The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Today is January 11, 2014 and the last year on the same day a 26-year-old, young hacker, Reddit cofounder and the digital Activist, Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide. He found dead in his Brooklyn, New York apartment, where he had hanged himself. Swartz was indicted by a federal grand jury in July 2011, accused of hacking the MIT JSTOR database and stealing over four million documents with the intent to distribute them. He could have prison for 50 years and $4 million in fines by the Court, but before that he committed suicide in fear. Swartz's father, Robert, later blamed the MIT and the judiciary system for his son's death. On the first Anniversary of Aaron Swartz , today the Anonymous group of hackers defaced the sub-domain of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) website ( https://cogen.mit.edu/ ) for about an hour as part of #OPLASTRESORT. Defacement page was titled ' THE DAY WE FIGHT BACK '. The message posted on it, " Remember The Day We Fight Back,...

The Flashback Trojan, the most sophisticated piece of malware that infected over 600,000 Apple's Macs systems back in April, 2012 is still alive and has infected about 22,000 machines recently, according to the researchers from Intego . For a refresh, Flashback Trojan was first discovered in September 2011, basically a trojan horse that uses a social engineering to trick users into installing a malicious Flash player package. Once installed, the Flashback malware injects a code into that web browser and other applications like Skype to harvest passwords and other information from those program's users. The Trojan targets a known vulnerability in Java on Mac OS X systems. The system gets infected after the user redirects to a compromised website, where a malicious javascript code to load the exploit with Java applets. Then an executable file is saved on the local machine, which is used to download and run malicious code from a remote location. It took Apple months to recogni...

A few days back the developers of one of the most advance open source operating system for penetration testing called ' KALI Linux ' announced that they were planning to include " emergency self-destruction of LUKS ". They patched a utility called cryptsetup,  which introduces a self destruction feature that will allow the Kali user to encrypt the full hard disk to make the data inaccessible in an emergency case by entering a secret password at boot time. Offensive Security has finally announced today the release of the latest version i.e. Kali Linux 1.0.6 with Kernel version 3.12, and also added the Self Destruct feature along with many new penetration testing and hacking tools. The new release also includes an ARM image script, that allow the user to build Kali Linux images for various ARM devices. Some more scripts are also added that enables the user to build their own custom Amazon AMI and Google Compute cloud images. If you already have a Kali ...

I think you haven't forgotten the massive data breach occurred at TARGET , the third-largest U.S. Retailer during last Christmas Holidays. People shop during Black Friday sales in which over 40 million Credit & Debit cards were stolen, used to pay for purchases at its 1500 stores nationwide in the U.S. TARGET officially confirmed that the encrypted PINs (personal identification numbers) of payment cards were stolen in the breach, since the stolen pin data were in encrypted form so they were confident that the information was " Safe and Secure ", because PIN cannot be decrypted without the right key. The Breach was caused by a malware attack, that allowed the criminals to manipulate Point of Sale (PoS) systems without raising red flags and the card numbers compromised in the breach are now flooding underground forums for sale. Possibly a group of Eastern European cyber criminals who specializes in attacks on merchants and Point-of-Sale terminals either attached a physical de...

The Military Units that rely on very small aperture terminals (VSATs) for satellite communications in remote areas are vulnerable to cyber attack . Researchers from cyber intelligence company IntelCrawler recently identified nearly 3 million VSATs, many of them in the United States, and found that about 10,000 of them could be easily accessed because of configuration weaknesses. " We have scanned the whole IPv4 address space since 2010 and update the results in our Big Data intelligence database, including details about the satellite operator's network ranges, such as INMARSAT, Asia Broadcast Satellite, VSAT internet iDirect, Satellite HUB Pool, and can see some vulnerabilities, " Researchers have warned that terminals having data transmission rate 4kbps to 16 Mbps used in narrow and broadband data transmission are vulnerable to cyber attack. VSATs are most commonly used to transmit narrowband data such as credit card, polling or RFID data or broadband data for VoIP or ...

The most critical and worst target of a State-sponsored cyber-attack s could be Hospitals, Dams, Dykes and Nuclear power stations and this may cause military conflicts between countries. According to Japan Today , The Monju nuclear power plant in Tsuruga, Japan was accidentally targeted by a malware on 2nd January, when a worker updated the system to the latest version of the video playback program. Monju Nuclear Plant  is a sodium-cooled fast reactor, was launched in April 1994. It has not been operational for most of the past 20 years, after an accident in which a sodium leak caused a major fire. Employees over there are only left with a regular job of company's paperwork and maintenance. So the malware could have stolen only some sensitive documents, emails, training records and employees' data sheets. The Malware command-and-control server suspected to be from South Korea. The malware itself is not much sophisticated like Stuxnet  o...

The Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman ' Patrick Leahy ' reintroduced a revamped version of the " Personal Data Privacy and Security Act " for tough criminal penalties for hackers, that he originally authored in 2005. During last Christmas Holidays, a massive data breach had occurred at the shopping giant  Target,  involving hack of 40 million credit & debit cards, used to pay for purchases at its 1500 stores nationwide in the U.S. Reason: "Target Data Breach? Seriously"?  In a statement, as published below, the Senator wrote: "The recent data breach at Target involving the debit and credit card data of as many as 40 million customers during the Christmas holidays is a reminder that developing a comprehensive national strategy to protect data privacy and cybersecurity remains one of the most challenging and important issues facing our Nation" It seems that the  TARGET Breach  was scheduled, as the best opportunity to ramp u...

After the release of NSA Secret spying over Internet communications, I am expecting from all tech companies to make surveillance significantly harder. Yahoo has HTTPS encryption support since late 2012, but users had to opt in to use the feature. Documents revealed by the Edward Snowden shows that the NSA secretly accessed data from several tech giants, including Yahoo, by intercepting unencrypted Internet traffic in a program called Muscular. As promised back in October 2013,  Yahoo  has finally enabled the HTTPS connections by default for their users, that will now automatically encrypts the connections between users and its email service. Jeff Bonforte , senior vice-president of communication products at Yahoo announced  in a blog post: It is 100% encrypted by default and protected with 2,048 bit certificates. This encryption extends to your emails, attachments, contacts, as well as Calendar and Messenger in Mail. HTTPS by default is really a good news fo...

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...