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

Kaspersky Lab's team of experts recently published a new research report that analyzed that Cyber criminals have targeted government officials in more than 20 countries, including Ireland and Romania with a new piece of malware called ' MiniDuke '. In a recent attack, malware has infected government computers this week in an attempt to steal geopolitical intelligence. The computers were infected via a modified Adobe PDF email attachment, and the perpetrators were operating from servers based in Panama and Turkey. According to Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky," I remember this style of malicious programming from the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. I wonder if these types of malware writers, who have been in hibernation for more than a decade, have suddenly awoken and joined the sophisticated group of threat actors active in the cyber world. " Last week Adobe released an update that patches the Adobe PDF bug (CVE-2013-6040) used in the atta...

Do you still have Java installed? There is a bad news for you ! FireEye has detected yet another Java zero-day vulnerability being exploited in attacks in the wild. The vulnerability targets browsers that have the latest version of the Java plugin installed Java v1.6 Update 41 and Java v1.7 Update 15 and  FireEye warned that the   vulnerability is being exploited to install a remote-access trojan dubbed McRat , researchers from security firm. " Not like other popular Java vulnerabilities in which security manager can be disabled easily, this vulnerability leads to arbitrary memory read and write in JVM process," "After triggering the vulnerability, exploit is looking for the memory which holds JVM internal data structure like if security manager is enabled or not, and then overwrites the chunk of memory as zero. " The exploit is reportedly different from the one used to attack Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and several other companies last mont...

Cloud note-taking service Evernote has been hacked and now you have to reset your password  imminently . A ccording to  a post on the official Evernote blog , an  unidentified attacker compromise the servers and extracted usernames, email addresses, and passwords. " Evernote’s Operations & Security team has discovered and blocked suspicious activity on the Evernote network that appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service. " But those passwords were encrypted, so  all users must change their password before they can log back into their account. " In our security investigation, we have found no evidence that any of the content you store in Evernote was accessed, changed or lost. " Evernote also said that they h ave no evidence that any payment information for Evernote Premium or Evernote Business customers was accessed. There are also several important steps that you can t...

The UK High Court has ordered  BSkyB , BT , Virgin Media and three other UK broadband providers to block access to three music and movie file-sharing websites  Kickass Torrents , H33T and Fenopy. Judge Richard Arnold said   that t hese websites  infringed 10 music companies copyrights on an industrial scale. He  granted an order to 10 record labels including EMI, Sony and Universal against six UK internet service providers requiring them to take measures to block or at least impede access by their customers to these three file-sharing websites. " The orders are necessary and appropriate to protect the intellectual property rights of the claimants and other copyright owners. "  Judge said.  The ISPs have been given 15 working days to block access to the sites.  Each ISP will decide how to warn customers and subsequently attempt to curb alleged illegal file sharing activity. Verizon decided to send a series of warni...

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is investigating data breach after Lateline interviewed Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders. A hacker going by the handle " Phr0zenMyst " has claimed to have hacked a web site associated with the ABC television program Making Australia Happy, leaking the details of its users online. The files contain the personal email addresses, locations and genders of almost 50,000 of registered users of ABC websites, including encrypted versions of their login passwords. The data was posted in 10 separate pastebin's which can be accessed online.  There were some indications on social media sites that the attack was in retaliation for some of the ABC's recent editorial decisions. The hacker, believed to be associated with the online activist group Anonymous, wrote on Twitter, " ABC hacked for giving a platform to Geert Wilders to spread hatred #OpWilders - database leaked! " " This breach originated ...

Today social media are spreading a shocking news, authors of Stuxnet virus that hit Iranian nuclear program in 2010 according a new research proposed by Symantec security company started in 2005 and contrary to successive instance of the malware he was designed to manipulate the nuclear facility’s gas valves. The attacker strategy was to destroy the nuclear plant causing an explosion due the sabotage of gas valves, hackers purpose was physical destruction of the targets, due this reason the press and security community labeled Stuxnet as first cyber weapon of the history.  Francis deSouza, Symantec’s president of products and services, during an interview with Bloomberg revealed that the version detected was a sort of beta version of the final weapon and that in the period between 2005 and 2009 the authors were testing its capabilities. “ It looks like now the weapon tried a few things before it hit on what would actually work ,”‘ “ It is clear that this has been a ...

