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The call for papers for The Hackers Conference 2013 is now open.  #THC2013  is a hacker conference taking place in New Delhi , India on August 25th, 2013.  The Hackers Conference is an unique event, where the best of minds in the hacking world, leaders in the information security industry and the cyber community along with policymakers and government representatives on cyber security meet face-to -face to join their efforts to co-operate in addressing the most topical issues of the Internet Security space. This is the second edition of the Conference . Following the huge success of the conference last year the current edition of the conference brings back to you all the knowledge, all the fun in a better, grander way! The Conference will be held in New Delhi, on the 25 of August 2013, and will get together industry leaders, Government representatives, Academia and underground Black-hat hackers to share knowledge and leading-edge ideas about information...

Tor is a web service that allows users to surf the Internet, use IM, and other services while keeping themselves completely anonymous, but  Japan's National Police Agency wants ISPs to block access to Tor if users are found to have abused it. The push by Japanese authorities is because they're worried about an inability to tackle cyber crime enabled in part by anonymizing services such as Tor.  Japanese police is having a hard time when it comes to crimes in the cyberspace. Just last year a hacker, going by the name Demon Killer, took remote control of systems across the country and posted death threats on public message boards. The panel claimed it has been used in the past to commit internet fraud, help paedophiles groom kids online and, tellingly, enabled leaks from Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department. Tor has proven to be an invaluable tool for pro-democracy campaigners in the Middle East while censorious regimes such as the Chinese authorities have att...

Trusteer researcher Tanya Shafir   has recently identified an active configuration of TorRAT targeting Twitter users. Other than  spreading ideas on the most popular social networks, now cyber criminals are spreading  malware . The malware launches a Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) attack through the browser of infected PCs, gaining access to the victim's Twitter account to create malicious tweets.  Because the malware creates malicious tweets and sends them through a compromised account of a trusted person or organization being followed, the tweets seem to be genuine. Those tweets contain malicious links and they read : " Our new King William will earn even more than Beatrix. Check his salary" or "Beyonce falls during the Super Bowl concert, very funny!!!! " At this time the attack is targeting the Dutch market. The malware spreading via the online social networking service, used as a financial malware to gain access to user credentials and target their fi...

The United States House of Representatives on Thursday voted to approve the highly controversial  cyber security bill CISPA , which stands for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. The Bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was presented under the guise National Security , but in reality opens up a loop hole for companies that collect personal information about their users and in some cases want to trade of even sell these to other companies for money or other services.  This was the second time that the US House of Representatives passed the CISPA. Senators had earlier rejected the first draft of this bill on the grounds that it wasn't providing enough for protecting the privacy. Some lawmakers and privacy activists worry that the legislation would allow the government to monitor citizens' private information and companies to misuse it. The first parts of CISPA are relevant and necessary. If we're " h...

Security Researcher from Group-IB ( Group-IB is one of the leading companies in global cybercrime prevention and hi-tech crime investigations )   has found a new kind of malware   that targets the Russian stock-trading platform QUIK. It was detected during several targeted attacks starting in November 2012 where  Cyber criminals have traditionally targeted private and corporate banking accounts, using malware (such as variants of the ZeuS  cyber-crime  toolkit ) to log key-strokes and extract account information. In the last year, Group-IB has received several incoming incident fraud requests on some famous online trading and stock brokerages where systems were possibly hacked and recently trading fraudsters have diversified tactics and begun to use malware. Group-IB has detected the first professional malware, targeted at a specialized trading software named QUIK (Quik Broker, Quik Dealer) from Russian software developers ARQA Technolo...

Google's Oman domain ( https://www.google.com.om/ ) was reportedly defaced today due to a hijacking of the company's local domain name by by Moroccan Hackers . The credit being taken by " SQL_Master And Z0mbi3_Ma " serial website defacers. It seems that hackers successfully beached into Oman Telecommunication Company , who is domain registrar of Google's Oman domain and possible DNS hijack techniques is used to re-directed users to a different site whenever they tried to reach Google's local domain. The text on the hacked site reads: " 0h0h0h! U get FUCKED BY! And Z0mbi3_Ma SQL_Master for more: Z0mbi3_Ma@hotmail.com . / Morocco". Same group of hackers were responsible for hacking  The National Security Agency (NSA) in past.  Zone-H mirror record also available for proof of hack and at the time of writing, site is defaced. Whether you own 1 domain or over 100, domain security today is more important than ever. We will update ...

It appears as if another malware scare has come to Android . Lookout Security said on Friday that it has discovered a new family of malware called BadNews .  Malware that avoided detection and made its way onto the Google Play store has been downloaded around 9 million times by users from all over the world. The company uncovered the malware in 32 applications listed by four different developer accounts on Google Play. Google was notified and the company removed the affected apps and killed the developer accounts associated with them. In their report, firm describes the malware: " BadNews masquerades as an innocent, if somewhat aggressive advertising network. This is one of the first times that we've seen a malicious distribution network clearly posing as an ad network. Because it's challenging to get malicious bad code into Google play, the authors of Badnews created a malicious advertising network, as a front, that would push malware out to infected devices...

