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In last October, the Feds told they would probably just  liquidate the bitcoins  seized from the online black market Silk Road, once they were legally free to do so. Finally the United States District Judge  J. Paul Oetken   signed off  on the forfeiture order for the Bitcoins, clearing the government to sell the assets. Last September, the FBI had seized  29,655 Bitcoins from the online black market Silk Road after its alleged 29-year-old mastermind, Ross William Ulbricht , aka ' Dread Pirate Roberts ' was arrested and charged with possessing controlled substances and committing or conspiring to commit computer hacking offenses, among other charges. This new ruling represents the largest-ever forfeiture of Bitcoins . The assets include the Silk Road hidden website and 29,655 Bitcoins , worth more than $28 Million according to current exchange rates. Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: "With today's forfeiture...

Browser extensions are extra features and functionality that you can easily add to Google Chrome, Firefox and other popular Browsers, but they can be used to serve malicious adware , which automatically renders advertisements in order to generate revenue for its author.  Hackers are now taking their business rather more seriously than we thought. Even a single instance of malicious adware on your PC can inject bad ads or malware to your browser. Ads are a legitimate way to monetize. However, creating and spreading a fresh add-on to get a large user base is always tough, but now adware companies found a new trick i.e. Buying trusted browser extensions with a large user-base and exploiting their auto-update status to push out adware. Recently, the developer of ' Add to Feedly ' Chrome extension with 30,000+ users, Amit Agarwal , was approached by some mysterious buyers. " It was a 4-figure offer for something that had taken an hour to create and I agreed to the deal ," ...

Have you given shed to Zombies in your house? No???? May be you have no idea about it. After Computers, Servers, Routers, Mobiles, Tablets…. Now its turn of your home appliances to be a weapon or a victim of cyber war. Recently Security Researchers from Proofpoint  found more than 100,000 Smart TVs, Refrigerator, and other smart household appliances compromised by hackers to send out 750,000 malicious spam emails. As the ' Internet of Things ' becoming smart and popular it became an easy weapon for cyber criminals to launch large scale of cyber attacks. " The attack that Proofpoint observed and profiled occurred between December 23, 2013 and January 6, 2014, and featured waves of malicious email, typically sent in bursts of 100,000, three times per day, targeting Enterprises and individuals worldwide." Previously, such attacks were only drafted theoretically by researchers, but this is the first such proven attack involved smart household appliances that are used as ' thingB...

Is Managing Customer Logins and Data Giving You Headaches? You're Not Alone! Today, we all expect super-fast, secure, and personalized online experiences. But let's be honest, we're also more careful about how our data is used. If something feels off, trust can vanish in an instant. Add to that the lightning-fast changes AI is bringing to everything from how we log in to spotting online fraud, and it's a whole new ball game! If you're dealing with logins, data privacy, bringing new users on board, or building digital trust, this webinar is for you . Join us for " Navigating Customer Identity in the AI Era ," where we'll dive into the Auth0 2025 Customer Identity Trends Report . We'll show you what's working, what's not, and how to tweak your strategy for the year ahead. In just one session, you'll get practical answers to real-world challenges like: How AI is changing what users expect – and where they're starting to push ba...

The Holiday data breach at TARGET appeared to be part of a broad and highly sophisticated international hacking campaign against multiple retailers, involving the heist of possibly 110 million Credit-Debit cards, and personal information. Target confirmed last weekend that a malicious software was embedded in point-of-sale (POS) equipment at its checkout counters to collect secure data as the credit cards were swiped during transactions. The Malware called ' BlackPOS ' also known as " reedum " or ' Kaptoxa ' is an effective crimeware  kit, that was created in March 2013 and available in underground sites for $1800-$2000. Investigators from IntelCrawler found a 17-years old hacker who actually developed the BlackPOS crimeware kit. His nickname is ' ree4 ' and original name: ' Sergey Taraspov ' from  St . Petersburg  and  Nizhniy Novgorod ( Russian Federation). IntelCrawler's sources mentioned that the BlackPOS malware was created i...

After the exposure of various surveillance programs, including PRISM, XKeyscore, MUSCULAR, DROPOUTJEEP in recent revelation, NSA has come up as the only ' Government that Actually Listen '. Another day and here comes another revelation - According to the The Guardian , National Security Agency (NSA) has collected almost 200 million text messages per day from across the globe and is using them to extract data including location, contact networks and even credit card details. The two names that come in the limelight are,  DISHFIRE  that collects " pretty much everything it can "and PREFER  that conducted automated analysis of the untargeted communications. The program was designed to collect the text messages automatically from various service providers, to pull the details of financial transactions, roaming charges, delayed flights, missed calls and scheduled alerts, address book contacts, credit cards, bank accounts and visited locations. Now If I am not wrong...

Watch out, coffee drinkers. If you are one of those 10 million Starbucks customers, who purchases drinks and food directly from their Smartphones, this news is for you! If you use Starbucks' official iOS app, you should know that the company is not encrypting any of your information, including your password. The app allows the Starbucks customers to check their balance, transaction history, fund transfer, and store location, etc. A Security researcher Daniel E. Wood found a vulnerability (CVE-2014-0647) in STARTBUCKS v2.6.1. iOS mobile application, that stores your credential details and GPS locations in plain text format into the file system. To extract the information from the mobile, an attacker just needs to connect the device to a computer and accessing ' session . clslog ' file from the location given below: /Library/Caches/ com . crashlytics . data/ com . starbucks . mystarbucks /session . clslog The vulnerability , however, requires that the hacker has physical...