Duo Security found a loophole in Google's authentication system that allowed them to Google's two factor authentication and gain full control over a user's Gmail account by abusing the unique passwords used to connect individual applications to Google accounts. Duo Security itself a two-factor authentication provider and the flaw is located in the auto-login mechanism implemented in Chrome in the latest versions of Android, that allowed them to use an ASP to gain access to a Google account's recovery and 2-step verification settings.  Auto-login allowed users who linked their mobile devices or Chromebooks to their Google accounts to automatically access all Google-related pages over the Web without ever seeing another login page. " Generally, once you turn on 2-step verification, Google asks you to create a separate Application-Specific Password for each application you use (hence “Application-Specific”) that doesn’t support logins using 2-step verif...

After a series of security issues, it appears that Apple still has not been able to resolve all the issue in iOS . Last week, Apple rolled out its iOS 6.1.2 update to owners of the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch in an effort to fixing the 3G connectivity and an Exchange calendar bugs. Hackers found an iOS 6 bug two weeks ago that allowed thieves into your phone, but only the Phone app and the features contained within could be accessed. Just after that, recently another screen lock bypass vulnerability  reported  in iOS 6.1 by Vulnerability Lab . This vulnerability allows users to bypass the lock screen pass code and access the phones photos and contacts. Researchers say the vulnerable device can be plugged into a computer via USB and access data like voice mails, pictures, contacts, etc.  This particular vulnerability was shared in detail over in a YouTube video for the masses, you can see the video tutorial as shown below: Steps to Follow: ...

A Polish security firm ' Security Explorations' reported two new Java zero-day vulnerabilities , as “ issue 54 ” and “issue 55 ,” with proof of concept code to Oracle. Oracle's security team is currently investigating the issue, but the status flaws not yet confirmed by Oracle. Less than a week after Oracle released its latest Java critical patch update, Researcher and Security Explorations's CEO Adam Gowdiak  have found two previously unknown security issues affecting Java 7. Security experts generally advise users to disable the Java browser plugin, which was exploited in recent targeted attacks on developers at Facebook , Apple and Microsoft. Java has faced an increasing number of zero-day vulnerabilities, bugs that are exploited by criminals before those flaws are patched, or even known by the vendor. Gowdiak confirmed that these newest vulnerabilities can be combined to circumvent Java's anti-exploit sandbox technology and used to attack...

More than 18 million smartphones and other mobile devices made by HTC are at risk vulnerable to many security and privacy issue. The Federal Trade Commission charged HTC with customizing the software on its Android- and Windows based phones in ways that let third-party applications install software that could steal personal information. The vulnerabilities placed sensitive information about millions of consumers at risk and potentially permitted malicious applications to send text messages, record audio and install additional malware without a user’s knowledge or consent.  FTC identify many vulnerabilities including, insecure implementation of two logging applications i.e Carrier IQ and HTC Loggers . The agency also found programming flaws that let third-party apps bypass Android's permission-based security model. Flaws in the security system could also give third-party apps access to phone numbers, contents of text messages, browsing history a...

Security tools company Pwnie Express is making a network hacking focused Android device called the Pwn Pad . The device is based on the Google Nexus 7 specs, with USB-based Bluetooth, Ethernet and WiFi to gauge the security of a network beyond what Google's tablet can manage on its own. Pwn Pad  will be introduced at the RSA security conference in San Francisco next week and Pwnie Express is also releasing the Pwn Pad source code. This will allow hackers to download the software and get it up and running on other types of Android phones and tablets. “ Every pen tester we know has a phone and a tablet and a laptop, but none of them has been able to do pen-testing from the tablet ,” says Dave Porcello, Pwnie Express’s CEO said to  wired . Most interesting part is that, first time the most popular wireless hacking tools like Aircrack-ng and Kismet introduced on an Android device.  The complete list of the tool available  in this...

