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U.S. intelligence agencies traced a recent cyber intrusion into U.S. Army database that holds sensitive information about vulnerabilities in U.S. dams.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams contains information about 79,000 dams throughout the country and tracks such information as the number of estimated deaths that could occur if a specific dam failed. The database also holds sensitive information, including vulnerabilities, of every major dam throughout the country. Michelle Van Cleave, a former consultant to the CIA, told the Beacon that the data breach appeared to be part of a greater effort to collect vulnerability and targeting data for future cyber or military attacks. The Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams was hacked by an unauthorized user believed to be from Chinese government or military cyber warriors, beginning in January and uncovered earlier this month. " In the wrong hands, the Army Corps of Engineers...

The Bitcoin mining rig is becoming a popular alternative to people who want an easy way to earn the digital currency. All you have to do is plug the hardware that specializes in Bitcoin mining and run its customized software. After that, you can sit back and relax as it mines the digital currency for you. A popular eSports league has admitted that one of its employees harnessed the power of member's computers without their knowledge in order to mine Bitcoins. For a period of 2 weeks, gamers noticed that their computers were generating unusually high GPU loads and frequent BSOD errors. Some gamers stated that their GPUs were damaged due to them reaching temperatures above 90 degrees Celsius. The mining began on April 13th and affected thousands of gamers, who unwittingly mined over $3,700 worth of the currency. Eric Thunberg, co-owner of ESEA, stated that the Bitcoin miner was meant to be part of an April Fools joke, however, they weren't able to finish it in time. Th...

Early 2012 ESET company a mysterious malware, dubbed the Avatar rootkit (Win32/Rootkit.Avatar), advertised in the underground forums by Russian cyber crime . " We present you here previously announced product. In connection with work on other projects, we moved the release date for the public from May to February 2013th 2012go.Now nuclear rootkit AVATAR is available for rental. " Despite the malware was described months ago it was not found and published until now, in March ESET researchers detected two droppers with different C&C servers and having different compilation time stamps as showed in the following pictures: The Avatar rootkit appears very sophisticated, it uses two different infection techniques, the first in the dropper so as to bypass detections by HIPS, and the second one in the rootkit driver to allow the malware to be alive after system reboot, the instance detected works only on x86 systems. The 2 level dropper for Avatar rootkit works in conjunct...

A dangerous variant of the Ramnit malware has been discovered targeting the UK's financial sector. Trusteer claims to have discovered an interesting trojan based attack technique that injects highly convincing and interactive real-time messages into the user Web stream that they encounter when logging into a UK online banking session. The Ramnit worm was discovered in 2010, but in 2011 researchers spotted a new strain that had incorporated source code from the notorious Zeus banking trojan. Cyber criminals are stepping up their use of social engineering techniques to bypass increasingly security-aware users of online banking and e-commerce sites.   The malware reportedly avoids detection by going into an idle sleep mode until its intended victim logs into their online bank account, at which point it activates and presents them with a fraudulent phishing message. Ramnit circumvented the OTP feature at the target bank using a 'Man in the Browser' attack ...

Distributed Denial of Service attacks have increased in scale, intensity and frequency. The wide range of motives for these attacks political , criminal, or social makes every merchant or organization with an online presence a potential target. Over the weekend Incapsula mitigated a unique DDoS attack against a large gaming website, in which they have discovered a DDoS attack using thousands of legitimate WordPress blogs without the need for them to be compromised. Incapsula released the list of approximately 2,500 WordPress sites from where the attack was originated, including some very large sites like Trendmicro.com, Gizmodo.it and Zendesk.com . In a recent report , we posted about another method for DDoS attacks using DNS amplification , where a DNS request is made to an open DNS resolver with the source IP address forged so that it is the IP address of the targeted site to which the response is thus sent, but this new method uses HTTP rather tha...

Privacy conscious phone users are being offered a new app that claims to be the world's first totally secure messaging service. A London-based iPhone messaging app claims to be unhackable and is offering reward to anyone who can intercept a message sent by it.  Redact believes that messages sent via the app are completely secure, and to prove it a reward of £10,000 has been offered. The application creates a secure and encrypted peer-to-peer network between two iPhones, with messages sent directly from one phone to another and not through the company's servers.  The company has already offered its Secure Messenger service for free to MPs and submitted the technology to CESG, the Government's National Technical Authority for Information Assurance, which provides advice on the security of communications and electronic data. With Redact there are no user names, phone numbers or email addresses. Instead, new users are automatically assigned a unique PIN, simi...

