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Though Apple claims iMessage has end-to-end encryption, But researchers claimed at a security conference that Apple's iMessage system is not protected and the company can easily access it. Cyril Cattiaux - better known as pod2g, who has developed iOS jailbreak software, said that the company's claim about iMessage protection by unbreakable encryption is just a lie, because the weakness is in the key infrastructure as it is controlled by Apple: they can change a key anytime they want, thus read the content of our iMessages . Basically, when you send  an   iMessage to someone, you grab their public key from Apple, and encrypt your message using that public key. On the other end, recipients have their own private key that they use to decrypt this message. A third-party won't be able to see the actual message unless they have access to the private key. Trust and public keys always have a problem, but the  researchers noted that there's ...

In March of this year, we saw the first ever 300 Gigabit DDoS attack , which was possible due to a DNS Reflection Amplification attack against Spamhaus . On 24 September World's 3rd Largest Bitcoin exchange BTC China , a platform where both Bitcoin and Chinese yuan are traded faced massive DDoS attack for continued nine hours, where no amplification techniques were used. Incapsula , Cloud-based security service provider helped the Chinese Bitcoin trader to protect them from such massive denial-of-service attack and successfully mitigated the threats. Incapsula tweeted  a graph of DDoS attack last month as shown, " Yesterday we prevented a ~100Gbps DDoS. The attack's load was distributed across our 350Gbps network. " Specialist at Incapsula shared the details of the attack with TheRegister , explained " The attack against BTC China took the form of a SYN flood rather than the DNS amplification-style attack ", " The attacker balanced the assault betwee...

Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a security technique involved in protection from buffer overflow attacks. Many recent APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) attacks have utilized many different ASLR bypass techniques during the past year, according to Researchers at  FireEye . Many exploits and malware attacks rely on the ability of the programmer to accurately identify where specific processes or system functions reside in memory. In order for an attacker to exploit or leverage a function, they must first be able to tell their code where to find the function or process to exploit.  The goal of ASLR  is to introduce randomness into addresses used by a given task. It involves randomly arranging the positions of key data areas of a program, including the base of the executable and the positions of the stack, heap, and libraries, in a process's address space.  Today a lot of attention is brought to client side exploits especially inside web brows...

In August the New Zealand has passed a bill that radically expands the powers of  The Government Communications Security Bureau ( GCSB ), an intelligence agency of the New Zealand government, equivalent of the National Security Agency ( NSA ). The bill demands the companies and other network operators like Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo must allow New Zealand spy agencies a certain path to monitor user communications, but it will also violate the rights of New Zealand citizens. Today afternoon the controversial of Telecommunications ( Interception Capability and Security) Bill made progress in the House in its Second Reading. A number of minor changes were made in select committee. Labour Leader David Cunliffe said his party continued to strongly oppose the legislation as it did not provide protection for the privacy of communications from spying by the state. In a supplementary order paper to the Telecommunications Bill , Amy Adams i...

A number of D-Link routers reportedly have an issue that makes them susceptible to unauthorized backdoor access . The researcher Craig, specialized on the embedded device hacking - demonstrated the presence of a backdoor within some DLink routers that allows an attacker to access the administration web interface of network devices without any authentication and view/change its settings. He found the backdoor inside the firmware v1 . 13 for the DIR-100 revA . Craig found and extracted the SquashFS file system loading firmware's web server file system (/bin/webs) into IDA.  Giving a look at the string listing, the Craig's attention was captured by a modified version of thttpd , the thttpd - alphanetworks /2.23, implemented to provide the rights to the administrative interface for the router.  The library is written by Alphanetworks, a spin-off company of D-Link, analyzing it Craig found many custom functions characterized by a name starting with suffix "a...

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has once again has renewed the permission to the U.S. government for a controversial program to collect the telephony metadata from American phone companies. The News that the NSA collects bulk phone call metadata including phone numbers, call times and duration from Verizon and other backbone providers initially leaked out in June by Edward Snowden . It's pointed out that FISA court orders are usually issued to track a specific person. It's rare to see the government collecting information on every single person. The government filed an application with the FISC seeking renewal of the authority to collect telephony metadata in bulk, which expired on Friday. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has published a press release and the Court has renewed that authority. The program does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's phone calls , and the information acquired does not include the content ...