FBI agents this week raided the home of a Australian hacker who recently leaked a slew of details about Microsoft's next release of Xbox console. “ They just took all my computers my hard drives, all of my technology, they took my bank cards, credit cards, bank statements ,” he said. He had claimed to know about the next Xbox and PlayStation, claimed to really have two prototype versions of the next Xbox. The suspect, identified as  Dan Henry a.k.a SuperDaE  and he tweeted about the raid on his twitter and  uploaded a warrant copy. Last year he reportedly sold a next-gen Xbox development kit on eBay for $20,100. A development kit is what Microsoft sends to companies so they can develop Xbox games. The warrant revealed that there are many companies behind the charges filed, including Microsoft, eBay, and Paypal. The photo was removed after it was thought to be a hoax but developers later confirmed that the pictures were in fact accurate of ...

Microsoft has become the latest victim of to Cyber attack and confirm that small number of its computers, including some in its Mac software business unit, were infected with malware . Microsoft added , malicious software used in a cyber attack is very similar to those experienced by Facebook and Apple recently. Microsoft gave few other details about the break-in, " We have no evidence of customer data being affected and our investigation is ongoing. " “ During our investigation, we found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations. We have no evidence of customer data being affected and our investigation is ongoing, ” Microsoft said. " This type of cyber attack is no surprise to Microsoft and other companies that must grapple with determined and persistent adversaries ," the company said. Last week, Apple said its...

Recently we published an article on the attacks against Japanese banks using a new variant of the popular Zeus , one of the most prolific malware of recent history, security experts in fact have detected various versions of the popular malicious code that hit also mobile and social networking platforms . Due its flexibility the malware has been re-engineered several times by cyber criminals that adapted its structure to specific purposes and context, leaving unchanged its core capabilities of stealing banking credentials of victims. Zeus has been a huge success in the criminal circles especially for the sales model, as malware as service, implemented by its authors on many underground sites, let’s remind for example the Citadel Trojan one of the most popular on the crimeware market. Fortunately its author, known as Aquabox , has been banned from a large online forum that sells malware and other services to cyber criminals, but many security firms consider Citadel Trojan still very ...

Remember Hector Xavier Monsegur a.k.a Lulzsec hacker  Sabu ?  That  undercover   double agent working for the FBI. Once again Authorities abruptly postponed his sentencing due to his continued cooperation with the feds. All told, he faced a maximum time behind bars of 124 years associated with his guilty plea on ten counts of bank fraud and one count of identity theft. When he was a active member of LulzSec , the group hacked into sites belonging to the CIA, Serious Organised Crime Agency, Sony Pictures Europe and News International. " It's widely believed that Monsegur will receive a reduced sentence for signing a plea agreement and serving as an  informant " cnet said . Monsegur, an unemployed father of two, led the loosely organized group of hackers from his apartment in a public housing project in New York.

Customer service software provider Zendesk announced a security breach, that affected three major Zendesk clients i.e Tumblr, Pinterest and Twitter and allowed hackers into their systems. The hacks come just days after Apple , Twitter and Facebook revealed that their employees computers fell victim to unauthorized access. The company believes the hacker downloaded the email addresses of Tumblr, Twitter, and Pinterest customers who attempted to get support from the companies.  Stolen information might be exploited via social-engineering attacks. " Our ongoing investigation indicates that the hacker had access to the support information that three of our customers store on our system. We believe that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who contacted those three customers for support, as well as support email subject lines. We notified our affected customers immediately and are working with them to assist in their response. " Zendesk discov...

Twitter announced via its blog today that it has begun using a new method called Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) to help prevent email phishing. DMARC is actually a standard for preventing email spoofing, in order to make it harder for attackers to send phishing emails that appear to come from twitter.com addresses. Sometimes it’s not easy to figure out if an email is legitimate or not. It implementing the SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) email message validation and authentication systems. Twitter says it started using the DMARC earlier this month. While the DMARC specification does need support from e-mail services, outfits including AOL, Gmail, Hotmail or Outlook and Yahoo already make use of it. It has also been implemented by services like Facebook, PayPal, Amazon and now Twitter. If you don’t use Gmail or one of the other email providers listed above, you may not be protected. It ...