Google has fixed a series of serious vulnerabilities in its Chrome OS , including three high-risk bugs that could be used for code execution on vulnerable machines. Bug bounties is the cash prizes offered by open source communities to anyone who finds key software bugs have been steadily on the rise for several years now. As part of its reward program, Google paid out $31,336 to a researcher who found three of the vulnerabilities . Google's post notes : " We're pleased to reward Ralf-Philipp Weinmann $31,336 under the Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program for a chain of three bugs, including demo exploit code and very detailed write-up. We are grateful to Ralf for his work to help keep our users safe. " The three-bug chain credited to Weinmann exploited O3D, a JavaScript API (application programming interface) designed for crafting interactive 3-D graphics-based Web applications. The API and supporting browser plug-in were created by Google, with a preliminary ve...

The Guardian's Twitter accounts have been taken over by pro-Syrian government hackers ' Syrian Electronic Army ' , who previously targeted the Associated Press BBC , al-Jazeera, the Qatari government and National Public Radio in the United States, as well as France 24 TV. " We are aware that a number of Guardian Twitter accounts have been compromised and we are working actively to resolve this ," a Guardian spokesperson said. Nine bogus tweets were broadcast in an hour, including some with anti-Israeli sentiments, and others saying " Long Live Syria " and " Syrian Electronic Army Was Here ".  Cyber-security experts believe the SEA have targeted a series of western media organisations in an apparent attempt to cause disruption and spread support for President Bashar al-Assad's regime, which has been under increasing Western pressure to end an ongoing bloody civil war in Syria. The group's domain names were apparently registered by the Syr...

McAfee said it has found a vulnerability in Adobe Systems' Reader program that reveals when and where a PDF document is opened. The issue emerges when some users launch a link to another file path, which calls on a JavaScript application programming interface (API), while Reader alerts a user when they are going to call on a resource from another place. The issue is not a serious problem and does not allow for remote code execution, but McAfee does consider it a security problem and has notified Adobe. It affects every version of Adobe Reader, including the latest version, 11.0.2. " We have detected some PDF samples in the wild that are exploiting this issue. Our investigation shows that the samples were made and delivered by an 'email tracking service' provider. We don't know whether the issue has been abused for illegal or APT attacks ," wrote McAfee's Haifei Li. McAfee declined to reveal the details of the vulnerability as Adobe i...

Cyber crime enterprise is showing a growing interest in monetization of botnets , the most targeted sector in recent months is banking. One of most active malware that still menaces Banking sector is the popular Zeus . Zeus is one of the oldest, it is active since 2007, and most prolific malware that changed over time according numerous demands of the black-market. Recently, Underground forums are exploded the offer of malicious codes, hacking services and bullet proof hosting to organize a large scale fraud. Cyber criminals are selling kits at reasonable prices or entire botnets for renting, sometimes completing the offer with information to use during the attacks. The model described, known also as a Fraud-as-a-Service , is winning, malicious code such as Zeus, SpyEye , Ice IX, or even Citadel have benefited of the same sales model, cyber criminals with few hundred dollars are able to design their criminal operation. Since now the sales model and the actor invol...

After only a few days since the developer edition of Google Glass landed, Jay Freeman aka " Saurik " has jailbroken it. Though Google Glass run on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, he get root access using an exploit first discovered by another hacker named B1nary .  Freeman, who obtained the device by pre-ordering it at Google I/O last year, announced his success on Friday via Twitter. Such tactics give the user full command of the operating system without restriction. Freeman is not the first to crack Glass, though: just yesterday, another developer, Liam McLoughlin, also got root on his device. Although both jailbreaks were successful on the current Explorer Edition of Glass, it's not clear whether those holes will still be available in the consumer edition. Freeman says that Glass could be made to store data on the device itself or on a nearby phone connected by Bluetooth, instead of sending data to Google servers. McLoughlin says that Google Gla...

The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 35-year-old man suspected of taking part in a massive DDoS attack against the anti-spam group Spamhaus back in March . The attack's bandwidth peaked at over 300Gbps, making it the largest DDoS attack in history. Their target, Spamhaus, is a company which creates blacklists of spam sites and sells them to Internet Service Providers. Spamhaus was attacked with DDOS and the website overcrowded with traffic and went offline. Later CloudFlare was hired by Spamhaus to protect against such attacks. The suspect was arrested by Spanish authorities in Barcelona based on a European arrest warrant and is expected to be transferred to the Netherlands soon. The man arrested is believed to be Sven Kamphuis, the owner and manager of Dutch hosting firm Cyberbunker that has been implicated in the attack. This DDoS attack was believed to have been sparked when Spamhaus placed CyberBunker on its spam blacklist. Cyberbunker i...

