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It’s not a mystery, every nation is worried of the level of security of its infrastructure, the United States are among the most concerned governments due the high number of cyber-attack against its networks. US Government representative such us former States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano warned in more than one occasion on the possible consequences of a cyber offensive and declared the necessity to improve the cyber capabilities of the country.  Senators are interested to evaluate the level of protection of nuclear stockpile of foreign governments against cyber attacks, question has been raised after that Pentagon's chief cyber officer admitted to ignore if countries such as Russia or China have adopted efficient countermeasures. Nelson and Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich. will request to national intelligence an assessment about the ability of foreign states to safeguard networked ...

A critical vulnerability discovered in certain LaserJet Pro printers that could give remote attackers access to sensitive data. Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Response Team recently issued a vulnerability note warning that HP LaserJet Professional printers contain a telnet debug shell which could allow a remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to data. This flaw was discovered by a Germany security expert, Christoph von Wittich . He detected the vulnerability during a routine network scan of his company's corporate network. He said the vulnerability could also be used for a denial-of-service attack. " As long as the printer is not connected to the Internet, this vulnerability should not cause much trouble for the end user ,". Marked as CVE-2012-5215 ( VU#782451 , SSRT101078), vulnerability affected 12 printer models including HP LaserJet Pro P1102w, P1102w, P1606dn, M1212nf MFP, M1213nf MFP, M1214nfh MFP, M1216nfh Multifunc...

Israeli mobile security start-up Skycure has exposed a vulnerability that could allow hackers to control and spy on iPhones. A major security vulnerability for iOS configuration profiles  pose malware threat. The vulnerability affects a file known as mobileconf files, which are used by cell phone carriers to configure system-level settings. These can include Wi-Fi, VPN, email, and APN settings. Apple used to use them to deliver patches, and carriers sometimes use them to distribute updates. Adi Sharabani , CEO and co-founder of Skycure, made a demonstration that how sensitive information, including the victim’s exact location, could be retrieved, while also controlling the user’s iPhone. In Demo, he setup a fake website with a prompt to install a configuration profile and sent the link out to Victim. After installing it, he found out they were able to pull passwords and other data without his knowledge. These malicious profiles can be emailed or ...

The U.S. government repository of standards based vulnerability management website National Vulnerability Database (NVD) was hacked by some unknown attacker last week. The website of NVD ( http://nvd.nist.gov/index.html ) is down since Friday due to a malware infection on two web servers, discovered on Wednesday. The main page of website reads," The NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has experienced an issue with its Web Services and is currently not available. We are working to restore service as quickly as possible. We will provide updates as soon as new information is available ." According to a post available on Google+ by Kim Halavakoski , who contacted NIST Public Inquiries Office to know about the issue," On Friday March 8, a NIST firewall detected suspicious activity and took steps to block unusual traffic from reaching the Internet. NIST began investigating the cause of the unusual activity and the servers were taken offline. Malware was ...

Philippines-Malaysia Cyber war over Sabah land dispute take another turn, when Philippines hackers deface their own President  Benigno Aquino III   website early Thursday, and criticized how the President has been handling the conflict in Sabah. The hacker group left a message to the president on the defaced Web site and links to Facebook profiles of the hackers, as shown in screenshot taken. Hacker managed to direct hack into other government websites also including: http://www.gdelpilar.gov.ph http://www.calasiao.gov.ph http://bolinao.gov.ph http://mauban.gov.ph http://apayao.gov.ph http://www.mauban.gov.ph http://www.drd.pnp.gov.ph Complete message from Anonymous Philippines reads: Greetings, President Aquino! We have watched how you signed into law a bill that endangers and tramples upon the citizenship  freedom of speech and expression. Now, we are silent witnesses as to how you are mishandling the Sabah issue. We did not engage the Malay...

According to an exclusive report published today by DNA news, the computers of highly sensitive Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) have reportedly been hacked by Chinese hackers as biggest security breach in the Indian Defence ever. Infiltrate leading to the leak of thousands of top secret files related to Cabinet Committee on Security, which have been detected to have been uploaded on a server in Guangdong province of China. Indian Defence Minister A K Antony said, " Intelligence agencies are investigating the matter at this stage and I do not want to say anything else. " " The leak was detected in the first week of March as officials from India’s technical intelligence wing, National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), working with private Indian cyber security experts cracked open a file called “army cyber policy”. The file had been attached to hacked email accounts of senior DRDO officials that quickly spread through the system in a matter...

