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

What if you could easily host malicious websites, send phishing emails, and manage compromised hosts across diverse internet addresses? This week's Cobalt Strike adds the ability to manage multiple attack servers at once. Here's how it works: When you connect to two or more servers, Cobalt Strike will show a switch bar with buttons for each server at the bottom of your window. Click a button to make that server active. It's a lot like using tabs to switch between pages in a web browser. To make use of multiple servers, designate a role for each one. Assign names to each server's button to easily remember its role. Dumbly connecting to multiple servers isn't very exciting. The fun comes when you seamlessly use Cobalt Strike features between servers. For example: Designate one server for phishing and another for reconnaissance. Go to the reconnaissance server, setup the system profiler website. Use the phishing tool to deliver the reconnaissa...

Systems on your network log data 24/7/365. Simply allowing logs to take up disk space, reviewing them only after something has happened and deleting logs when you run low on disk space are all the strategies of an admin doomed to always being in firefighting mode, reacting to bad things when they happen. Proactive log management can help an admin get into a proactive mode You know that event log monitoring is important, since all your systems and key applications log data. But since no two systems log to the same place, or in the same format, it's almost impossible to get ahead of the logging and actually pay attention to what is being logged. That's where event log monitoring comes into play; here's why: Aggregate your logs in a central location:  With logs spread across dozens or even hundreds of systems, there's no way you can manage them where they are. Event log monitoring applications can gather up all your logs in a central location, making them easy to analyze, store, a...

A multinational security firm ' Raytheon ' has secretly developed software called ' RIOT ', capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future Behavior by mining data from social networking websites. The multi billion dollar company, didn't want its concept video revealed, but the Guardian posted it anyway. Raytheon has not yet sold RIOT to any clients but has been shared with the US government as part of a joint research project to develop a Big Data system capable of surveilling large parts of the population. The software can also pull metadata from pictures taken to pinpoint a user's location when the picture was taken. From this and other location data taken from applications i.e Foursquare, the software can predict future movements of users. The video shows how Riot works on a sample Raytheon staff member, tracking his regular visits to Washington Nationals Park and a local gym. RIOT creates unique profiles from publicly available data, inclu...

One week after launching a Bug bounty program by the Kim Dotcom 's new file-storage and sharing service MEGA claims to have fixed seven vulnerabilities. Although Mega hasn't shared how much money and to whom it paid out in the first week. But as promised, it is clear that MEGA paid out thousands of dollars in bug bounties during the first week of its security program. We found bug hunter yesterday (tweeted)- Mr.  Frans Rosén received 1000 Euros in the bug fixing challenge. This tweet was also Re-tweeted by Kim Dotcom later, that confirmed Frans's class III bugs reward. Congratulations @ fransrosen for XSS in #MEGA . Handsome EUR 1000 in Bug Bounty Program twitter.com/fransrosen/sta… — The Hacker News™ (@TheHackersNews) February 10, 2013 In a blog post, Mega explained how it classifies vulnerabilities and their impacts. Vulnerabilities were classified into VI classes, with I being the lowest risk and VI being the highest. Seven qualified bug details are as shown...

Mozilla's Firefox OS, the mobile operating system from the company that makes the Firefox browser build entirely on open web standards and having ability to beat Android or iOS.  Firefox OS is Mozilla's ambitious attempt to build an operating system that brings more openness to the walled gardens of Apple's iOS and Google's Android. New Operating Systems for Smartphones Its a new mobile operating system built entirely using open web standards and with codename  Boot to Gecko , means a Linux distro that automatically loads Gecko or in more simple words apps for Firefox OS are basically just websites written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The Web is the Platform, which means not only taking down barriers, but also a lighter system that makes your apps run smoothly and an optimal battery life. Firefox OS written with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Mozilla has also added some extra hooks to Firefox OS that allow developers to access a phone's hardware v...

Several Myanmar journalists have recently received warnings from Google that their Gmail accounts may have been targets of state-sponsored attacks. After they login to their Gmail accounts, warning message," We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer " was displayed on top as shown. Google had begun the policy of notifying users of suspicious activity in June. " We are constantly on the lookout for malicious activity on our systems, in particular attempts by third parties to log into users' accounts unauthorized. " Google said in a blog post . " If you see this warning it does not necessarily mean that your account has been hijacked. It just means that we believe you may be a target, of phishing or malware for example, and that you should take immediate steps to secure your account ." The Voice Weekly Journal's editor Aung Soe, Aye Aye Win, a Myanmar correspondent for the Associated Press, and Myat Thura, a Mya...

