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X.Org Foundation develops the X-Window System, the standard window system for open source operating systems and devices. Most of the graphical user interfaces for Unix and Linux systems rely on it. At the 30th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Germany, Ilja van Sprundel , a security researcher gave the presentation titled  " X11 Server security with being 'worse than it looks.'". He found more than 120 bugs in a few months. In the presentation, he has presented a 23 year old Stack overflow vulnerability in X11 System that could lead to privilege escalation to root and affects all versions of the X Server back to X11R5. Later today, X.Org Foundation released a security Advisory , states " A BDF font file containing a longer than expected string could overflow the buffer on the stack. Testing in X servers built with Stack Protector resulted in an immediate crash when reading a user-provided specially crafted font. " The flaw resides in a file at " libXfo...

When you visit a website, it stores some information on your system through a web browser for later use i.e. Login information, so you do not have to re-login to your website every time you visit the same website on the same browser. Cookies are usually stored as plain text or in the database by the browser and if a computer is accessed by multiple people, one person might scan another's cookie folder and look for things like passwords or long-life session IDs. If an attacker has the physical access to your system, can steal all your cookies easily to hijack accounts. There are many tools available on the Internet that can make it quicker and easier for an attacker to export all your cookies from the browser. The Google Chrome web browser also saves cookies to a SQLite database file in the user's data folder. One can import that file to SQL Editor software to read all cookies in plain text format. Google's open source project Chromium browser now have a new feat...

Now that we have enough details about how the NSA's Surveillance program, running for a long time against almost each country of this planet.  Hundreds of top-secret NSA documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden already exposed that Spying projects like PRISM and MUSCULAR are tapping directly into Google and Yahoo internal networks to access our Emails. NSA's tactics are even capable to defeat the SSL encryption, so unsecured email can easily be monitored and even altered as it travels through the Internet. One major point on which all of us are worrying is about the privacy of communication among each other and If you're looking for a little personal privacy in your communications you will need to encrypt your messages. To avoid privacy breaches; rather I should say to make it more difficult for the NSA or British GCHQ surveillance program to read our communication, we should use PGP encryption (Pretty Good Privacy). Why we should Enc...

Full disk encryption is expected to be the top security technology to be adopted this year. Take a moment to think about the information that is present on your personal computer, i.e. Photo s , passwords, emails, Important documents from work or  Financial data and  trade secrets. Many of us from the Security Industry obviously have enough confidential and important data regarding our work, source codes, or researches stored in our laptops or systems. What if your computer is stolen or seized by any Law enforcement agency at the Airport? Best example to explain the situation is as follows: We all know  Guardian journalist ' Glenn Greenwald ', who  has written a series of stories in July 2013 revealing the NSA's secret surveillance programs, leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden . In August 2013,  The partner of the Guardian journalist ' Glenn Greenwald ', was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at the Airpor...

If you spend more than a few hours a month doing patching; if you stay up until the middle of the night one Saturday each month doing patching; if you just flip on automatic updates and hope for the best; or if you email your users instructions on how to update their machines – then you're doing it wrong. Patching shouldn't be something that takes multiple days, nor is it something that should ruin one weekend a month. But it is critical and needs to be done right. If you think you're spending way too much time on patching, and have actually considered skipping a month because things didn't sound "that bad," then here's a post just for you. In it, we'll look at seven tips to save you time (and money) taking care of patch management. 1. Have a plan: First of all, you have to have a plan. Management has to support it, and you need to make sure it covers all the systems on your network. You don't want to patch at random, or try to remember every system that you have. Create a plan that...

After Snapchat hack, this can be another worst data breach of the new year. A Pakistani hacker ' H4x0r HuSsY ' has successfully compromised the official Forum of ' openSUSE ', a Linux distro developed, sponsored & supported by SUSE. The hacker managed to deface the Forum and uploaded its custom message page as shown and account information of 79,500 registered users' may have been compromised. (The forum was defaced at the time of writing - Check Here ) The popular website MacRumors's Forum was compromised  in last November using an alleged zero day exploit, which is based on  vBulletin , a famous forum software. The openSUSE Forum is also based upon  vBulletin . Another interesting fact is that openSUSE is still using vBulletin 4.2.1 , which is vulnerable to  inject rogue administrator accounts flaw. Whereas,  the latest patched  vBulletin 5.0.5 is available. Possibly, Hacker exploits same or another known vBulletin version 4.2.1 vuln...