LivingSocial, a daily deals website part-owned by Amazon Inc ., hit by a cyber attack that may have affected more than 50 million customers and will need to reset their passwords. LivingSocial says it has 70 million members worldwide. Leaked data includes names, e-mail addresses, dates of birth and encrypted passwords. Customers' credit card information and merchants' financial and banking information were not affected by the hack, LivingSocial said. So it looks like some personal info may have fallen into the wrong hands, but credit card and other financial details should be safe. The cyberattack affected LivingSocial customers in North America, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Ireland and Malaysia and its LetsBonus users in Southern Europe and Latin America. So if you're among the affected users, the hackers have just the right amount of information to phish you. The site is sending out emails to customers advising them to change their passwor...

A new sophisticated and stealthy Apache backdoor meant to drive traffic to malicious websites serving Blackhole exploit kit widely has been detected by  Sucuri recently. Researchers claimed that this backdoor affecting hundreds of web servers right now. Dubbed Linux/Cdorked.A , one of the most sophisticated Apache backdoors we have seen so far. The backdoor leaves no traces of compromised hosts on the hard drive other than its modified httpd binary, thereby complicating forensics analysis. All of the information related to the backdoor is stored in shared memory.  The configuration is pushed by the attacker through obfuscated HTTP requests that aren't logged in normal Apache logs. The HTTP server is equipped with a reverse connect backdoor that can be triggered via a special HTTP GET request. This means that no command and control information is stored anywhere on the system. ESET researchers  analyzed the binary and ...

Google just released a new Play Store version 4.0.27 that, contains only very minor tweaks and Google has changed the rules of its Google Play Store to put an end to the practice of developers updating their apps through their own means rather than the official Google Play channel. Shortly before the Facebook Home launch, some users noticed a new version of Facebook was available on their device, but it wasn't through the Play Store. Instead, the update came directly through the app, bypassing the Store altogether. Under the " Dangerous Products " section of the Google Play developer policies, Google now states that " an app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play's update mechanism. " Essentially this means that once an app is downloaded by an Android user it cannot contact home base and auto-update its own operating code. Instead, it has to use the off...

BackTrack Linux, a specialized distribution of penetration testing tools, has long been a favorite of security specialists and IT pros. Security professionals have been relying on the BackTrack security distribution for many years to help them perform their assessments. A couple of weeks ago, futuristic major release of BackTrack was announced as   Kali Linux . Today Backtrack team released few updates to Kali Linux as version 1.0.3 and fixed couple of bugs. " Our first attempts at building an accessible version of Kali failed and after a bit of digging, we found that there were several upstream GNOME Display Manager (GDM3) bugs in Debian, which prevented these accessibility features from functioning with the GDM greeter. Working together with an upstream GNOME developer, we knocked out these bugs and had the fixes implemeted in Kali, and hopefully in future builds of GDM3 in Debian ." Download  new version of Kali Linux ( kali-linux-...

It seems that 2013 is the " Data Leakage Year "! Many customers' information and confidential data have been published on the internet coming from government institutions, famous vendors, and companies too. Ebrahim Hegazy(@Zigoo0) an Egyptian information security advisor who found a high severity vulnerability in " Avira license daemon " days ago, is on the news again, but this time for finding and reporting Blind SQL Injection vulnerability in one of Yahoo! E-marketing applications. SQL Injection vulnerabilities are ranked as Critical vulnerabilities, because if used by Hackers it will cause a database breach which will lead to confidential information leakage. A time based blind SQL Injection web vulnerability is detected in the official Yahoo! TW YSM Marketing Application Service. The vulnerability allows remote attackers to inject own SQL commands to breach the database of that vulnerable application and get access to the user data. ...

