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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...

A group of Pro-Palestine hackers ' KDMS Team ' today has been able to hijack the Metasploit website simply by sending a fax and hijacked their DNS records. Rapid7 is a leading Security Company and Creator of world's best penetration testing software called ' Metasploit '. The company confirmed via Twitter that Metasploit.com was hacked via a spoofed DNS change request sent via fax to its registrar, Register.com . The group came to prominence earlier this week when it managed to hijack the websites of popular messaging service WhatsApp and anti-virus company AVG among others. On the website, the hacker posted " Hello Metasploit.  After Whatsapp , Avira, Alexa , AVG and other sites. We were thinking about quitting hacking and disappear again! But we said: there is some sites must be hacked. You are one of our targets. Therefore we are here. And there is another thing do you know Palestine? " Rapid7 official statement regarding the in...

Authorities in Britain, Sweden, and the United States have arrested eight more people in the wake of the shutdown of the Silk Road , online illegal drug marketplace which helped dealers sell drugs under the cloak of anonymity. Millions of Dollars worth of Bitcoins (Electronic currency) had been seized and that other online drug dealer should expect a knock on their door by the National Crime Agency. The other suspects were arrested within hours after the FBI arrested 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht , the suspected creator of Silk Road also known as " Dread Pirate Roberts ". Although, he denies charges that he operated the website. Ulbricht is separately accused in a federal indictment in U.S. District Court in Baltimore with a similar count of narcotics trafficking conspiracy and additional charges of soliciting an $80,000 murder-for-hire of a former Silk Road employee. A federal judge on Wednesday ordered that Ulbricht charged with operating a notorious online drug marketplac...

If you're unlucky enough to lose your Smartphone or have it stolen, anyone who finds the device will also be able to access any content stored on the device, whether its contacts, music or documents. But by implementing a SIM card PIN lock, everytime the device is powered down and subsequently switch back on again, the PIN will need to enter before the phone can be used. Security Researcher - Benjamin Kunz Mejri from Vulnerability Laboratory claimed that he found a new vulnerability in the iOS v7.0.1 & v7.0.2, that allows a hacker to bypass the Sim lock Mode. In a Proof of Concept video, he demonstrates that how an attacker can bypass the restricted section of the iPhone, when Sim Lock is enabled on a Stolen iPhone Device. Flaw can be exploited without user interaction and successful exploitation results in the bypass of the SIM lock mode to the regular lock mode. Follow Steps to bypass SIM Lock on stolen Devices: Turn on your iPhone and ...

The Website of Word's most popular mobile messaging app and Antivirus Firm - AVG were hacked this morning and defaced by a new Palestinian Hacker group - KDMS Team, affiliated with Anonymous Group. The Defacement page titled 'You got Pwned', with Anonymous Logo and playing Palestinian national anthem in the page background, says:  we want to tell you that there is a land called Palestine on the earth this land has been stolen by Zionist do you know it ? Palestinian people has the right to live in peace Deserve to liberate their land and release all prisoners from israeli jails we want peace and " There Is No Full Security We Can Catch You ! " It seems that the hacker used DNS hijacking to point domains on a fake server with deface page. The  Whatsapp has resolved the issue, but at the time of writing AVG is still defaced. It is not clear that if any user data was compromised from AVG or Whatsapp. We have contacted WhatsApp and AVG...