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Heartbleed has left a worst impression worldwide affecting millions of websites and is also supposed to put millions of Smartphones and tablets users at a great risk. Heartbleed is a critical bug ( CVE-2014-0160 ) in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS heartbeat extension, which allows attackers to read portions of the affected server's memory, potentially revealing users data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers, that the server did not intend to reveal. OpenSSL is a widely-used cryptographic library which implements the SSL and TLS protocol and protects communications on the Internet, and mostly every websites use either SSL or TLS, even the Apache web server that powers almost half of the websites over internet utilizes OpenSSL. But to assume that the users using desktop browsers to visit websites are vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, will be wrong. Despite 40...

A critical vulnerability has been uncovered in Google that could allow an attacker to access the internal files of Google's production servers. Sounds ridiculous but has been proven by the security researchers from Detectify. The vulnerability resides in the Toolbar Button Gallery ( as shown ). The team of researchers found a loophole after they noticed that Google Toolbar Button Gallery allows users to customize their toolbars with new buttons. So, for the developers, it is easy to create their own buttons by uploading XML files containing metadata for styling and other such properties. This feature of Google search engine is vulnerable to  XML External Entity (XXE) . It is an XML injection that allows an attacker to force a badly configured XML parser to " include " or " load " unwanted functionality that can compromise the security of a web application. " The root cause of XXE vulnerabilities is naive XML parsers that blindly interpret the DTD of t...

The Bloomberg claimed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) knew about the most critical Heartbleed flaw and has been using it on a regular basis to gather " critical intelligence " and sensitive information for at least past two years and decided to keep the bug secret, citing two sources ' familiar with the matter '. In response to the above report, NSA has issued a ' 94 character' statement today denying the claims that it has known about the Heartbleed bug since two years and that it has been using it silently for the purpose of surveillance. " NSA was not aware of the recently identified Heartbleed vulnerability until it was made public ," the U.S. intelligence agency said on its Twitter feed . Heartbleed is one of the biggest Internet vulnerabilities in recent history that left large number of cryptographic keys and private data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers, from the most important sites and services on the Int...

We have already read so many articles on Heartbleed, one of the biggest iNternet threat that recently came across by a team of security engineers at Codenomicon , while improving the SafeGuard feature in Codenomicon's Defensics security testing tools.  The story has taken every media attention across the World, as the bug opened doors for the cyber criminals to extract sensitive data from the server's memory and almost every major site have been affected by it. UNINTENTIONAL  BIRTH OF HEARTBLEED More than two years ago, German programmer Robin Seggelmann introduced a new feature called " Heartbeat " in the most secured open source encryption protocol, OpenSSL , which is used by several social networks, search engines, banks and other websites to enable secure connections while transmitting data. But introducing heartbeat feature cost him dearly, as here the most critical bug resides. Dr. Seggelmann allegedly was just trying to improve OpenSSL and wo...

Going for a meeting or for a party and your Phone's battery discharged? Oops!  Yes, I know this happens with most of us once in a day or I can rather say all of us. Smartphones are smart enough but not that smarter as expected keeping in mind today's lifestyle. Phones are the basic necessity now-a-days, but this comes up with another tension-tension of charging at regular intervals, which took most of our precious time. GET-SET CHARGE IN 30 SECONDS Now, if I say that your Smartphone will charge in just 30 seconds, then you definitely won't believe it. But saying this won't be wrong, Israeli start-up claims to have created a battery that uses nanotechnology to charge your Smartphone in 30 seconds. StoreDot unveiled the device Monday at Microsoft's Think Next Conference in Tel Aviv . The prototype charger is capable to charge your Smartphone 100% within few blinks of your eyes, all in about 30 seconds. It depends on bio-organic quantum dots that are na...

