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Last October, the social network ' LinkedIn ' launched a controversial Smartphone app called ' Intro ' that intercepts and route all of your emails through LinkedIn servers to inject LinkedIn profiles of the sender directly into the mails. The app was released for Android , as well as iOS devices. Why Controversial? The app puts the security and privacy of your data entirely in the company's hands, and at that time everyone criticized and reacted negatively, but LinkedIn defended Intro, claiming that all information was fully encrypted and deleted from LinkedIn's servers immediately. Just two days back, I got an e-mail from LinkedIn with the subject line " We're retiring LinkedIn Intro. " i.e. LinkedIn is giving up so quickly just four months of the launch! In a blog post today, LinkedIn SVP of products Deep Mishar explained, " We are shutting down LinkedIn Intro as of March 7, 2014. The intro was launched last year to bring the power of LinkedIn to your emai...

With the beginning of a new week, we always came across a new revelation of surveillance programs run by the U.S. Government. A Recent NYT Report disclosed that how whistleblower Edward Snowden downloaded 1.7 million classified files which are revealing a number of secret spying projects that are being executed by NSA. The only lesson we have learned, is about taking our PRIVACY very seriously.  To Communicate using electronic media, we need to explore something which can make the conversation more secure and private. The only point where my search ends is to 'Encrypt the message' to be sent with a robust encryption technique which might provide at least a handy balance of security and convenience. Recently, it was reported that most widely adopted encryption technique RSA had a backdoor for the NSA . So 'Privacy' becomes a question to all of us and what technology we should trust upon. We have various sets of options to choose encryption e.g. Advanced Encry...

Last Saturday millions of France Internet users saw a strange message on Google's Homepage, rather than any GOOGLE DOODLE, as shown above. Despite Paying €150,000 ($228,147)  Fine to France Government, Google has been forced to post a ' Privacy Fine Notice ' on its French Search Engine homepage for violating Data-Processing and Freedoms Laws. The French Data-protection authority - ' The Commission Nationale de l'information et des Liberties ' (CNIL) said on Friday that Google's appeal to suspend the order of January decision has been denied by the Conseil d'Etat i.e. The Administrative Court and the company is ordered to post a notice for 48 hours on its Google.fr page within eight days as of the notification of the decision. In 2012, Google's new privacy policy that combined several separate policies under one umbrella and allowed Google to take advantage of user data from multiple different services at once, was in violation of " fun...

National Security Agency (NSA) – the one that had ruled over the privacy of the entire world from countries to individuals, the one with master access to read anyone's data, intruded into large fiber networks, and can target anyone, at any time, at any place; but lapsed somewhere in protecting its own privacy and security of the confidential data. If I am wrong, then from where did Snowden gets hold over roughly 1.7 million NSA's confidential files in sequence? According to the Intelligence officials who has investigated the insider theft by Snowden, noticed that he had accessed all these documents using some ' web crawler ', a freely available automated tool also known as spiders, which used to search, index and backup a website, " scraped data out of our systems " he said. " We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence ," he added. He used the web crawler tool against NSA 's internal network and 'probably...

Smartphone manufacturers are adding ways for owners to track and manage their phones if they ever get lost or stolen. Find My iPhone is a service that comes with every iOS device that allows you to track your iPhone, whether it was lost or stolen. Normally, the iPhone requires a password if you want to deactivate " Find My iPhone ", but it isn't entirely perfect and thieves are now smart enough to disable ' Find My iPhone ' on devices running iOS 7.0.4 and lower version, without having to enter a password. The exploit was discovered and demonstrated security researcher ' Bradley Williams ' and performing a successful bypass means you won't be able to locate, make sound and wipe out. The vulnerability could put the devices at risk, and the exploitation method involves a few simple steps that involve making changes in the iCloud settings, even if they don't know the password. Steps to hack 'Find My iPhone': Navigate to iCloud in the settin...

In the era of Smart devices, we have Smartphones, Smart TVs, Smart Fridges, and even the Smart cars! We have made our life very easy and comfortable by providing the master control of every task to such smart devices. But imagine if an attacker wants to take revenge or hurt someone, now they can hack your car, rather failing breaks in the traditional way. Sounds Horrible ! WELL, Two Security researchers - Javier Vazquez-Vidal and Alberto Garcia Illera have developed a home-made gadget called ' CAN Hacking Tools (CHT) ', a tiny device smaller than your Smartphone, which is enough to hack your Cars. The Kit costs less than $20, but is far capable to give away the entire control of your car to an attacker from windows and headlights to its steering and brakes. The device uses the Controller Area Network (CAN) ports that are built into cars for computer-system checks, and draws power from the car's electrical system. Injecting a malicious code to CAN ports all...

