involved in the security breach were found under the control of Stell during the ensuing forensic evaluation of evidence obtained during the course of the invest...

Japan's National Police Agency has offered a monetary reward for a wanted hacker, use programming languages like C# to create a virus called " iesys.exe " and Hijack systems of innocent people to post aggressive messages on Internet on behalf of Users.  Method called a " Syberian Post Office " to post messages to popular Japanese bulletin board. Hacker use cross-site request forgery exploit, that allow hackers to making online postings via innocent users automatically. The messages included warnings of plans for mass killings at an elementary school posted to a city website. It is the first time that Japan's National Police Agency has offered a monetary reward for a wanted hacker  and will pay up to 3 million yen (US$36,000). The case is an embarrassing one for the police, in which earlier this year four individuals were wrongly arrested after their PCs were hacked and used to post  such messages on public bulletin boards. " Up until now t...

The Homepage of BSNL ( Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited ) http://www.bsnl.co.in/ was hacked today morning by hacking group Anonymous.  BSNL is an Indian state-owned telecommunications company, the largest provider of fixed telephony and fourth largest mobile telephony provider in India, and is also a provider of broadband services. The website's homepage was hacked saying, "  Hacked by Anonymous India,  support Aseem trivedi (cartoonist) and alok dixit on the hunger strike,  remove IT Act 66a,  databases of all 250 bsnl site has been deleted .............Do not think of BACKUP "  with a images of Mr. Aseem while he was arrested by Police. Hack was performed by Anonymous India hacking group and claiming to hack whole server, with 250 Databases. Hacker wrote on deface page, that they deleted all the databases and dump credentials of BSNL database servers in a pastebin File . Analyzing the dump of database After analyzing ...

The U.S. Department of Justice said on Tuesday that they’ve arrested 10 suspects from from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the United States involved in a global botnet operation that infected more than 11 million systems. The ring is said to have caused more than $850m in losses in one of the largest cyber crime hauls in history. Officials said international cyber crime rings linked to Butterfly (aka Mariposa) botnet, first discovered in December 2008 and shut down a year later, infected over 12 million PCs worldwide and was spread primarily through file-sharing and instant messaging attacks. It also harvested financial information from over 800,000 victims. FBI said , " Facebook’s security team provided assistance to law enforcement throughout the investigation by helping to identify the root cause, the perpetrators, and those affected by the malware. Yahos targeted Facebook users from 2010 to October 2012, a...

Some 22,300 purported student and staff records held by the Australian Defence Force Academy were stolen and published online last month. A member of the Anonymous group, known as Darwinaire , is claiming responsibility for the theft. The systems were compromised in November, with UNSW notifying staff and students within a day, but has only now come to light. Among the victims are hundreds of senior officers in the army, navy and air force, as well as military personnel from other nations who are enrolled at the academy. Hacker express the lack of security as '' I know, right, very surprised I didn't get kicked out. So simple, took like three minutes , ''. The University of Canberra in which the ADFA resides had warned students of possible phishing attacks but said the compromised passwords were mostly redundant.  Darwinare, who describes himself as ''black hacker'', has previously breached the networks of online bookstore Amazo...

The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters published a new message on their Pastebin profile , warning of a new round of cyber attacks against U.S. financial institutions, beginning this week. In September and October , al-Qassam launched widespread distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against numerous banking websites . A Bank of America spokesperson told that the bank is " aware of the reports of possible cyber attacks and [is] monitoring [its] systems, which are fully operational .". Hacker said in new warning note ," After stopping one month attack of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Group to American banks, today, this group has announced a new cycle of attacks, via an Email which has been sent to us, and has acclaimed that its aim is to compensate guilty offends to holy Prophet of Islam, Mohammad(PBUH). Also, in internet conversations earlier, this group had been stated that these attacks won’t stopped and even in new announcements, it’s been marked that there will b...

With the release of the Microsoft security bulletins for December 2012, Company flag total 7 updates for Windows users, where one is rated as critical that could lead to remote code execution, where as other two are rated as important which fix flaws that could result in the operating system's security features being bypassed. All of the IE fixes involve use-after-free memory vulnerabilities. Where as kernel level exploits bundled into mass-exploitation kits is like Blackhole. In addition to IE, Microsoft is fixing a critical flaw in Microsoft Word that could enable attackers to execute remote code. The vulnerability could be exploited by way of a malformed Rich Text Format (RTF) document. Also Fonts can also be used as a potential attack vector, as this Patch Tuesday reveals. A pair of critical font parsing vulnerabilities are being patched this month, one for OpenType and the other for TrueType fonts. Details of all Updates : MS12-07...

