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The use of mobile devices in government environments concerns the secret service of any states, cyber espionage more often exploits the mobile platforms. Mobile devices are reason of great concern for governments, they have a great computational capability, huge memories to store our personal data, GPS to follow our movements and are equipped with a camera and microphone to increase our experience in mobility. The advent of monitoring apps like Mobistealth has already brought the possibility of using the aforementioned features to keep tabs on a target device irrespective of the geographic distance to light. However, it has also raised red flags over the possibility of exploitation of such features by attackers for cyber espionage . The problem is well known to governments that are adopting necessary countermeasures especially following the recent revelations about the U.S. Surveillance program . The UK Government has decided to ban iPads from the Cabinet over foreign e...

Microsoft has issued a temporary fix for a 0day vulnerability that can be exploited to install malware via infected Word documents. A Zero-day Remote code execution flaw, which has been dubbed CVE-2013-3906 , exploits a vulnerability in a Microsoft graphics component, to target Microsoft Office users running Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. " The vulnerability is a remote code execution vulnerability that exists in the way affected components handle specially crafted TIFF images ," it said in the post .  Vulnerability was reported to Microsoft by McAfee Labs senior security researcher Haifei Li. A successful infection can give an attacker complete control over a system. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. Currently the company is only aware of targeted attacks mostly in the Middle East and South Asia, with attackers sending unsuspecting v...

Last week we noticed a rise in cyber attacks particularly - website Defacement attacks on many governments and organizations of different countries by the hackers around the world. Targeted countries include Singapore, Mexico, Philippines, Australia, Egypt, United States, Syria and many more. Out of all these targets, most controversial were Philippines and Australia, hacked by Activist group Anonymous. Last Sunday, Anonymous hackers from Indonesia defaced hundreds of websites belonging to the Australian Government , saying the action was in response to reports of spying by Australia. The websites, defaced with a message reading " Stop Spying on Indonesia ". We have shared the list of all targeted website on a pastebin note . In a separate incident, Anonymous hackers defaced more than 38 Philippine Government websites, and called on the public to support an anti-corruption protest " Million Mask March " at the Batasang Pambansa on Novem...

There's an extraordinary malware making rock-n-roll over the Internet and if you are one of the unlucky folks to cross its path, then it could make your computer unusable and you have to pay a few hundred Dollars to retrieve your important data back. We have warned our readers in many  previous articles about a nasty piece of Ransomware malware called ' CryptoLocker ', which is targeting computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. The CryptoLocker  Ransomware encrypts the files on a victim's computer and issues an ultimatum - Pay up or lose your data . Users who are getting infected with CryptoLocker can see a message informing them that their computer is locked up and their files encrypted. It then asks them to make a ransom payment, which typically ranges between $100 and $700 or 2 Bitcoins , to get their files back. Just yesterday I noticed on a forum that the criminals behind the CryptoLocker malware has recently launched a dedicated...

Today Malware is a very real threat, and if you're not careful about what you download and install, you could end up with a serious problem. But now Google will be trying their very best to block malware from installing itself on your computer on your behalf. Google has developed a security feature for Chrome that lets the browser detect and stop malware downloads. The feature has been added to Chrome Canary, the latest version of the browser which is available to download in beta form now. All you'll see is a notification like the one below, which you can then dismiss: " These malicious programs disguise themselves so you won't know they're there and they may change your homepage or inject ads into the sites you browse. Worse, they block your ability to change your settings back and make themselves hard to uninstall, keeping you trapped in an undesired state. " wrote Linus Upson, a Google vice president, in a blog post . Google is implementing...

Earlier this year, in the month of July it was first discovered that 99% of Android devices are vulnerable to a flaw called " Android Master Key vulnerability " that allow hackers to modify any legitimate and digitally signed application in order to transform it into a Trojan program that can be used to steal data or take control of the device.  The vulnerability was also responsibly disclosed to Google back in February by Bluebox and but the company did not fix the issue even with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. Later, Google has also modified its Play Store's app entry process so that apps that have been modified using such exploit are blocked and can no longer be distributed via Play. Then after a few days, in the last week of July this year,  Android Security Squad , the China -based group also uncovered a second Android master key vulnerability similar to the first one. Security researcher  Jay Freeman has  discovered  ye...