United Arab Emirates (UAE) may terminate a $930 Million USD contract with France based companies for the supply of two two military Imaging satellites  due to the discovery of several US produced components in them. Now the deal is in danger because the UAE claims it has discovered backdoors in the  components  which are manufactured in the United States , reported by the Defense News . The contract, sealed in July 2013, includes a ground station, the Pleiades-type satellites (aka Falcon Eye) are due for delivery 2018. The revelation was provided by high-level UAE sources, the companies involved in the business are the prime contractor Airbus Defense and Space, and payload maker Thales Alenia Space. " If this issue is not resolved, the UAE is willing to scrap the whole deal ," he added. UAE authorities suspect the presence of vulnerabilities would " provide a back door to the highly secure data transmitted to the ground station ". An unnamed UAE source has confirmed...

After being an owner of Smartphones, now it's your turn to own a Smart Car. Wouldn't it sound great if you could use your favorite mobile apps on Car's dashboard display? Yes! You heard right.. Google has tied-up with several Auto manufacturers with the goal to bring Android to Cars with built-in controls and hardware by the end of this year. Google has announced at the CES technology trade show in Las Vegas, the Open Automotive Alliance (OAA) will achieve this with their partners i.e. General Motors, Honda, Audi, Hyundai and chipmaker Nvidia. This new project is designed to accelerate innovation in the Automotive sector, with the customized version of most popular mobile platform 'Android' for Cars, that will bring Google Places, Maps, Voice, Earth and developer support to cars. " This open development model and common platform will allow automakers to more easily bring cutting-edge technology to their drivers, and create new opportunities for developers to delive...

Google's primary search domain for Tajikistan had seemingly been hacked yesterday, along with other high profile domains including Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon -- redirected to a defaced page. Actually neither Google, nor Twitter servers have been hacked, rather website of Tajikistan's Domain registrar ( domain.tj ) authority has been hacked, that allows the hacker to access domain control panel. Server Kernel:  Linux mx.takemail.com 2.4.21-27.ELsmp #1 SMP Wed Dec 1 21:59:02 EST 2004 i686 Iranian hacker ' Mr.XHat' successfully managed to change the DNS records of attack websites and defaced them for about a day. Hacker told ' The Hacker News ' that he used Directory Traversal vulnerability to hack the website and still has the access to the control panel. Directory traversal is a type of HTTP exploit that is used by attackers to gain unauthorized access to restricted directories and files. Following the screenshot of compromised Domain Registrar's Control Panel:...

Staysure, a UK based Insurance company has suffered a massive data breach . More than 93,000 customers' sensitive financial data may have been compromised by unknown hackers. We became aware of the problem on November 14, and quickly informed the relevant card issuing bodies and subsequently The Financial Conduct Authority, the Information Commissioner's Office and the Police. The company notified that their systems have suffered cyber attack during the second half of October 2013 and Customers' Data including names, addresses, payment card details and CVV numbers has stolen. In that attack, encrypted payment card details of customers who purchased insurance from us before May 2012 were stolen, along with CVV details and customer names and addresses. From May 2012 we ceased to store this data. Credit card details were encrypted, but the CVV number was in the clear text, which is not good. Now this is not confirmed that their encryption implementation was secure or not. Howe...

Think twice before using some words like ' Bomb ', ' Attack ', ' Blast ' or ' kill ' in your Facebook status update, tweets or emails, because this may flag you as a potential terrorist under a surveillance project of Indian Security agencies. This Indian Internet surveillance project named as NETRA ( Network Traffic Analysis) ,   capable of detecting and capture any dubious voice traffic passing through software such as Skype or Google Talk, according to  the Economic Times . In Hindi, NETRA means " eye " and this project is an Indian version of PRISM i.e. A spying project by US National Security Agency (NSA), that also allows the government to monitor the Internet and telephone records of citizens. Reportedly, NETRA is under testing right now by the Indian Intelligence Bureau and Cabinet Secretariat and after on success will be deployed by all Indian National security agencies. Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), a lab under Defe...