ReVuln Ltd. , a small security company headed by Donato Ferrante and Luigi Auriemma, post a video that demonstrates that how attacks can gain root on the appliances. Samsung Smart TV contain a vulnerability which allows remote attackers to swipe data from attached storage devices. In this demonstration readers will see how it is possible to use a 0-day vulnerability to retrieve sensitive information, root access, and ultimately monitor and fully control the device remotely. Auriemma said, “ We have tested different Samsung televisions of the latest generations running the latest version of their firmware.  Unfortunately we can't disclose additional information but we can only say that almost all the people having a Samsung TV at home or in their offices are affected by this vulnerability. ".

Saudi Arabia's national oil company " Aramco " is the country’s largest oil production facility and is a significant exporter in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. They said that a cyber attack against it in August which damaged some 30,000 computers was aimed at stopping oil and gas production at the biggest OPEC exporter. The interior ministry said it was carried out by organised hackers from several different foreign countries and Aramco employees and contractors were not involved. “ The main target in this attack was to stop the flow of oil and gas to local and international markets and thank God they were not able to achieve their goals ,” Abdullah al-Saadan, Aramco’s vice president for corporate planning, said on Al Ekhbariya television. “ Not a drop of oil was lost and the company was able to restore productivity in record time ,” he added. The hackers used several methods to hide their location The attack used a computer viru...

Team Ghostshell a Hacktivists group of hackers, who before was in news for hacking Major Universities Around The Globe and leaked 120,000 records, are once again hit major organisations and expose around 1.6 million accounts  Hacker name the project as #ProjectWhiteFox , means " Freedom of Information " . These leaked 1.6 millions user accounts belongs to aerospace, nanotechnology, banking, law, education, government, military, all kinds of wacky companies & corporations working for the department of defense, airlines and more. In a Pastebin Note hackers mention, " How we went from 'cyber-criminals' to 'hacktivists' to 'e-terrorists' to 'bad actors' to blacklisted. #ProjectHellFire got the US wary of us, at that time we still wasn't sure if GhostShell had gotten X'd, but when the second release of #ProjectWestWind came out, you guys got so hyped about it that we knew it had started to unfold. " Hacked ...

Anonymous hackers once again hit Egyptian Government Websites and taken down. Hackers react under operation named #OpEgypt and hit 30 websites with DDos attack. Hacktivist using the handle @AnonymousGrupo claimed the responsibility of attack. Attacked websites include, The Egyptian Presidency website, The Egyptian Cabinet, Trade Agreements Sector (TAS), Maritime Transport site, Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, parliament website, Income Tax and many more. At the time of writing, many sites has been restored, but a few like http://www.presidency.gov.eg/ is still under maintenance. The Reason of Hack is mentioned in the banner shown above, was posted their facebook page. Readers can find list of sites under attack at Pastebin Note here .

A Gold Coast, Australian medical centre computers are infected with some ransom malware by a group of Russian hackers . The hackers encrypted the practice’s patient database, demanding payment of $4000 for the files to be decrypted. " Cyber criminals based mainly throughout Eastern Europe look for rich targets, places with identifying information to extort, " Mr Phair, director of the Centre for Internet Safety and a former investigator with the Australian High-Tech Crime Centre. There have been 11 similar offences in Queensland this year, according to police. David Wood, Miami Family Medical Centre's co-owner said, " We've got all the anti-virus stuff in place - there's no sign of a virus. They literally got in, hijacked the server and then ran their encryption software ". The server with encrypted information is being held offline and an IT contractor is working with the practice to restore a backup of patient records. IT security exper...

" H4ksniper " hacker claiming responsibility for disrupting three South African government websites. This morning after hack, website of The social development department opened to a black page with a window containing the animated graphic “ Website hacked by H4ksniper ”. Another message on the deface page was " Hello South Africa :D , Bad News For You IM BACK ! ..You Messed With Us & Now You Must Suffer..From Morocco with love. " On asking, hacker said that the reason of hack is " We all know that SA is the first supporter of the [República Árabe Saharaui Democrática] RASD and the enemy of Morocco since a long time and we are hackers and our goal is defending our country... " From statement, its clear that hacker belongs to Morocco and claiming to defend it from its enemy. Defaced domains : http://www.dsd.gov.za/ http://www.population.gov.za/ http://www.pnc.gov.za/ Mirror Links: http://www.th3mirror.com/mirror/id/146186/ http...

