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MI6, CIA and Department of Justice Tango Down ! Hacker group Anonymous claimed it took down the CIA website for the second time in two months following a new DDoS attack on the U.S. secret service which lasted 45 minutes.  Anonymous is reportedly on a DDoS rampage today, downing the CIA, Department of Justice, and two Mi6 websites. Members of the group claimed responsibility throughout Facebook and Twitter. Brazilian hacktivist Havittaja reportedly launched the initial offensive on the DoJ and CIA for "lulz" while other members jumped on board a short time later. The technique also known as a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack, is a concentrated effort by multiple individuals to make a network busy to its intended users. The end result is server overload. Anonymous makes a freeware tool available to its members to carry out these attacks, which it calls the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. The collective targeted the department of justice in January as part of Operation M...

Banking System Vulnerability - 3 million bank accounts hacked in Iran Iran's Central Bank has announced that the electronic information of 3 million customers of 10 Iranian banks have been compromised. These banks now require their customers to change their ATM pin numbers before they can access their account. This has caused a rush to the ATM machines by the worried customers. The hacker was identified as Khosro Zare', a former bank-system specialist in Iran who recently left the country.Zare' claimed in a blog that he hacked the PIN codes to highlight the vulnerability of Iran's banking system. According to the report, the hacker had provided the managing directors of the targeted banks with information about the bank accounts of 1000 customers in the previous Iranian calendar year (ended on March 19) to warn them about the susceptibility of their computer systems and networks to cyber threats. But Central bank officials had earlier downplayed the reports, sayi...

Forensic FOCA - Power of Metadata in digital forensics Most of the e ort in today's digital forensics community lies in the retrieval and analysis of existing information from computing systems.  Metadata is data about data. Metadata plays a number of important roles in computer forensics. It can provide corroborating information about the document data itself. It can reveal information that someone tried to hide, delete, or obscure. It can be used to automatically correlate documents from different sources. More simply, electronic information about a file but not seen on a printed copy of the file. It is embedded and provides additional information, including when and by whom it was created, accessed, or modified. Informatica64  release Forensic FOCA (Fingerprinting Organizations with Collected Archives) , tool for forensic analysts focused on the use of metadata files to generate a forensic case. Several other metadata extraction tools exist but FOCA is co...

Phone Phreaking  using Bluebox   Demonstrated  in India Christy Philip Mathew , an Indian Information Security Instructor and Hacker demonstrated Phone Phreaking  using Bluebox in his lab. This time we have something really special that would remind us the phone phreaking. Actually Phone Phreaking reminds us about the life of Kevin Mitnick, Steve Wozniak and John Drapper, mean the olden times when they used to play around with the bluebox. What is Blue Box : This device is certainly one of the most unique pieces of electronic equipment that I have been able to collect so far. It is essentially a hacking tool disguised to look like a common 1970's Texas Instruments hand held electronic calculator. Basically a real calculator was sacrificed and modified to produce audio frequency signaling tones which allowed the user to freely (and illegally) access the Bell Telephone System long distance network. The origin of the name " blue box " was due to the f...

Android Video Malware found in Japanese Google Play Store A new Trojan has been found, and removed, from the Google Play/Android Market, McAfee reported on Friday afternoon. The post says applications carrying the Trojan promise, and in some cases deliver, trailers for upcoming video games or anime or adult-oriented clips, but they also request "read contact data" and "read phone state and identity" permissions before being downloaded. McAfee Mobile Security detects these threats as Android/DougaLeaker .A, the company said.McAfee said that the fifteen malicious applications of this sort had been found on Google Play, and that all had been removed from the market. The app gathers the Android ID not the IMEI code that can uniquely identify the device, but the 64-bit number that is randomly generated on the device's first boot and remains with it for the life of the device. The app also harvests the phone's phone number and contact list, along with every n...

Sabpab - Another Mac os Backdoor Trojan Discovered Security firm Sophos has discovered more malware for the Mac OS X platform called Sabpab . It uses the same Java vulnerability as Flashback to install itself as a "drive-by download." Users of older versions of Java now have still more malware to worry about. It also doesn't require any user interaction to infect a system either just like Flashback all that needs to happen is for you to visit an infected webpage. Sabpab, according to Sophos, installs a backdoor that allows the hackers to capture screen snapshots, upload or download files and execute commands on infected Macs remotely. The Trojan creates the files /Users/ /Library/Preferences/com.apple.PubSabAgent.pfile /Users/ /Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.PubSabAGent.plist Encrypted logs are sent back to the control server, so the hackers can monitor activity. Although one variant of Flashback installed a file in the LaunchAgents folder, not all tools for detectin...