SNAPCHAT , photo sharing app is the majority choice for variety of users. Recently, the company has faced data breach and Captcha bypass vulnerability, and just yesterday a new denial-of-service attack has been revealed which can crash an iPhone . Jamie Sanchez , a security researcher has found the app vulnerable, which can enable a hacker to launch a denial-of-service attacks , resulting prompt the user to reset the mobile device. The flaw into the Snapchat app allows someone to flood a user with thousands of messages in a measure of seconds, " By reusing old tokens, hackers can send massive amounts of messages using powerful computers. This method could be used by spammers to send messages in mass quantities to numerous users, or it could be used to launch a cyber attack on specific individuals " he said. He demonstrated the vulnerability to LA Times reporter, bombarded his handset with thousands of messages within five seconds in a denial-of-service ...

Till now we all have heard about the Ransomware malware that encrypts your files or lock down your computer and ask for a ransom amount to be paid in a specified duration of time to unlock it. Emsisoft has detected a new piece of malware called " Linkup ", dubbed as " Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Linkup " that doesn't lock your computer or encrypts files; rather it blocks your Internet access by modifying the DNS settings, with the ability to turn your computer into a Bitcoin mining robot.  Sounds Interesting?? Once the Linkup Trojan is installed in your system, it makes a copy of itself and disables the selected Windows Security and Firewall services to facilitate the infection. Injected poisoned DNS Server will only allow the malware and Bitcoin miner to communicate with the internet. It display a bogus notification on the victim's web browser, which is supposed to be from the Council of Europe , that accuses you of viewing " Child Pornography " and only returns th...

The Major US Financial institution, Bank of America is being targeted by a stealthy malicious financial malware campaign, according to AppRiver report. Last month the researchers at AppRiver has noticed enormous volumes of traffic through their data centers, with the peaks of traffic reaching three or four times than their normal network traffic.  They caught and blocked a malware campaign that was using the new and novel tactics designed specifically to beat the filtering engines. Last Wednesday the company experienced huge spam traffic i.e. 10 to 12 times the normal amount of their normal routine traffic. " These spikes have been driven by a tremendous increase in the number of incoming messages being sent with viruses attached. " and some user experienced delays in sending and receiving mail. They found the malware campaign, distributing a Financial Trojan designed to target, the Bank of America customers, known as ' Bredo virus ', capable of stealing inf...

Today Microsoft has released Security Bulletin Advanced Notification for February 2014 Patch Tuesday. The notification dictates five bulletins out of which two have critical Remote Code Execution and rest are important in aspect to severity of security flaw. A Remote Code Execution vulnerability has been found in Security software of Microsoft i.e. Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server, but this time there will be no new bulletins for Internet Explorer. Not only this, users of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows RT and Windows RT 8.1 are also advised to patch their systems in order to protect themselves from being a victim of malicious code which is exploiting Remote code execution vulnerability. Except the remote code execution, Microsoft is going to release patches for privilege escalation, information disclosure, and denial of service security flaws in Windows operating syste...

Many Smartphone applications support, installation or app data storage to an external SD Card, that can be helpful in saving space on the internal memory, but also vulnerable to hackers. Typically, an app that has permission to read and write data from an SD card has the permission to read all data on that card, including information written by other apps. This means that if you install a malicious application by mistake, it can easily steal any sensitive data from your Phone's SD Card. To prevent the data from being misused by any other app, the best implementation is to encrypt the data, but that will drop the performance of the device. On its 10th birthday, as a treat for mobile developers, Facebook has unveiled the source code of its Android security tool called ' Conceal ' cryptographic API Java library, that will allow app developers to encrypt data on disk in the most resource efficient way, with an easy-to-use programming interface. Smaller th...

Science Fiction Movies always show the possible direction of the development of technology and gives us the opportunity to think about it. The U.S. Government is also trying to develop such technology that was introduced in movies like Star Trek and TERMINATOR i.e. Self destructing Network of computers, Sensors and other devices. The agency of the United States Department of Defense which is responsible for funding the development of many technologies, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has handed over a contract to IBM for creating a microchip that will self-destruct remotely. The project announced a year back, known as Vanishing Programmable Resources ( VAPR ) , which is dedicated to developing a CMOS microchip that self-destructs when it receives a certain frequency of radio signal from military command, in order to fully destroy it and preventing it from being used by the enemy. The U.S. Military uses all kinds of embedded systems and there are obvio...