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection act (CISPA) will be reintroduced by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) before the US House next week . CISPA would've allowed any company to give away all the data its collected on you if asked by the government and The bill that plan to introduce next week will be identical to the version of CISPA that passed the House last spring. May be the recent reports of cyber espionage against The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal,  along with attacks on the Federal Reserve 's Web site and on several U.S. banks have brought the issue back to the fore. " This is clearly not a theoretical threat - the recent spike in advanced cyber attacks against the banks and newspapers makes that crystal clear, " Rogers said in a statement. If implemented, An independent Intelligence Community Inspector General would review the government's use of any...

Malwares are getting updated during the age of social networking. FortiGuard Labs researchers have discovered a new malware called ' Rodpicom Botnet ' that spreads via messaging applications such as Skype and MSN Messenger. Dubbed W32/Rodpicom.A - Rodpicom Botnet sends a message to the victim with a link to a malicious site that leads to downloadable content. When the user clicks the link, the attack downloads another strain of malware, known as Dorkbot . Once the target machine is infected, it checks to see if the victim is using any messaging applications such as Skype or MSN Messenger.  It is revealed that, the malware employs new stealth tactics, including an exception handling technique that generates its own error to dodge analysis and relies on an anti-emulator that attacks the heuristic-scanning capabilities in antivirus software and enables its code to jump around several hundred times. The malware is enough smart to checks the language of the installed operating...

Microsoft next updates are fully loaded with 57 different security vulnerabilities through 12 separate updates. It will roll out fixes as it always does on Patch Tuesday, the second Tuesday of every month. Anyone who uses Windows as their primary operating system will be quite familiar with Patch Tuesday. According to Microsoft's advisory , The 12 security update including two for Internet Explorer (IE), that will patch a near-record 57 vulnerabilities in the browser, Windows, Office and the enterprise-critical Exchange Server email software. Part of this update will be security patches for every single version of Internet Explorer. Apparently, this is to address a security hole that leaves users open to being exploited through drive-by attacks. Out of the 12 updates, five are considered " critical, " and others are labeled " important, ". As always, the critical patches will automatically install for any Windows users with automatic updates enabled. Two of...

Anonymous user asked a question on Quora that, How and Why Google is showing p*rn results in when one type  equation -4^(1/4) into Google search query ? This is really a very strange bug on Google. Just after that  Jeremy Hoffman , Google software engineer replied him, " Hi, I'm a Google search engineer. Anon User and Anon User did some excellent analysis. As a web search query, [-4^(1/4)] is interpreted like [-4 "1 4"], as in "Find me pages which contain a 1 next to a 4, but which do not contain a 4." This should return zero results, because it is impossible to satisfy both requirements. " The bug was apparently uncovered via when user tried to use Google for solving mathematical equations, but the search engine misinterpret his queries. Because it was a combination of impossible questions Google brings back p*rn sites results, any Logic ? Some similar example Queries are: -s "s 2″ -3 "1 3″ -title "title 4″ -4 "1 4″ How -s ...

Bit9 disclosed Friday that hackers had stolen digital code signing certificates from its network and have utilized it to sign malware. Bit9, a company that provides software and network security services to the U.S. government and at least 30 Fortune 100 firms. " As a result, a malicious third party was able to illegally gain temporary access to one of our digital code-signing certificates that they then used to illegitimately sign malware ," Bit9 Chief Executive Patrick Morley said in a blog post . The attackers then sent signed malware to at least three of Bit9's customers, although Bit9 isn't saying which customers were affected or to what extent. " Since we discovered this issue, we have been working closely with all of our customers to ensure they are no longer vulnerable to malware associated with the affected certificate ." and company said it has resolved the issue. It is not the first time that hackers have breached a security firm as part of a ...

The hacker, known as Guccifer , targeted several e-mail accounts and exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the former US President Bush family, including both former U.S. presidents. Hacked Emails includes the AOL account of his daughter Dorothy Bush Koch; family friends Willard Hemingway and Jim Nantz; former First Lady Barbara Bush's brother; and George H W Bush's sister-in-law. Some of the e-mails contain catty comments about another former president, Bill Clinton. The photos and e-mails were uploaded yesterday to an online account that appears to have been hacked for the purpose of hosting the material including confidential October 2012 list of home addresses, cell phone numbers, and e-mails for dozens of Bush family members, including both former presidents, their siblings, and their children. The hacker also intercepted photos that George W. Bush e-mailed two months ago to his sister showing paintings that he was working o...