Stuxnet was planted by Iranian double agent using memory stick The Stuxnet computer worm used to sabotage Iran's nuclear program was planted by a double agent working for Israel. The agent used a booby-trapped memory stick to infect machines deep inside the Natanz nuclear facility, according to a report published  on Wednesday. The worm is believed to have been placed on a specially crafted USB memory stick and handed over to a Natanz worker who, by all accounts, was an Iranian national belonging to a dissident group named Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK). "The MEK has been listed as a 'foreign terrorist organization' since 1997 because of deadly attacks on Americans abroad, but members of the group have been trained at a secret site in Nevada. U.S. officials consider them 'the assassination arm of Israel's Mossad intelligence service' as they have been connected to the killing of five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007. The incident with Stuxnet is not the fir...

FBI track Anonymous hacker using his girlfriend's boobs The FBI swooped on Higinio O Ochoa III after he posted the snap, which included a gloating message to his online victims.He took the picture on his iPhone and posted it on Twitter without realising it contained GPS data pointing directly to his house. Researching the username "w0rmer", investigators also found a reference online which included Ochoa's full name. Ochoa, is an alleged member of CabinCr3w, an offshoot of the hacktivist collective Anonymous. A criminal complaint filed in connection with the case reveals that pictures of a amply proportioned young woman taken in an outer-Melbourne suburb played a key role in the case. The snap posted by 30-year-old Ochoa shows a girl in a bikini top from the neck down, with a printed message pinned to her skirt reading: " PwNd by w0rmer & CabinCr3w " This GPS location allowed local police to easily track down the presumed residence of the woman pictured in the photo, ...

[ Call for Articles ] The Hacker News Magazine - Hacktivism Special Edition - May 2012 A big shout out to all you cowboys and cowgirls who want to stir up some thoughtful reading and discussions by submitting to The Hacker News Magazine articles regarding Hacktivism . As you know, Hacktivism is the use of computers and computer networks as a means of protest to promote political ends. Given that, we'd love to have your articles to print in our May 2012 magazine . So, get to writing and wrangling.. CYBER WARFARE [ Download Here ] -  Last Month (April) The Hacker News turns over every leaf of the newest way world citizens are fighting wars and using their keyboards to destroy planet earth.  Join us as we explore this new frontier and let us know how you feel and what you have learned! If you enjoy our monthly publication, please spread the word! By sharing our free magazine with your family, friends, co-workers and other security experts, you're helping t...

Botnets, DDoS attacks as weapon against financial sector DDOS attacks against the financial sector almost tripled during the first quarter of this year, according to DDoS mitigation specialist Prolexic. The firm also reported a 3,000 per cent quarter-on-quarter increase in malicious packet traffic targeted at the financial services sector, compared with the final quarter of 2011. China leads the way as the country from where DDoS attacks originate, followed by the U.S., Russia, then India. Prolexic says " more than 10 of the worlds largest banks due to market capitalization ," and " an almost threefold increase in the number of attacks against its financial services ". A distributed denial-of-service attack is one in which several compromised systems attack a single target, causing denial of service for legitimate users. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service. The average attack bandwidth...

Ransomware replaces Windows MBR and asking users for Money Security researchers from TrendMicro, F-Secure and Dr. Web have intercepted two new ransomware variants currently circulating in the wild. This new ransomware variant prevents infected computers from loading Windows by replacing their master boot record (MBR) and displays a message asking users for money. Cris Pantanilla, a threat response engineer at Trend Micro said, " Based on our analysis, this malware copies the original MBR and overwrites it with its own malicious code ," " Right after performing this routine, it automatically restarts the system for the infection take effect ." The MBR is a piece of code that resides in the first sectors of the hard drive and starts the boot loader. The boot loader then loads the OS. Instead of starting the Windows boot loader, the rogue MBR installed by the new ransomware displays a message that asks users to deposit a sum of money into a particular account via...

This month Microsoft released a total of six new security bulletins, but one in particular deals with a zero-day vulnerability impacting virtually every Microsoft user, which is already being exploited in the wild. Four of the six security bulletins are rated as Critical by Microsoft, with the remaining two ranked as Important. The Critical security bulletins include a fix for Windows and the .NET framework, as well as the perennial favorite the cumulative update for Internet Explorer. The biggest deal, though, is MS12-027, which addresses a critical flaw in Windows Common Controls. One of the fixes is gaining the most attention though, even from Microsoft. " We list MS12-027 as our highest priority security update to deploy this month because we are aware of very limited, targeted attacks taking advantage of the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability using specially crafted Office documents as an exploit vector ," said the firm in an apparently hastily written blog post. ...