Year back, one of the largest " Advanced Persistent Threat " ( APT ) hacking groups received widespread attention from the media and from the U.S. government. APT Groups are China's cyber espionage units and they won't stop their espionage operation, despite being exposed last year. Yes, APT hacking groups, APT1 and APT12 , are again making headlines. Without bothering that the world knows about its cyber hacking activities, the two of its major hacking groups have became once again active and have resumed their espionage operation, reports the security firm Mandiant . A timeline of APT1 economic espionage conducted since 2006 and has systematically stolen confidential data from at least 141 organizations across multiple industries. Mandiant, the FireEye owned company, announced in its M-Trend report that over the past year the firm has a close eye on the APT1 group , which it first exposed in February 2013. It's also been monitoring the second Chinese hackers group, APT12 that...

Just imagine, you are sitting in front of your laptop and your laptop is listening to your nearby conversations. What if the recorded audio from the system's microphone is being instantly uploaded to a malicious website? Google has created a speech-recognition Application Programming Interface (API) that allows websites to interact with Google Chrome and the computer's microphone allows you to speak instead of typing into any text box, to make hands-free web searches, quick conversions, and audio translator also work with them. In January, a flaw was discovered in Google Chrome that enabled malicious websites with speech recognition software to eavesdrop on users' conversations from background without their knowledge using an outdated Google speech API. CHROME IS LISTENING YOU A new similar vulnerability in Google Chrome has been discovered by Israeli security researcher, Guy Aharonovsky, claimed that the Chrome's speech-recognition API has a vulnerability that ...

Firewalls are the front-line soldiers, who sit strategically at the edge of your network and defend it from various security threats. Firewalls require constant maintenance and management to ensure that they are accurately configured for optimal security, continuous compliance, and high performance. Manual firewall configuration and change management is a time-consuming, error-prone, and headache-fraught task, especially in today's increasingly complex and dynamic networks and, for organizations dealing with dozens, or very commonly, hundreds of individual firewalls, routers and other network security devices, manual configuration and ongoing ACL changes can quickly become a management nightmare. If not managed correctly, organizations can find themselves exposed to dangerous cyber threats and compliance risks, which can lead to costly repercussions. The key to keeping up with ever-changing and ever-growing firewall rule-sets is automation.By automating firewall configu...

Millions of websites, users' passwords, credit card numbers and other personal information may be at risk as a result of the Heartbleed security flaw , a vulnerability in widely used cryptographic library ' OpenSSL '. [ READ DETAILS HERE ] Netcraft survey says that about half a million widely trusted active websites on the internet are vulnerable to the heartbleed bug, which means the information transmitting through hundreds of thousands of websites could be vulnerable, despite the protection offered by encryption techniques. According to Netcraft, " the heartbeat extension was enabled on 17.5% of SSL sites, accounting for around half a million certificates issued by trusted certificate authorities. These certificates are consequently vulnerable to being spoofed (through private key disclosure), allowing an attacker to impersonate the affected websites without raising any browser warnings. " Among the trusted names running OpenSSL is Yahoo!, which has been ...

Are you safe from the critical bug Heartbleed?? OpenSSL- the encryption technology used by millions of websites to encrypt the communication and is also used to protect our sensitive data such as e-mails, passwords or banking information.  But a tiny, but most critical flaw called " Heartbleed " in the widely used OpenSSL opened doors for the cyber criminals to extract sensitive data from the system memory. WHAT IS HEARTBLEED? SSL and TLS are known to provide communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as websites, email, instant messaging (IM), including some virtual private networks (VPNs). Heartbleed is a critical bug ( CVE-2014-0160 ) is in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS (transport layer security protocols) and DTLS ( Datagram TLS ) heartbeat extension (RFC6520). This bug was independently discovered by a team of security enginee...

Passwords are the first line of defense against cyber criminals. It is the most vital secret of every activity we do over the internet and also a final check to get into any of your user account, whether it is your bank account, email account, shopping cart account or any other account you have. We all know storing passwords in clear text in your database is ridiculous. Many desktop applications and almost every web service including, blogs, forums eventually need to store a collection of user data and the passwords, that has to be stored using a hashing algorithm. Cryptographic hash algorithms MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512, SHA-3 are general purpose hash functions, designed to calculate a digest of huge amounts of data in as short a time as possible. Hashing is the greatest way for protecting passwords and considered to be pretty safe for ensuring the integrity of data or password. The benefit of hashing is that if someone steals the database with hashed passwords, they o...