The hardware qualification is a very important issue, recent vulnerabilities discovered in network appliances of various manufacturer have alerted security community once again on the necessity to validate the hardware especially for large consume product. The last news is related to a vulnerability related to the Intel's 82574L Ethernet controller that expose equipment to risk of "packet of death." Attack. Star2Star 's chief technology officer Kristian Kielhofner identified the cause of the problems after customers experienced random crashes. Researchers at Star2Star after the analysis of lot traffic identified the cause of the problem in the format of a packet managed by a particular VoIP manufacturer. But as yet it is unclear how widespread the problem is or how other Intel hardware is affected. Kielhofner, wrote : " The system and Ethernet interfaces would appear fine," "and then after a random amount of traffic the interface woul...

A hacker 'Cahya Fitrianta' sentenced to eight years in prison by the West Jakarta District Court judges for hacking into many economic websites to steal money and funding that money to terrorist groups. He is also ordered to pay a Rp 500 million ($51,000) fine. He is charged with breaking into many sites, for running online fraud of billions of dollars and fund that money to terrorist training in Poso, Central Sulawesi. Cahya was arrested in May last year in a Bandung hotel. The defendant, along with another man, Rizki Gunawan. Police in May arrested Rizki, accusing him of hacking a marketing firm's website to steal money in order to fund militant training. They both accused of channeling money to terrorism suspect Umar Patek , who was sentenced this year to 20 years for his role in the 2002 Bali bombing. " Aside from engaging in a vicious conspiracy, the defendant was also found guilty of laundering money, which he obtained from hacking the www.speedline.c...

Syrian Electronic Army strike again! This time hacking group hijack Twitter accounts and a Facebook page of Sky News Arabia and also hack their Emails. The accounts affected were the channel's main twitter handle @skynewsarabia and the @skynewsarabia account used for cultural and entertainment news, as well as the Facebook page facebook/skynewsarabia . Sky News regained control of the hacked accounts some how later. During an Interview with hackers at Syrian Electronic Army, hackers said that they first target Sky News's Email panel which is using Outlook Web App. Below is the screenshot of hacked inbox: Then it was too easy for hackers to reset the password of Twitter accounts and Facebook pages attached to that mail using Password forget option. Hackers said, they attack because of the bias that the foreign media has against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad and their support for the rebels in the Syrian conflict.

Microsoft teamed up with Symantec to take down a nasty malware affecting thousands upon thousands of PCs. Bamital botnet  hijacked people's search experiences and redirected victims to potentially dangerous sites that could leave them vulnerable to other online threats and steal their personal information. Experts from the organizations obtained a court order and shut down servers at a data center in New Jersey and convinced operators in Virginia to shut down a server they control in the Netherlands on Wednesday. The Bamital botnet threatened the US$12.7 billion online advertising industry by generating fraudulent clicks on Internet ads. Microsoft's research shows that Bamital hijacked more than 8 million computers over the past two years. Microsoft says that the botnet affected many major search engines and browsers including Bing, Yahoo, and Google offerings. Bamital's organizers also had the ability to take control of infected PCs, installing other types o...

Hacking group 'today hack and deface Hostgator Indian domain  Hostgator.in  , which handles the Indian Operations of Hostgator.com with locally available servers and localized currency billing as well as support. Rather than editing homepage or other pages of site, hacker just added new file at on ftp with defacement purpose. At the time of writing, the page has been removed by firm but we had taken a screenshot this morning as shown below: The defacement page ends with message," We Are Anonymous ". No doubt that group have nothing to do with Hacktivist group Anonymous, but may be they use this term just for fun. Mirror of hacker is also uploaded to  Legend-h .

John Arquilla, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and former military adviser has urged President Barack Obama to pardon the British computer hacker Gary McKinnon and to recruit master hackers to US Cyber Command. Gary McKinnon faced extradition for hacking into Pentagon and Nasa systems, and but they believe that he could encourage other hackers to become government cyber warriors. ' If the notion of trying to attract master hackers to our cause is ever to take hold, this might be just the right case in which President Obama should consider using his power to pardon, ' says Arquilla. China is widely thought to employ hackers, so the Pentagon aims to expand its cyber security personnel from 900 to 4,900 in the next few years and Hackers are frequently employed by security firms after serving sentences and Arquilla suggest Obama to do so. ' Today's masters of cyberspace are not unlike the German rocket scientists who, after World War II, were so...