More than 50 millions of Smartphone users worldwide are facing a risk posed by a critical flaw in Viber app. The security company Bkav announced that it has found a way to gain full access to Android phones using the popular Viber messaging app. Unlike the Samsung lockscreen issue we reported on earlier, this attack doesn't take any fancy finger work. Instead, all it needs is two phones, both running Viber, and a phone number. " The way Viber handles to popup its messages on smartphones' lock screen is unusual, resulting in its failure to control programming logic, causing the flaw to appear, " said Mr. Nguyen Minh Duc, Director of Bkav's Security Division. Steps to exploit: Send Viber message to victim Combine actions on Viber message popups with tricks like using victim's notification bar, sending other Viber messages, etc. to make Viber keyboard appear Once Viber keyboard has appeared, to fully access the device, create misse...

In recent months the DDoS world has shifted from complex small scale Botnet attacks to much larger network based DDoS attacks , perpetrated largely by hijacked web servers. How many of these hijacked servers are out there remains to be seen. However, Incapsula recently got a very good idea of just how large these DDoS cannons are getting. Last Saturday Incapsula mitigated a rather small, 4Gbps DDoS attack, but this time it had a different pattern that attracted our attention. At first sight the attack seemed rather simple, generating 8 million DNS queries per second, to many domains, from spoofed IP addresses (using real domain name servers' IPs). But this time it included a hint about where it was coming from: all that traffic was coming from the same source. Probably on the same network, maybe even the same device. Tracing it to a single Source - TTL Giveaway Incapsula were able to trace the attack to a single source because this time the attackers slipped-u...

A self-proclaimed leader of hacking group Lulzsec has been arrested in Sydney, know by online name " Aush0k ". Australian Federal Police confirmed they arrested the unnamed 24-year-old man from Point Clare yesterday.  The police allege that the man compromised and defaced a government website, triggering an investigation that led to his arrest. The man is reportedly a senior member of staff at a prominent Sydney IT firm, and used his position of trust within the company to get access to sensitive information. His knowledge and skills presented " a significant risk to the clients of the company for which he was employed had he continued his illegal online activities ," police said. He faces a maximum of 12 years in jail. AFP Commander Glen McEwen says " This man is known to international law enforcement and police will allege he was in a position of trust within the company with access to information from clients including government agencies ," It's wo...

Founder and CEO of Security Explorations of Poland,  Adam Gowdiak has reported a new unpatched security vulnerability in JAVA that affects all Java versions, including 7u21 released last Tuesday. Gowdiak claims to have sent to Oracle a report about a reflection API vulnerability in the newly shipped Server Java Runtime Environment (JRE), notifying them of the new security weakness. " It can be used to achieve a complete Java security sandbox bypass on a target system ," Vulnerability allows attackers to completely bypass the language's sandbox to access the underlying system. Gowdiak has not published any further details about the vulnerability in order to give Oracle time to patch the problem. Last week's Oracle patch update repaired many issues plaguing the platform. Java 7 Update 21 contains 42 new security fixes for Oracle Java SE. A majority of these flaws are browse-to–a-hacked-site-and-get-infected vulnerabilities. According to Oracle, " 3...

The Associated Press Twitter account has been hacked,and posted a bogus post about explosions at the White House and Barack Obama is injured. Within a few minutes, Twitter suspended the account, and Julie Pace, the chief White House correspondent for The A.P., announced at a White House briefing that the account had been hacked. " The president is fine ," spokesman Jay Carney said. " I was just with him. " AP said later: " The @AP twitter account has been hacked. The tweet about an attack at the White House is false. " The Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility, tweeting out: " Ops! @AP get owned by Syrian Electronic Army! #SEA #Syria #ByeByeObama. " Last year, it took over Twitter and Facebook accounts of the Al Arabiya news channel to spread fake news of a coup and explosion in Qatar, which sides with the Syrian rebels. Shortly after the account was suspended, Mike Baker, a reporter for the news organization, posted a messa...

FireEye experts have been tracking the Operation Beebus campaign for a few months now, and new same gang of hackers are being blamed for a set of recently discovered spear-phishing attacks that aim to steal information related to American drones . These attacks exploited previously discovered vulnerabilities via document files delivered by email in order to plant a previously unknown backdoor onto victim systems. Operation Beebus is an APT-style attack campaign targeting government agencies in the United States and India as well as numerous aerospace, defense, and telecom industry organizations. FireEye Labs has linked the attacks to the China-based Comment Group hacker collective (a prolific actor believed to be affiliated with the Chines government), and Operation Beebus. " The set of targets cover all aspects of unmanned vehicles, land, air and sea, from research to design to manufacturing of the vehicles and their various subsystems. Other related malware have been discov...