I hope you all still remember the famous and powerful Remote Administration Tool (RAT) called ' Dark Comet ', developed by a French computer geek ' Jean-Pierre Lesueur ', also known as ' DarkCoderSc '. However, He had closed the Dark Comet project, when the Syrian government found to be using it to track down and to spy on their people. After that  DarkCoderSc  started working under a new banner ' Phrozen Software ' to develop many new security softwares and penetration testing tools. Just yesterday, Jean-Pierre and his team-mate Fabio Pinto  from French University, have released a new tool called ' Rakabulle ', a file binder with some cool features for penetration testers and malware researchers. File binder is an application that allows a user to bind multiple files together, resulting in a single executable file. When you execute that single application, all previous merged files will be extracted to a temporary location, and will be exe...

Like Bitcoin, There are numerous other cryptocurrency similar in nature, including  MasterCoin , ProtoShares, Litecoin, Peercoin, BitBar and many more. One of them is  Primecoin  (sign: Ψ; code: XPM),  a peer-to-peer open source cryptocurrency that implements a scientific computing proof-of-work system. Unlike Bitcoin or other virtual currencies, only Primecoin provides a proof of work that has intrinsic value. It generates a special form of prime number chains, known as ' Cunningham chains & bi-twin chains ' and has a real world importance in mathematical research. Worldwide famous RSA Encryption basically uses two prime numbers for generating a RSA key pair. If you are able to factorize the public key and find these prime numbers, you will then be able to find the private key. Thus, the whole Security of RSA encryption is based on the length of prime numbers. So, Primecoin plays a great role for crypto researchers to get large... and a ve...

In this Internet savvy generation, we want all of our data to be secured at some place. Having backups of your data is always a good idea, whether that data is stored in the Cloud or on your computer. But everyone who is following the Edward Snowden leaks of the NSA 's PRISM program now pushed to hardening their Mobile devices and computers for security, privacy, and anonymity. There are many Free Cloud storage providers including  Google Drive ,  Dropbox, Box, RapidShare, Amazon Cloud Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive  and many more. These services have a limitation that all data is unencrypted, or even if it is encrypted, the encryption keys are still generated by the company's software, meaning the company still has an access to your data. So as an end user, we must think about the security and privacy of our data. We should first encrypt our files on the system level and then upload a copy of it on the cloud storage. For this a robust and highly user friendly tool called...

Mobile security may not be secure as you think. In September we have reported that the National Security Agency has the ability to access data on iOS, Android and even BlackBerry devices. Everyday a new revelation of NSA Surveillance Program makes Security and Privacy a major concern for all of us. Today we feel the need of highly secured Networks and Encrypted Devices to safeguard our privacy from Cyber Criminals as well as Government. Phil Zimmerman , Inventor of the email encryption tool PGP and Silent Circle's Co-founder (company specializes in mobile privacy and peer-to-peer encryption ) has announced ' BLACKPHONE ', a Smartphone that's been designed to enable secure, encrypted communications, private browsing and secure file-sharing. The company will launch BLACKPHONE in the ' Mobile World Congress ', Spain next month, offers ' PrivatOS ', an Android based operating system which will allow users to make and receive secure phone calls, exchange secure te...

More than 15.2% of the Algerian population use Internet service which is provided by around 30 Internet Service Providers and one of the largest shares is served by Algerie Telecom .  Algerie Telecom provides  TP-LINK TD-W8951ND  Router to most of their home customers who Opt-In for Internet services and each of which has ZYXEL embedded firmware installed in it. ABDELLI Nassereddine, penetration tester and Algerian Computer Science Student has reported highly critical unauthorized access and password disclosure vulnerabilities in the Routers provided by Algerie Telecom. He told ' The Hacker News ' that the vulnerabilities can be exploited by any remote hacker just by exploiting a very simple loophole in the firmware. First, he found that an unauthorized access is available to ' Firmware/Romfile Upgrade'  Section on the Router's panel that can be accessed without any login password i.e. https://IP//rpFWUpload.html This page actually allows a user to upgr...

Oops.. Hackers got Hacked! The Syrian Electronic Army , who has hacked hundreds of High Profile targets in 2013-14, today they got hacked by a Turkish hacker. Turkguvenligi , a Turkish hacker told The Hacker News that he hacked and defaced the official website of the hacking group SEA ( sea . sy  and  leaks . sea . sy ). SEA Group has taken down many serious targets like Microsoft, Obama & New York Times' twitter accounts & websites in the past, but today their own server got breached. The most common hacking technique used by the SEA Group is Phishing , but the Turkguvenligi hacked then using an exploit known for vulnerabilities in the server or website. At the time of writing this news, the whole website of SEA was down, but our readers can see the defacement mirror on Zone-H . Turkguvenligi tagged SEA in a  tweet , says " hi guys, you have been hacked ": The Syrian Electronic Army group has not commented anything about the hack, b...