Facebook OAuth is used to communicate between Applications & Facebook users, to grant additional permissions to your favorite apps. To make this possible, users have to ' allow or accept ' the application request so that app can access your account information with required permissions. As a normal Facebook user we always think that it is better than entering your Facebook credentials, we can  just allow specific permissions to an app in order to make it work with your account. Today whitehat Hacker ' Nir Goldshlager ' reported ' The Hacker News ' that he discovered a very critical vulnerability in Facebook's OAuth system, that allowed him to get full control over any Facebook account easily even without ' allow or accept ' options. For this purpose he hunt the flaw in a very mannered way i.e Step 1) Understanding the OAuth URL Step 2) Finding a way to use custom parameters in URL Step 3) Bypassing OAuth ' Allow '...

Today Adobe released a patch for two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2013-0640 and CVE-2013-0641) that are already being exploited by attackers. Adobe released version 11.0.02 of its Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro applications.  Vulnerabilities affect Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI (11.0.01 and earlier), X (10.1.5 and earlier) and 9.5.3 and earlier for Windows and Mac OS X systems. " These updates address vulnerabilities that could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system ." security advisory  reads . Exploits were discovered by security company FireEye and researchers with antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab have confirmed the exploit can successfully escape the Adobe sandbox. Users can update the software through the built-in updater or by downloading a copy of the  Windows ,  Mac , or  Linux  installer directly from Adobe's website. 

A new malware threat for the Mac has been discovered that attempting to set up a secure connection for a remote hacker to connect through and grab private information. Dubbed " Pintsized " that uses a modified version of OpenSSH to potentially set up a remote connection into Mac accounts. This backdoor Trojan can be used to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, or it can be used to install additional Trojans or other forms of malicious software. Since the connection between the hacker and the machine is encrypted, it becomes very hard for the Trojan to be detected or traced. The threat has the potential to become serious, as it uses an exploit in OS X to bypass Gatekeeper and establish a reverse shell that creates a secure connection.  Trojan stays hidden by disguising itself as a file that is used for networked printers in Mac OS X. The location of the malware has been traced to this particular directory. This tactic conceals the Trojan an...

The same ring of hackers that are responsible for hacking into at least 40 companies including Facebook and Twitter are reportedly also infected the computers of some Apple employees, the company acknowledged Tuesday. The purpose of hack considered an effort to steal company secrets, research and intellectual property that they can sell. Investigators tracked at least one server being used by the hacker ring to a hosting company in the Ukraine. " Apple has identified malware which infected a limited number of Mac systems through a vulnerability in the Java plug-in for browsers, " the company said in its statement. " The malware was employed in an attack against Apple and other companies, and was spread through a website for software developers. We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network ." Apple isolated the infected systems from its network and said there was no indication that...

If you are a BlackBerry Enterprise Network user, here is something you need to be careful about. BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) users have been warned that an image-based exploit could allow hackers to access and execute code on the servers used to support corporate users of BlackBerry smartphones.  The flaw that been rated as high severity and actual vulnerability in BlackBerry Enterprise Servers resulted from how the server processes image files. Scenario to Exploit Vulnerability :  A malicious person writes a special code and then embeds it in a TIFF image file. The person then convinces a Blackberry smart phone user (whose phone is connected to a corporate BES) to view the TIFF file. As soon as the image file loads on the phone, the code runs on the Blackberry Enterprise server and either opens up a back door in the network or causes the network to crash altogether as instructed in the basic code. “ RIM is not aware of any attacks on or speci...