A Chinese malware campaign called ' Beebus ' specifically targeting the aerospace and defense industries has been uncovered by FireEye security researchers. Beebus is designed to steal information, and begins its infiltration, as so many attacks do, with spear-phishing emails. Operation Beebus very related to Operation Shady RAT and was first detected in April 2011. The attacks carried out by  spear phishing attack and drive-by downloads as a means of infecting end users. malicious Whitepapers or PDFs were mailed to targets and by using known flaws, malware was able install Trojan backdoors on vulnerable systems. The malware communicates with a remote command and control (CnC) server. FireEye discovered the attacks on some of its customers in the aerospace and defence last March and the Vulnerability in the Windows OS known as DLL search order hijacking was used to drops a DLL called ntshrui.DLL in the C:\Windows directory.  It has modules ...

A Trojan that attacks Russian Internet users using a new trick to spread itself. Known as " Bicololo " was first discovered in October 2012 and specially designed to steal login credentials from users.  For this, the malware modify the system Hosts file (i.e etc/hosts) to host perfect phishing sites via DNS poisoning to collect social networking and email credentials. In a recent post from Avast antivirus,  Bicololo  continued to evolve and spread even further. Because it is difficult for a user to determine that he is redirected to a phishing site the attack going smoothly. In Oct, They found that all these phishing sites were resolving via servers located at 69.197.136.99, 94.249.188.224 and 178.63.214.97, 94.249.189.21 , which originally were hosted on afraid.org servers. But now this malware spreading via standard 404 Error webpage error of hacked sites. The most frequent phishing clones of vk.com , odnokl...

A Dutch hacker was sentenced to 12 years in a US prison on Friday for trafficking over 100,000 credit card numbers stolen in a computer hacking conspiracy. David Benjamin Schrooten , 22,  known as "Fortezza" in the hacker world, pleaded guilty in November to criminal charges related to hacking, bank fraud, and identity theft, according to Western District of Washington US Attorney Jenny Durkan. At sentencing U.S. District Judge Ricardo S. Martinez asked him, " I don't think you would ever consider walking into someone's home, pulling out a gun and robbing them… Did it ever occur to you that you were doing that to all your victims? " Investigators estimate that tens of thousands of people were affected. The damage amounted to more than 63 million dollars. He is Sentenced to 12 years in prison for a computer hacking and credit card fraud scheme that victimized people around the world. A California man is set to go on trial by the middle of the year for his purp...

The Computer networks of Energy Department were attacked by unknown hackers in a major cyber attack two weeks ago and personal information on several hundred employees was compromised. The Washington Free Beacon reports that, FBI agents are investigating the attacks and 14 computer servers and 20 workstations reportedly were penetrated during the attack. Officials are working to determine the exact nature of the attack and the extent of potential damage. " They believe the sophisticated penetration attack was not limited to stealing personal information. There are indications the attackers had other motives, possibly including plans to gain future access to classified and other sensitive information ." The security breach resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of employee and contractor Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of several hundred people. Department is in the process of notifying employees whose information was stolen. However, Chinese ...

PKNIC, The Pakistan domain registrar of .com.pk, .pk, org.pk and others domains has been reportedly hacked again yesterday. A hackers group named PakBugs has claimed that they have successfully penetrated PKNIC servers and gained control of around 23,000 domains which included some of the most popular pakistani media websites also. This is not the first time that PKNIC servers have been compromised. Earlier a Turkish hacker successfully managed to penetrate PKNIC servers and redirected 284 .pk domains. Hacker redirect / deface many websites by changing the DNS records (DNS spoofing) of the websites which are maintained by PKNIC. However, it took the hacker 5 hour to submit all his defacement's on zone-h to make mirror's.

Kaspersky Lab has revealed a new type of malware that can infect your computer when connected smartphone or tablet. Two such application, Super Clean and DroidCleaner found in Google Play android market. These two are actually same application, just released with two different names. These applications apparently disguised as a tool to clean memory for the Android operating system but after installing and running it displays a list of all running some processes and then restart the device. Later, in background, the app downloads three files autorun.inf, folder.ico, and svchosts.exe in phone. When user connect infected android mobile phone to any Windows computer with active Autorun or Autoplay functionality for USB devices, the svchosts.exe file ( Backdoor.MSIL.Ssucl.a ) is automatically executed on computer. A similar situation may arise in case of SD card. Before apps were removed by Google, they may together have been downloaded up to...