Great news for Hackers and Backtrack Linux fans! The most awaited penetration testing Linux distribution has been released called ' Kali Linux ' or ' Backrack 6 ', from the creators of BackTrack itself. From last 7 years we have seen five awesome versions of Backtrack Linux. But this time to achieve some higher goals, team decided to leave the 4 years old development architecture and ' Kali Linux ' born today. Kali Linux is based upon Debian Linux, instead of Ubuntu and new streamlined repositories synchronize with the Debian repositories 4 times a day, constantly providing users with the latest package updates and security fixes available. Another great feature introduced is that, because of Debian compliant system, it is now able to Bootstrap a Kali Installation/ISO directly from Kali repositories. This allow any user to easily build their own customization of Kali, as well as perform enterprise network installs from a local or remote repo...

Remember the last OAuth Flaw in Facebook , that allow an attacker to hijack any account without victim's interaction with any Facebook Application, was reported by white hat Hacker ' Nir Goldshlager '. After that Facebook security team fixed that issue using some minor changes. Yesterday Goldshlager once again pwn Facebook OAuth mechanism by bypassing all those minor changes done by Facebook Team. He explains the complete Saga of hunting Facebook  bug in a blog post. As explained in last report on The hacker News , OAuth URL contains two parameters i.e.  redirect_uri &   next , and using Regex Protection (%23xxx!,%23/xxx,/) Facebook team tried to secure that after last patch. In recent discovered technique hacker found that next parameter allow  facebook.facebook.com domain as a valid option and multiple hash signs is now enough to bypass Regex Protection. He use facebook.com/l.php ...

It's time of stocktaking, principal security firm are proposing their analysis to synthesize actual situation on cyber security, 2012 is widely considered a year when the malware has increased significantly thanks to the contributions of various actors that we will analyze shortly. WebSense has published a new interesting study, 2013 Threat Report , that confirms an extraordinary growth of cyber threats, the data that most of all alert the security community is the increasing number of sophisticated attacks able to elude traditional defense mechanisms. The analysis revealed that technologies most exposed to cyber attacks continue to be mobile platforms and social media, internet is confirmed as primary channel for cyber menaces, let’s consider in fact that number of malicious web sites grew nearly 600% and 85% are represented by legitimate web hosts. Another concerning phenomenon is the use of Email as vector for cyber menace, attackers consider this carrier as ...

One of the best 3rd party Android Mobile Keyboard called ' SwiftKey ' turned into a Keylogger Trojan by an Android developer to show the possible security threat of using pirated cracked apps from from non-official App Stores, " anyone pirating Swiftkey is taking a serious risk " developer said to ' The Hacker News '. He demonstrated how to inject a Keylogger snippets of code into a legitimate Android Keyboard application that infected a mobile device with Trojan, connected with a remote server and transmitted data from the device inducing your all key logs. " Cracked copies of PC and iPhone apps can have malware as well of course but on both those platforms most software is compiled to machine code. Android apps are coded in Java and compiled to byte code that is run on the Dalvik VM and this byte code is not that hard to edit and insert back into an APK. " he explained. He developed a keylogger from SwiftKey( APK Download ), a mali...

IRAN has spent years fending off cyber attacks, blocking access and isolated their own intranet off from the outside world. Many Iranians was using of virtual private network (VPNs), which provides encrypted links directly to private networks based abroad, to access Sites like YouTube and Facebook after bypassing the country's internet filter. But recently, Iranian authorities have blocked the use of most virtual private network to stop people in the country from circumventing the government's internet filter. A widespread government internet filter prevents Iranians from accessing many sites on the official grounds they are offensive or criminal. Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, the head of parliament's information and communications technology committee said, " Within the last few days illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked. Only legal and registered VPNs can from now on be used. " Registered and legal VPN access can still be purchased, but the typical fi...