Last April 7th the Anonymous collective hit the Israeli networks with a huge as historic offensive, for the first time an independent group of hackers declared war to a Governments to protest against its policy. Many web sites of the country were hit by DDoS attacks, the data on the event reported by Israel government are totally different from the information published by Anonymous that produced a report for #OpIsrael in which total damage are estimated of $3-plus billion. According security experts at TrendMicro the collective adopted various botnet coordinating large scale attacks, analyzing traffic directed to one of the targeted website, the researchers discovered that meanwhile usually more of 90% of the traffic is originated in Israel, during the attack almost the entire traffic was originated outside the country and internal connections have fallen to 9% as shown in the following chart: What is surprising is that TrendMicro discovered that many IP addre...

Nir Goldshlager , Founder/CEO at Break Security known for finding serious flaws in Facebook once again on The Hacker News for  sharing his new finding i.e Stored Cross-site Scripting (XSS) in Facebook Chat, Check In and Facebook Messenger. Stored Cross-site Scripting ( XSS ) is the most dangerous type of Cross Site Scripting. Web applications where the injected code is permanently stored on the target servers, such as in a database, in a message forum, visitor log, comment field, etc 1.) Stored XSS In Facebook Chat: This vulnerability can be used to conduct a number of browser-based attacks including, Hijacking another user's browser, Capturing sensitive information viewed by application users, Malicious code is executed by the user's browser etc. When a user starts a new message within Facebook that has a link inside, a preview GUI shows up for that post. The GUI is used for presenting the link post using a parameter i.e  attachment[params][title]...

The Pirate Bay co-founder  Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (Anakata)  charged with hacking the IBM mainframe of Logica, a Swedish IT firm that provided tax services to the Swedish government, and the IBM mainframe of the Swedish Nordea bank. Svartholm has been charged with several hacking related offenses including serious fraud , attempted aggravated fraud, and aiding attempted aggravated fraud. Three other defendants received similar charges. He was arrested in Cambodia in September 2012 and deported to Sweden where he was arrested for his alleged involvement in the Logica hack. 28-year-old computer specialist Svartholm and other founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty by the Swedish government in 2009 for facilitating the illegal downloading of copyrighted materials. He has served a one-year prison sentence in Sweden since September 2012, and will likely remain in prison while facing these new charges. Swedish prosecutor Henrik Olin said in a statement, " ...

In recent few months White hat Hacker ,' Nir Goldshlager ' reported many critical bugs in Facebook OAuth  mechanism, that allowed an attacker to hijack any Facebook account without user's interaction.  Another hacker, ' Amine Cherrai ' reported a new Facebook OAuth flaw, whose exploitation is actually very similar to Nir Goldshlager 's findings but with a new un-patched way. Before reading further, I would like to suggest you to read following post to understand the basic exploitation mechanism: Facebook OAuth flaw allows gaining full control over any Facebook account Facebook hacking accounts using another OAuth vulnerability URL Redirection flaw in Facebook apps push OAuth vulnerability again in action Now, if you are aware about the vulnerability used against Facebook OAuth in  redirect_uri parameter in  the URL, there is another way that  Amine Cherrai found, to bypass the patch applied by F...

If you've ever been tempted to download a 'hack' for your favorite game to accelerate your progress, or to download a pirated copy of the latest title through a torrent or file-sharing site, watch out ! Anti-virus company AVG has today warns that over 90% of hacked or cracked games downloaded via torrent or file-sharing sites are infected with malware or malicious code. It claimed that a lot of these hacks didn't just contain malware, but were simply malware programs in disguise. " Even if we assume that just 0.1% of the gamer playing the top five titles go looking for a hack - a highly conservative estimate - that means 330,000 people are potentially at risk of falling victim to game hack malware, " said AVG. The prevalence of cracked games, key generators, patches, cheats and more indicates that this is a highly organised, crime based, initiative. " This could lead to the loss of any legitimate, paid-for gaming assets, as well as sensitive p...

Chinese hackers defaced the website of the government owned Philippines News Agency (PNA) on Sunday.  Defaced page of the website was with the Chinese flag and the text: " China Hacker EvilShadow Team, We are evil shadow. We are the team. We have our own dignity China Hacker Lxxker. " The hackers shared news of the attack on Facebook. The site was back to normal after an hour. This last hacking incident comes days after the arrest of 12 Chinese fishermen suspected of poaching after their boat ran aground in a protected marine park. This was not the first time that the site was hacked. Last year , cyber attacks on several government websites were blamed on Chinese hackers during a standoff in Scarborough Shoal, a group of rocky outcrops in the South China Sea that is close to main Philippine island of Luzon.