Few weeks after the discovery of the sophisticated cyber espionage campaign against principal US media The Mandiant® Intelligence Center ™ released an shocking report that reveals an enterprise-scale computer espionage campaign dubbed APT1. The term APT1 is referred to one of the numerous cyber espionage campaign that stolen the major quantity of information all over the world. The evidences collected by the security experts link APT1 to China’s 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department’s (GSD) 3rd Department (Military Cover Designator 61398) but what is really impressive is that the operation have been started in the distant 2006 targeting 141 victims across multiple industries. During the attacks the attackers have took over APT1 malware families and has revealed by the report APT1′s modus operandi (tools, tactics, procedures) including a compilation of videos showing actual APT1 activity. The Mandiant has also identified more than ...

The Tizen 2.0 source code and SDK has officially been released. Tizen is a Linux-based open-source software platform backed by Intel and Samsung Electronics, that is designed for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and in-car systems and it’s designed to run apps written using web technologies including HTML5. The list of new features and updates is an extensive one, though a lot of the changes are under-the-hood and aimed at offering a more attractive platform to application developers. Tizen 2.0 adds new APIs that developers can use to access Bluetooth and NFC function on phones with that hardware, as well as improved developer tools. There have been reports recently that Samsung is planning a line of phones built around the Tizen operating system, to reduce its dependence on Android after Google acquired mobile phone competitor Motorola Mobility. Samsung is already one of the top makers of phones and tablets, but right now the company’s fortunes are very much...

As part of  Operation Israel ( #OpIsrael )  Anonymous Hackers once again strike on Israeli infrastructure by dumping the 600,000 emails and passwords from one of the most popular Israeli web portal ' Walla ', which is know for providing news, search and e-mail system, among other things. Anonymous Activist knows ' AnonSabre ' dumped email addresses, password MD5 hashes and salts across 95 Pastebin posts containing this sensitive information have been published over the course of 24 hours. Walla also confirmed that the list was posted online, but they said that the information leaked by Hacker is Useless because the password posted by hacker is in Encrypted form.  I think, they are not aware about fastest MD5 cracker ' oclhashcat ' or other cloud based cracking services, anyway they also said,“ However, we are working on 'hermetically' sealing off user details in Walla! accounts, ”. The #OpIsrael campaign was announced last December, a...

Google is again under attack for its apparent mishandling of its users’ personal information. An Australian software developer ' Dan Nolan ' revealed that the search giant was sending him the full names, email and post codes of everyone who purchased his app on Google's Play. In a blog post , Nolan said the information was so detailed he would even be able to use it to ' track down and harass users who left negative reviews or refunded the app purchase '. Nolan discovered that he has obtained a fair share of customer info himself after logging into his Google Play merchant account to update his payment details. The main problem is that Google is not asking explicit permission from buyers to share that information with developers, but according to privacy groups and with careful inspection of the policies, Google does not clearly mention that it is sharing personal information to app developers nor does it create a good deal of effort in informing buying custome...

Facebook operator of the largest social network with more than 1 billion members, said on Friday it had been the target of an unidentified hacker group, but that no user information was compromised during the attack. The attack occurred when a handful of the company's employees visited a developer's compromised website, which led to malware being installed on their laptops. ‘ Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack ,’ read the statement , despite the laptops being ‘ fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software. ’ Reports say Facebook knew about the attacks, which likely exploited a zero-day Java software flaw, well before the announcement. " We are working continuously and closely with our own internal engineering teams, with security teams at other companies, and with law enforcement authorities to learn everything we can about the attack, and how to prevent similar incidents in the...

Famous Bangladeshi hacker TiGER-M@TE  known for his big defacements strikes again! This time he teams up with another hacker ' h311 c0d3 ' for another big defacement campaign.  According to mirror records on Zone-H, These hackers managed to deface Malawi Google, Yahoo, MSN, Windows and many more top domains using DNS poisoning attack. During talk with ' The Hacker News ', hackers disclose that they collectively hacked into Malawi (.mw) Domain Registrar website and also target Master and Slave DNS servers. The attackers changed the authoritative DNS records for the affected domains, to point the domain names to their own web server with a deface page hosted on it. All this could have been much worse if the attacker had other goals in his mind rather than defacing famous websites. Imagine how many accounts could have been compromised, if these websites were redirected to a phishing page, instead of a defacement page. At the time of reporting, D...