Finnish commercial broadcaster MTV3 reports that the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affair networks has been targeted in a four-year-long cyber espionage operation. Finland's foreign minister said, " I can confirm there has been a severe and large hacking in the ministry's data network ," A large scale spying attack   targeted the communications between Finland and the European Union using  a malware , similar to, and more sophisticated than Red October . The breach was uncovered during the early part of this year. MTV3 also mentioned that the breach was not discovered by the Finns themselves, but from a foreign tip-off reported to CERT.FI. Further the Finnish authorities kept the information under wraps for continuing the forensics. There are indications that information with the lowest level security classification has been compromised, he said. In January, 2013, we had reported about Red October Cyber-espionage operation that targeted t...

We have discussed many times in our stories the network of Intelligent devices , their capabilities and the possibilities that cyber criminals could exploit them for illegal activities. Hidden chips are used by cyber criminals and state-sponsored hackers to infiltrate company networks and organizations for various purposes, to send out spam or for cyber espionage . The fact has happened in Russia, the State-owned channel Rossiya 24 has showed the images of an electric iron included in a batch of Chinese imports where the operators find a chip used for spying the environment surround. China is planting Microchips practically in every electrical device, as recently it has been discovered that the  electric iron  and kettles were modified with this technique to launch spam attacks. The Microchips were equipped with a little microphone and according to the correspondent the component were mostly being used to serve malware and the chips in fact are abl...

The World's First Dedicated Hacking and Cyber Security News platform - ' The Hacker News ' is celebrating its 3rd Anniversary today. When we began our journey 5 years back as a Small Local Community of few Hackers and Researchers, we had the dream of providing the Hacking Community with World's first Hacking News Platform. We wanted to gift them their own trusted news platform. A Unique Platform which is run by Hackers and was dedicated to hackers, a platform which is free from Censorship, Conventions, Governments and Borders. In the last 5 years of our Dedicated service to Hacking and Security community we have grown into a huge family of more than One Million Google+ Followers, 200 thousand Facebook Fans, and 100 thousand Twitter Followers with Two Million Readers Monthly and the family keeps growing with new members everyday. In our journey of THN, we have seen the cyber world growing from Defacement to most Sophisticated cyber crimes of the Decade i.e Stu...

Yesterday I learned about  ' Dark Mail Alliance ', where  Lavabit , reportedly an email provider for NSA leaker Edward Snowden and Silent Circle comes together to create a surveillance-proof email technology. Ladar Levison at Lavabit and Silent Circle CEO Mike Janke, Founders of two e-mail services that recently shut down amid government efforts to nab encryption keys, as well as the larger revelations regarding the NSA's surveillance efforts. The newly developed technology has been designed to look just like ordinary email, with an interface that includes all the usual folders i.e. inbox, sent mail, and drafts. But where it differs is that it applies peer-to-peer encryption not only to the body of the digital missive, but also to its metadata (To:, From: and Subject fields) that third parties are most likely to collect. The encryption, based on a Silent Circle instant messaging protocol called SCIMP and the secret keys generated to encrypt the commun...

Security expert Ebrahim Hegazy , Cyber Security Analyst Consultant at Q-CERT, has found a serious vulnerability in Twitter that allows an attacker to upload files of any extension including PHP. When an application does not validate or improperly validates file types before uploading files to the system, called Unrestricted File upload vulnerability . Such flaws allow an attacker to upload and execute arbitrary code on the target system which could result in execution of arbitrary HTML and script code or system compromise. According to Ebrahim, when a developer creates a new application for Twitter  i.e. dev.twitter.com - they have an option to upload an image for that application. While uploading the image, the Twitter server will check for the uploaded files to accept certain image extensions only, like PNG, JPG and other extensions won't get uploaded. But in a Video Proof of Concept he demonstrated  that, a vulnerability allowed him to bypass this security va...

Son of a Baptist Minister, 28-year-old British man named Lauri Love has been charged with hacking into the computer systems of the US army, NASA and other federal agencies. He was arrested Friday at his home in Stradishall, England by the National Crime Agency and according to the indictment alleges Love and his unnamed co-conspirators hacked into thousands of computer systems between October 2012 and October 2013. The indictment does not accuse Love of selling information or doing anything else with it for financial gain. His father Alexander Love, 60, a Baptist minister, works as a chaplain at HMP Highpoint North. His mother Sirkka-Liisa Love, 59, also works at the jail as a teacher. He is charged with one count of accessing a U.S. Department or agency computer without authorization and one count of conspiracy. The government said the purpose was to disrupt the operations and infrastructure of the federal government.  They stole data on more than 5,000 individuals, a...