On Monday morning, Google has been the victim of a cyber-attack. Defacement attack was launched by Bangladeshi hacker TiGER-M@TE , their Kenyan domain google.co.ke  was defaced, instead the page splayed a black background€™ stamped in red across it. When a user visited the page the hacked screen spiraled in as some foreign music played in the background.  Google is the third most used site in Kenya. TiGER-M@TE has been quite active with defacements lately, and has targeted some high-profile sites in the past.

Cross site scripting vulnerabilities are mistakenly considered unimportant, but they could allow attackers to inject client-side script in web pages visited by victims. A cross-site scripting (xss) vulnerability may be exploited by hackers to bypass access controls going beyond the exceptions. An Egyptian information security advisor Ebrahim Hegazy (Zigoo) has found an XSS vulnerability in the Avira license daemon. license.avira.com But instead of exploiting it in a normal way " alert('MyName') " stuff and then reporting, He decided to demonstrate it to Avira security team in a different mode with the purposes to show how could an XSS vulnerability allows the hackers to steal user accounts with a clear text data! To demonstrate this attack he has created 4 files: avira.html - the fake login page log.php - the logger which will log the credentials as clear text into txt file avira.txt - credentials will be found here done.html - wi...

An alarming dispatch from the Hack In The Box security conference in Amsterdam arrived on Wednesday: a hacker says he's found a way to take over airplane controls . That's probably not true. At least according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the European Aviation Safety Administration (EASA) and Honeywell, the maker's of the cockpit software, it's not. The FAA, for one, says, " The described technique cannot engage or control the aircraft's autopilot system using the FMS or prevent a pilot from overriding the autopilot. " The agency assures America that this hack " does not pose a flight safety concern because it does not work on certified flight hardware. " So why did Hugo Teso, the German hacker in question, tell everybody at the conference as well as countless journalists who've latched on to the story that he could take over the software? Well, Teso says he's successfully taken over a plane's controls in a flight...

A large distributed brute force attack against WordPress sites is understood to be occurring. A large botnet with more than 90,000 servers is attempting to log in by cycling through different usernames and passwords. According to a blog update on IXWebHosting, they are currently experiencing issues where there is a brute force attack on the default  WordPress  login pages of  their customers. " As you can see from our numbers, we were seeing 30 to 40 thousand attacks per day the last few months. In April 2013, it increased to 77,000 per day on average, reaching more than 100,000 attempts per day in the last few days. " Sucuri study says. This attack is greatly effecting Linux servers and attack is possibly conducted using  botnets . To solve the issue, hosting administrator block all connections to wp-login.php. " At this moment, we highly recommend you log into any WordPress installation you have and change the password to something that m...

It is a terrifying prospect, a hack that allows an attacker to take control of plane navigation and cockpit systems has been revealed at a security conference in Europe. This was demonstrated by Hugo Teso , a researcher at security consultancy N.Runs in Germany who's also a commercial airline pilot. He explained that by building an exploit framework called Simon and a complimentary Android app that delivers attack messages, he could manipulate a plane's path as he saw fit. " You can use this system to modify approximately everything related to the navigation of the plane ," Teso told reporters. Teso found he was able to eavesdrop on the system's communications over its 1MBps link, as well as blocking information and injecting data into link.  It took three years of hunting down holes in standard systems to work out how he could use radio signals to send his own navigation commands to a plane's control system, using publicly available Flight Management System (FMS) ...

You can install the industry's strongest and most expensive firewall. You can educate employees about basic security procedures and the importance of choosing strong passwords. You can even lock-down the server room, but how do you protect a company from the threat of social engineering attacks? For any of you that are involved in security awareness efforts, you know what I am talking about. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen today or it might already have happened. In a recent disclosure  posted by renowned hacker and developer  DarkCoderSc (Jean-Pierre LESUEUR) explained that how one can easily Socially Engineer Microsoft Skype Support team to get access to any skype account. From a social engineering perspective, employees are the weak link in the chain of security measures in place. He simply used the weakness of Skype password recovery system itself. One simply need to request a new password to Skype support and aski...

Russian hackers have figured out a way to download free games from Ubisoft's servers, exploiting an existing vulnerability in Ubisoft's uPlay launcher. According to reports, the copies of Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon that are available on torrent sites are the result of a hack of Ubisoft's uPlay service. The hack has allowed users to download advance copies of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a game which has yet to be officially released. Blood Dragon will be officially released on 1st May, for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. As a proof of the exploit, hackers even posted an 1 hour 30 mins long footage of the game. A Ubisoft spokesman said that the company was aware of the issue and was working to resolve it quickly.  An earlier tweet on their account attributed yesterday's outage to hackers as well, saying " Servers were attacked which limited service from 2:30PM to 9:00PM Paris time [8:30AM to 3:00PM EST]. " The hackers developed a piece of software which tricks ...