Three men allegedly installed Credit Card Skimming keylogger at into cash registers in a Nordstrom department store in the Florida. Those Keyloggers were connected via a keyboard cord between the keyboard and the computer to intercept the information transmitted between the two devices and Furthermore, the gang used the connectors designed to resemble common PS2 cables. Krebs has indicated  on his blog that such keyloggers can be easily obtained online for about $40 only. Placing such a devices would have allowed criminals access to data for anyone applying for a Nordstrom credit card , plus any numbers typed in via the keyboard.  In order to collect the captured data, criminals have to return back after few days to collect the keylogger from store. But at this time it is unknown if the men ever returned to the store in order to retrieve the keyloggers and Nordstrom are unaware of any arrests being made. An alert circulated by the po...

One of the most intimidating issues that gives nightmares to IT teams across organizations is data breaches or data loss. Typically, data loss happens when security is compromised and corporate sensitive data is accessed. It might fall under any of these categories: Unauthorized, intentional or unintentional exfiltration of confidential information Data spill or data leak This can happen due to external security attacks like malware, hacking or sometimes even from an internal source such as a disgruntled employee. This calls for a data loss prevention (DLP) system in place that would help you contain and avoid the loss of data. Data loss happens in many stages and can be broadly categorized into three categories: Data in Motion: Data that moves through the network to the outside, in most cases using the Internet Data at Rest: Data that rests in your database and other provisions for storage Data at the Endpoints: Data at the endpoints of your network, say, data on USB and oth...

If you're a daily computer user, you're likely aware of all the threats you face every day online in the form of viruses and malware . CryptoLocker , a new ransomware malware, began making the rounds several months ago. This ransomware is particularly nasty because infected users are in danger of losing their personal files forever. Ransomware is designed to extort money from computer users by holding computer files hostage until the computer user pays a ransom fee to get them back. The Cryptolocker hijacker sniffs out your personal files and wraps them with strong encryption before it demands money. Cryptolocker is spread through malicious hyperlinks shared via social media and spam emails, like fake UPS tracking notification emails. The original demanded payments of $100 to decrypt files, but the new and improved version demanding $300 from victims. Apparently, the encryption is created using a unique RSA-2048 public key. The decryption key is located o...

A pro-Palestinian hacktivist group ' KDMS Team ', who recently managed to briefly hijack the Metasploit website of security firm Rapid7 and become popular after Hacking World's largest Web Hosting Network Leaseweb website and antivirus vendors AVG, Avira as well as mobile messaging service WhatsApp's websites. Now even I have to say that - Security is just an Illusion, because just now the group aligned with Anonymous has successfully hijacked another two Antivirus firm website - ESET and Bitdefender . The KDMS Team successfully changed the DNS records of both sites to redirect people to a website playing the Palestinian national anthem and displaying a political message under the title " You Got Pwned ". Message posted on Bitdefender and Eset website says: Hello bitdefender Touched By KDMS team We was thinking about quitting hacking and disappear again ..! But we said : there is some sites must be hacked You are one of our targe...

A serious vulnerability in WhatsApp allows anyone who is able to eavesdrop on WhatsApp connection to decrypt users' messages. Whatsapp , the mobile application for instant messaging platform has become one of the main communication tools of the present day and its popularity makes it attractive for security researchers and hackers . This time it is debated in the protection of the messages exchanged through the application, thanks to a vulnerability in the crypto implementation they can be intercepted by an attacker. Thijs Alkemade is a computer science student at Utrecht University in The Netherlands who works on the open source Adium instant messaging project, during its research activity he disclosed a serious issue in the encryption used to secure WhatsApp messages. In the post titled " Piercing Through WhatsApp's Encryption " Alkemade remarked that Whatsapp has been plagued by numerous security issues recently, easily stolen passwords, unencr...