Hacker Supporting Anonymous Group, with his nickname - " PV~E.rr0r " hack 516 websites.  Deface page shows a very cool animated Anonymous logo with text " We unite as one but no one can divide us. Expect us! " Because hacker intention was not to harm the website, so he has not change or delete any file, rather he just just upload his deface page on each site at "/Err0r.html" . In a message, Hacker told The Hacker News that purpose of hacking website is just to show their admins that they are vulnerable and need more security. Hacker also mention on deface page " Hello admin, I am here to warn you about your secrutiy, It kinda sucks 70% Security 30% Dumbness. We hacked this site to put a warning before the Blackhat hackers come. Please cooperate! " Rest at end page reads " We are Anonymous, We are legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget, United as one, Divided by zero, Expect us. #Knowledge is power. Don't learn to ha...

Most of People are curious to become Hackers, but they do not know where to start, If you are in the same situation, then " Hacking S3crets " Book will guide you through the basic and advanced steps of Hacking and will help you develop The Hacker Attitude. Author Sai Satish, and Co-Author K. Srinivasa rao with Aditya Gupta put together Ethical hacking with examples of live websites. Contents of the Book 1. Basic Hacking 2. email-Hacking 3. Google Hacking 4. Websites and databases Hacking 5. Windows Passwords Cracking in seconds 6. Backtrack 7. Metasploit 8. Wireless Cracking 9. Mobile Hacking To get reviews, we distribute book to few readers share the feedback after reading this book , as given below: Review from Nikhil Kulkarni An awesome book to start off with if you are interested in hacking. It unwraps various methods and techniques performed by hackers today. Being into security field from past 4 years, I've...

Creator of the GNU Project & Free Software Foundation's Leader Richard Stallman has called out Ubuntu as being "spyware". Why ?  Because the operating system sends data to Ubuntu maker Canonical when a user searches the desktop. How ? Due to the Amazon search capabilities that have been integrated into Ubuntu's  Unity desktop environment with the Dash. First introduced in Ubuntu 12.10. Surveillance Program ?  Stallman equates the Amazon search integration into the Ubuntu desktop as having installed surveillance code. He said, " Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical’s servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.) " Stallman’s post , " The ads are not the core of the problem ," " The main issue is the spying. Canonical says it doe...

Rootkit named as "Necurs" infect 83,427 unique machines during the month of November 2012. It is a multi-purpose rootkits capable of posing a threat to both 32 and 64-bit Windows systems. Distributed via drive-by download on the websites that host the BlackHole exploit kit. Like other rootkits it is able to hide itself from detection and also capable of downloading additional malware from outside. Attackers can maintain remote access to a machine this way in order to monitor activity, send spam or install scareware. Rootkit also stop security applications from functioning and hence no detection. Microsoft list this as  Trojan:Win32/Necurs . Trojan:Win32/Necurs is a family of malware that work together to download additional malware and enable backdoor access and control of your computer. The malware can be installed on its own or alongside rogue security software, such as Rogue:Win32/Winwebsec. The malware downloads itself into the folder " %windi...

According to reports, the hackers targeted personal computers retired Admiral Mike Mullen , the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The FBI is hunting for foreign hackers. Mullen is currently teaching WWS 318: U.S. Military and National and International Diplomacy and will teach an unnamed graduate seminar in the spring. According to Mullen's aides, however, he did not save or view classified information on his personal computers. Agents from an FBI cyber-security unit contacted Mullen in late October or early November, and asked that he surrender his computers in connection with the ongoing inquiry. Mullen agreed, and in early November at least one FBI agent collected the computers at his office at the U.S. Naval Institute. One official said that evidence gathered by the FBI points to China as the origin of the hacking, and that it appeared the perpetrators were able to access a personal email account of Mullen. Officials said that...

Samsung which is currently believed to the highest Smartphones Seller in the World is now providing a Remote tracking solution in all its smartphones to Track the lost phone with the name " Samsung Dive ". The Service is based on the Architecture which primarily acquires precise location of the smart phone using it GPS and other subsidiary location acquisition techniques. The Service is basically meant to be used by the users to track their phone in case of theft or lost phone. Security Researcher Jiten Jain discovered that this GPS based location tracking service provided by manufacturer (Samsung) is also vulnerable to Theft and Malwares. To use this inbuilt tracking Service, User has to simply create an account with Samsung (www.samsungdive.com). Users than have to enable remote services to track device and wipe data remotely. The permission can be disabled or modified only by the Samsung account holder after logging in and cannot be disabled by anyone else...