Three members of the high profile internet hacktivist group LulzSec have admitted to their parts in a series of cyber attacks against the NHS, Sony and News International. Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis and Mustafa Al-Bassam, pleaded guilty to one charge of carrying out an unauthorized act to impair the operation of a computer, contrary to the Criminal Law Act 1977. In July 2011 the Sun's website was hacked and users were briefly re-directed to a spoof page that falsely claiming that Rupert Murdoch had died. Davis, from Shetland, and Bassam, a student from Peckham, south London, admitted conspiring to bring down the websites of law enforcement authorities in Britain and the US, including the CIA and the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA). The group, an offshoot of the Anonymous hacktivists, but Both LulzSec and Anonymous wreaked havoc throughout 2011 and 2012, knocking thousands of websites offline and pilfering data from well-known companies. The men are said to h...

Researchers from Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new spam message campaign being transmitted via Skype contains malware capable of using an infected computer to mine for Bitcoins. The malware, identified as Trojan.Win32.Jorik.IRCbot.xkt . Bitcoin is a non-governmental, fully-digital currency based on an open-source and peer-to-peer internet protocol. Cybercriminals have figured out that distributed Bitcoin mining is a perfect task for botnets and have started developing malware that can abuse the CPUs and GPUs of infected computers to generate Bitcoins. " Bitcoin mining is the process of making computer hardware do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network to confirm transactions and increase security, " Victims are encouraged to install malware file that is included with messages like " this my favourite picture of you ". Those who click the links, infected with a virus dropper downloaded from a server in India. If the malicious file is ins...

A vulnerability in AirDroid application  which provides wireless management of your Android phone or tablet from any browser on the same Wi-Fi network allow hackers  to perform Dos attack from your Android device. Cross Site scripting or  XSS vulnerability in the browser version of AirDroid allows an attacker is able to send a malicious text message to the browser associated with the account when attacker is able to get access to a phone with AirDroid installed. According to advisory posted by US-Cert , When this message is viewed on the AirDroid web interface an attacker can conduct a cross-site scripting attack, which may be used to result in information leakage, privilege escalation, and/or denial of service on the host computer. Vulnerability is currently not patched and also AirDroid team didn't annouce any update regarding fix. As a general good security practice, only allow connections from trusted hosts and network...

Exploit kits are one of the dangerous cyber crime tool, where The Phoenix Exploit Kit is a good example of exploit packs used to exploit vulnerable software on the computers of unsuspecting Internet users. The Phoenix Exploit Kit is available for a base price of $2,200 in underground market by its malware author or developer.  Like other exploit kits , Phoenix also developed to exploit browser-based  vulnerabilities in outdated and insecure versions of browser plugins like Java, and Adobe Flash and Reader. Developer of Phoenix is known by nickname AlexUdakov on several forums. According to new investigation report published by  krebsonsecurity , AlexUdakov was also member of a forum called Darkode , whose administrator accounts were compromised few weeks before and that the intruders were able to gain access to private communications of the administrators.  Intruders was able to view full profiles and database of Dar...

A cyber attack campaign, dubbed #OpIsrael by hacking group Anonymous, targeting Israeli websites caused massive disruption to government, academic and private sites Sunday. Israeli media said small business had been targeted. Some homepage messages were replaced with anti-Israel slogans. Anonymous threatened to disrupt and erase Israel from cyberspace in protest over its mistreatment of Palestinians. In response to the eight day assault that killed 133 Palestinians , Anonymous defaced thousands of Israeli sites and provided information for Gazans facing Internet and communications blackouts.  60 million hacking attempts were reportedly made. Most of the attacks have had little impact, and Israeli experts even say they welcome the attempts as ways of sharpening their defenses. Israel itself is accused of taking part in much more sophisticated cyber attacks against its enemies, particularly Iran. List of all hacked sites are available in fo...

Microsoft has released an advance notification of 9 security bulletins that it plans to release on April 9, 2013. Microsoft said it will patch nine vulnerabilities in total and two of them rated critical and that of the remaining 7 as Important. The critical vulnerabilities are remote code execution issues. First vulnerability affects Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer while the second vulnerability affects Microsoft Windows.  The vulnerability will fix a flaw that allows a drive-by attack, which hackers can exploit to attack machines running the software using malware loaded websites. Earlier this year, Microsoft released an emergency update for Internet Explorer after all the commotion about the security holes in Java. The update aimed to patch a security vulnerability in Internet Explorer that is being used for attacks on government contractors and other organisations. The remaining 7 vulnerabilities pertain to issues affecting Microsoft Office, Microsof...