As you know, many enthusiasts Android mobile users wishing for alternate of WINE software for Android mobiles or tablet as well, that allow applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Sounds Interesting ? Alexandre Julliard , the original developer behind the Wine software project working on upcoming WINE version that will allow you to run windows apps on Android platform. Wine development talks being held during FOSDEM 2013 . In a Demo Julliard showed lite version of Wine running on Android, was quite slow. Anyway, this Wine port for Android is an active work-in-progress and hasn't received much attention yet. Before this Winulator makes it possible to run some classic Windows games on Android devices. Android devices currently use ARM-based chips and Intel has also been pushing its low power Atom x86 processors for Android phones and tablets, so Wine for Android could also theoretically run on devices with x86 chip...

A new Cyber Crimeware kit arrived in Hacking scenes called 'PiceBOT' just like other Latin American botnets such as vOlk (Mexico) & S.A.P.Z (Peru) and  cost just $140 in underground market for Cyber criminals. Like other amazing exploit kits, the main purpose is the distribution of malware that steals financial information through local pharming attacks. Bad bots perform malicious tasks allowing an attacker to take complete control over an affected computer for the criminal to control remotely. Once infected, these machines may also be referred to as 'zombies'. Kaspersky uncovered that this kit has already been adopted by Latin American cyber criminals to target clients of major banks and so far financial bodies from Chile, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Argentina under attack. Detected as  Trojan-Dropper.Win32.Injector , the malware having couple of dozen variants. Malware is sti...

Remember the DNS Changer malware that infected at least four million computers in more than 100 countries, including 500,000 in the United States, with malicious software or malware ? Valeri Aleksejev, 32 years old from Estonia, is the first of the seven individuals to enter a plea, admitting his guilt for his role in the global scam that netted approximately $14 million. He faces up to 25 years in prison, deportation and the forfeiture of $7 million. The other six individuals have been named as Anton Ivanov, Vladimir Tsastsin, Timur Gerassimenko, Dmitri Jegorov, Konstantin Poltev, and Andrey Taame.  Alekseev was the first large-scale Internet fraud criminal case came to trial. The scam had several components, including a click-hijacking fraud in which Malware was delivered to victims' PCs when they visited specially crafted websites or when they downloaded phony video codec software. The malware changed the DNS settings of the infected computers, and even in...

DefenseCode researchers have discovered a critical security vulnerability that allows remote unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code under root privileges in the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) implementation developed by Broadcom and used by many routers with Broadcom chipsets. Routers with vulnerable Broadcom UPnP stack are mostly based on Broadcom chipset. " We have found that, in fact, same vulnerable firmware component is also used in at least two other Cisco Linksys models - WRT54G3G and probably WRT310N. Could be others. " researchers said . The vulnerability is located within the wanipc and wanppp modules of the Broadcom UPnP stack, which is used by manufacturers that deliver routers based on the Broadcom chipset. The UPnP service is intended to be used on local networks, but Rapid7 found that there are over 80 million devices on the Internet that respond to UPnP discovery requests, making them vulnerable to remote attacks. The vul...

A hacker with handle name (~!White!~) today disclose SQL injection vulnerabilities in dozens of Military, United Nation and Pentagon domains. SQL Injection is one of the many web attack mechanisms used by hackers to steal data from organizations. Through a Pastebin note hacker announce more details about his findings in many sensitive websites, including Pentagon Defense Post Office Website, Office of the Deputy Director for Science Programs, Wiesbaden Military Community, NMCI Legacy Applications, Darby Military Community, Department of Economic and Social Affairs at United Nation and many more. SQL Injection is the hacking technique which attempts to pass SQL commands through a web application for execution by the back-end database. If not sanitized properly, web applications may result in SQL Injection attacks that allow hackers to view information from the database or even can wipe it out. Hacker also claimed to hack ...

In recent The Hacker News updates, we have reported about some major hacking events and critical vulnerabilities i.e Cyber attack and spying on The New York Times and Wall Street Journal by Chinese Hackers,  Security Flaws in UPnP protocol , Botnet attack hack 16,000 Facebook accounts, 700,000 accounts hacked in Africa and new android malware that infect more that 620,000 users . Today Twitter also announced that they have recorded some unusual access patterns that is identified as unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data. Unknown hackers breach Twitter this week and may have gained access to passwords and other information for as many as 250,000 user accounts " the attackers may have had access to limited user information – usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords " said Bob Lord ,Director of Information Security, at Twitter. For security reasons twitter have reset passwords and revoked session tokens...