It's Microsoft Patch Tuesday, and time of the month in which we gather round, hold hands, and see just how much of Microsoft’s software needs patching. Prepare your systems, Microsoft is expected to issue seven bulletins affecting all versions of its Windows operating system (OS), some Office components and also Mac OS X, through Silverlight and Office and 4 out of 7 are critical patches. Critical :  The first bulletin will address a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Windows and Internet Explorer. Critical : The second bulletin addresses a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Microsoft Silverlight. Critical :  The third bulletin addresses a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Office. The fourth security bulletin addresses a critical elevation of privilege vulnerability affecting both the Office and Server suites. Important : The fifth and sixth security bulletins address an information disclosure vulnerability affectin...

If hackers want to get into your computer network, they will find a way. You can make it harder but you can’t stop them. According to  Australian Financial Review report on Monday, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was hacked by hackers who infiltrated its networks and allegedly stole information using a Chinese piece of malware. After investigations they found multiple computers had been compromised by malicious software seeking intelligence. Several RBA staffers including heads of department were sent the malicious emails over two days, but it isn't known if the malware executed and succeeded in capturing information from the compromised computers.  The malware consisted of a web address that linked to a zip file that contained a Trojan which at the time was not detected by the anti-virus program, according to the bank.  A Defence department spokesperson said: “ The government does not discuss specific cyber incidents, activities or capabilitie...

Today a cyber attack on Pakistan Government servers crash many Government departments's official websites including Ministry of Information Technology, Ministry of Railways, Ministry of Economic Affairs & Statistics, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Environment and many more. Indian Hacker ' Godzilla ' continue to strike Pakistan Government because of their support to terrorism activities. Hacker said," all network owned including switches because they deserve it, I have not touched any innocent website because target is only Government " While Pakistani official are already aware about the risk from the newest viruses, worms and cyber attacks, so they having their servers running through a proxy server located at  http://202.83.164.6/ , but flawed cyber security practices once again results to messed up whole setup and hacker successfully breach into cen...

A Google developer helps Apple to fixed a security flaw in its application store that for years has allowed attackers to steal passwords and install unwanted or extremely expensive applications. Security loophole allowed attacker to hijack the connection, because Apple neglected to use encryption when an iPhone or other mobile device tries to connect to the App Store. Researcher Elie Bursztein revealed on his blog that he had alerted Apple of numerous security issues last July but that Apple had only turned on HTTPS for the App Store last week. An attacker only needs to be on the same network as the person who is using the App Store. From there, they can intercept the communications between the device and the App Store and insert their own commands. The malicious user could take advantage of the unsecure connection to carry out a number of different attacks i.e steal a password, force someone to purchase an app by swapping it with a different app that the buyer actually intende...

Google Drive is the new home for Google Docs , that users can access everywhere for Storing files safely. In a recent demonstration hacker successfully performed an attack on Google Docs to trick users to grab their Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo credentials with Credit Card Information. Security researcher Christy Philip Mathew came up with combination of  Clickjacking and CSRF vulnerabilities in Google's Docs that can allow a hacker to create a document in victim's Drive for further phishing attack. For those who are not aware about Clickjacking, It is a technique where an attacker tricks a user into performing certain actions on a website by hiding clickable elements inside an invisible iframe. He explain how this technique can be executed to pwn a Google user to steal victim's all type of credentials with a phishing attack. Here attacker need to send a Malicious URL to the victim, where victim needs to interact with some buttons only. Vulnera...

Using a new attack on most popular Android phones platform, a team of researchers in Germany managed to grab stored cryptographic keys if the device is frozen state for an hour. The method which able to bypasses Google’s data scrambling encryption system introduced in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to reveal the phone’s hidden data, when leaving Android phones in a freezer until they fell below -10 degrees Celsius, which revealed previously scrambled data, including contact lists, browsing histories, and photos. The team developed software called FROST , Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones, which lets them copy data from the phone for analysis on a computer. Abstract   explains ," We present FROST, a tool set that supports the forensic recovery of scrambled telephones. To this end we perform cold boot attacks against Android smartphones and retrieve disk encryption keys from RAM. We show that cold boot attacks against Android phones are general...

Another phishing campaign come in action recently targeting Facebook accounts and company pages with millions of followers. Phishers continue to devise new fake apps for the purpose of harvesting confidential information. Not a new method, but very creative phishing example in Facebook hacking scene, where hacker host a phishing page on Facebook app sub domain itself. Designed very similar to Facebook Security team with title ' Facebook Page Verification ' and using Facebook Security Logo as shown in the screenshot posted above. Phishing app URL: https://apps.facebook.com/verify-pages/ Application hosted on:   https://talksms.co.uk/ The phishing page asking users to enter Page URL and Page Name that victim own and his Facebook login email ID with password. Once victim trapped in hacker web, the phisher records your information. Another interesting fact is that, the phishing domain https://talksms.co.uk/ is a HTTPS site with with verifi...

As the popularity of Android has boomed, more and more malware is targeting the platform. Digital miscreants are using fraudulent developer accounts on Google's Play marketplace to spread malware. According to latest  Mobile Threat report from F-Secure , Android malware continued to gain in share in 2012 and was responsible for 79 percent of all threats for the year, up from 66 percent in 2011, but Google developer responded with," F-Secure can say that anything is malware ". F-secure report said, In the fourth quarter alone, 96 new families and variants of Android threats were discovered, which almost doubles the number recorded in the previous quarter.  According to official Google figures, there are over 700,000 apps and games in the Play marketplace and malware on Android jumped 850 percent between 2012 and this year. Whereas an Google Android developer reply to TechCrunch technology generalist ," They say they detected...

During the first day of Pwn2Own competition at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver , latest versions of all major browsers were exploited by hackers.  Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 were successfully pwned by various competitors, bringing them tens of thousands of dollars in prizes.  French vulnerability research and bug selling firm ' Vupen ' brought down IE10 running on a Windows 8 powered Surface Pro tablet by exploiting a pair of flaws. Researchers Jon Butler and Nils from MWR Labs managed to exploit Google Chrome on Windows 7 and also used a kernel bug to bypass the sandbox. " By visiting a malicious webpage, it was possible to exploit a vulnerability which allowed us to gain code execution in the context of the sandboxed renderer process. We also used a kernel vulnerability in the underlying operating system in order to gain elevated privileges and to execute arbitrary commands outside of the sandbox with s...

Anonymous, the Internet hacktivist hacked into ' Anglo American ' and dump their complete database online. The dump includes the Personal details of 122 investors, and more than 400 registered share holders details and other database also. Anglo American is a British multinational mining company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. They are the world's largest primary producer of platinum and mine many other things like diamonds, copper, nickel, iron ore and metallurgical and thermal coal. The attack against  Anglo American  is part of a larger Anonymous operation - Operation Green Rights . In a statement hackers said ," Anglo American, you destroy nature and pursue and kill indigenous people. We say enough to all of this ," " In the name of tribal leaders, whom you have offended, and the natives you have deported, in the name of the miners killed during a strike against your dirty company, in the name of nature that you consider as a s...

Twitter continues to implement new security features. But really, who thinks social media will ever be unhackable? The official twitter account of Saudi Aramco , the world's biggest oil producer hacked by hacker with name ' Mister Rero '. The background on Saudi Aramco’s official Twitter page and the name has been changed by hacker. So far, no tweets posted by hacker. Last year in August about 30,000 workstations inside internal computer networks of Saudi Aramco was infected by a virus. Last month Burger King’s and Jeep’s official Twitter accounts was compromised.

While the rest of the world engaged in cyber security conferences and Anonymous operations, an Indian patriotic hacker used the time to attack Unofficial Pakistan Intelligence agency ISI. Hacker going by name " Godzilla " today claimed to hack into one of the server belongs to ISI website ( http://isi.org.pk ) and claimed steal possible information from website database. According to the information shared by hacker with ' The Hacker News ', he claims to have access to Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) of the server located at 173.193.110.72. He disclose that System installed with Windows 2008 server standard edition and having three derives i.e C,D,E with operating system in C and Hostname ' AHCORP ' He also claimed to hack into MSSQL server containing 3 databases, with 9 users and located at http://mssql.isi.org.pk, as shown in screenshot taken by him. Some partial tables of the database ' msdb ' as listed below: bakupfile bakup...

Chinese search engine Baidu has just launched a security product called Baidu Antivirus 2013 . Described as a ultra light weight, easy to use, extremely fast anti-virus program that promises to protect your system from malware, viruses, spyware, adware and other malicious programs. Most interesting thing is that Baidu Antivirus comes only in English. Back in January, Baidu launched Baidu PC Faster, a software suite designed to fix speed and performance issues. The program combines the Baidu Antivirus Engine and Baidu Cloud Security Engine with the Avira Antivirus engine to provide you with complete protection against all online threats. " Baidu Antivirus offers an easy to use interface with several advanced configuration options as well as quarantine of infected files. It also has an extremely small memory footprint, so you can actually do other things while it is running on your computer. Other features include automatic updates, Host Intrusion Prevention System (HIPS), sc...

iOS was in the news lately for a series of security mishaps, but this time android back in scene. A security flaw discovered by Terence Eden on the Galaxy Note II with Android 4.1.2 that allows hackers to briefly bypass the phone's lock screen without needing a password. By hitting " emergency call " then " emergency contacts " then holding the home button, the main home screen becomes visible for around a second just enough time to load an app, before reverting back to the lock screen. Not all apps will open in this manner, a demo video shows that Google Play does not respond. Reportedly, Eden contacted Samsung roughly five days ago but has yet to hear back. He said that he has not tested any other Samsung devices to see if they are also affected. The flaw appears to be similar to a screen lock vulnerability in newer Apple devices, including the iPhone 5. Steps to follow: Lock the device with a "secure" pattern, PIN...

Old habits seem to die hard for a hacker, a cyber criminal who masterminded a £15 million fraud was allowed to join a prison IT class and hacked into the jail’s computer system. Nicholas Webber , serving five years in prison for running an internet crime forum Ghost Market , Which allowed those interested in creating computer viruses, partaking of stolen IDs and enjoying private credit card data to congregate. Webber had been arrested for using fraudulent credit card details to pay for a penthouse suite at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, Central London. The incident occurred back in 2011, but it only came to light recently " At the time of this incident in 2011 the educational computer system at HMP Isis was a closed network. No access to personal information or wider access to the internet or other prison systems would have been possible, " A spokesman fοr prison tοƖԁ the Daily Mail reported . His IT teacher, Michael Fox ,who was employed by Kensing...

A series of websites defacement has been conducted between Philippines and Malaysia over the dispute in the land of Sabah. Hackers claiming to be part of Anonymous group from Malaysian and Filipino and attacking websites of each other. It was believed that the first online attacks were made by Malaysians and defaced the government-owned site of the municipality Moal Boal, Cebu, hours after a skirmish erupted between police and Sulu gunmen on Friday. Meanwhile the online shop of Philippine mobile services provider Globe Telecom was defaced by hackers claiming to be from the " MALAYSIA Cyb3r 4rmy ". A series of websites defacement has been conducted between Philippines and Malaysia over the dispute in the land of Sabah #security — The Hacker News™ (@TheHackersNews) March 2, 2013 On other side  Philippine Cyber Army hackers claiming to have attacked 175 Malaysia-based sites,“ Greetings Malaysia! Greetings Government! Stop attacking over our cyberspace...

Feross Aboukhadijeh , 22-year-old Web developer from Stanford has discovered  HTML5 browser exploit can flood your Hard Drive with Cat and Dogs i.e junk data. Many times a website needs to leave a little data i.e 5-10KB on your computer like a cookie, but HTML5 allow sites to store larger amounts of data (like 5-10 MB). In a proof-of-concept he was able to full up 1 GB of HDD space every 16 seconds. He created FillDisk.com in order to demonstrate the exploit in HTML5. Once user will visit the website the Web Storage standard allows website to place large amounts of data on your drive. Please note that, It's not a hack and this exploit won't allow attackers to access your computer. However, Web browsers have the ability to limit just how much space websites can dump onto your hard drive. Firefox's implementation of HTML5 local storage is not vulnerable to this exploit. Whereas Chrome, Safari (iOS and desktop), and IE vulnerable to this. ...