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

The Russian government is offering almost 4 million ruble which is approximately equal to $111,000 to the one who can devise a reliable technology to decrypt data sent over the Tor , an encrypted anonymizing network used by online users in order to hide their activities from law enforcement, government censors, and others. The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) issued a notice on its official procurement website, originally posted on July 11, under the title " шифр «ТОР (Флот)» " ;which translates as " cipher 'TOR' (Navy) " an open call for Tor-cracking proposals whose winner will be chosen by August 20. The MIA specifically wants researchers to " study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users and users' equipment on the Tor anonymous network, " according to a translated version of the Russian government's proposal. Only Russian nationals and companies are allowed to take part in the competition " in o...

Data security is a big task for businesses as well as a challenge for IT leaders, whether it be securing networks or devices. Past few months, we often came across various data breaches, the largest among all was Target data breach , which cost a business nearly $50,000 in lost productivity, replacement and data recovery.  Once a bad actor has stolen your hardware or compromised your network, the ability to lock down sensitive data is predominant. To help mitigate these threats in order to protect businesses against data breaches without even damaging performance, Intel has announced its latest enterprise-class solid state drives (SSDs) that are self-encrypting, packaged with some powerful security and management features. The New Intel SSD 2500 Pro Series of solid state drives offers significant performance with hardware-based 256-bit self-encryption to reduce the impact on the performance. Intel SSD 2500 Pro Series will be offered in both 2.5-inch SATA and...

Security researchers from Russian Internet giant Yandex have discovered a new piece of malware that is being used to target Linux and FreeBSD web servers in order to make them a part of the wide botnet, even without the need of any root privileges. Researchers dubbed the malware as Mayhem, a nasty malware modular that includes a number of payloads to cause malicious things and targets to infect only those machines which are not updated with security patches or less likely to run security software. So far, researchers have found over 1,400 Linux and FreeBSD servers around the world that have compromised by the malware , with potentially thousands more to come. Most of the compromised machines are located in the USA, Russia, Germany and Canada. Three security experts, Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov , who work at Russia-based Internet portal Yandex, discovered the malware targeting *nix servers . They were able to trace transmissions from th...

A French information security company VUPEN has recently disclosed that it held onto a serious Internet Explorer (IE) vulnerability for at least three years before revealing it at the Pwn2Own hacker competition held in March this year. The critical zero-day vulnerability affected versions 8, 9, 10 and 11 of Internet Explorer browser that allowed attackers to remotely bypass the IE Protected Mode sandbox. An attacker can exploit this issue to gain elevated privileges. VULNERABILITY DISCLOSURE TIMELINE According to a disclosure made by the security company last week, the vulnerability with ID  CVE-2014-2777  was discovered by the company on 12 February 2011, which was  patched by Microsoft  last month. 12 February 2011 - IE Zero-day discovered by Vupen. 13 March 2014 - Vupen reported to Microsoft. 11 June 2014 - Microsoft Released patch and publicly released the advisory . Sandbox is security mechanism used to run an application in a restricted environme...

The users of WordPress, a free and open source blogging tool as well as content management system (CMS), that have a popular unpatched wordPress plugin installed are being cautioned to upgrade their sites immediately. A serious vulnerability in the WordPress plugin, MailPoet , could essentially allows an attacker to inject any file including malware, defacements and spam, whatever they wanted on the server and that too without any authentication. MailPoet, formerly known as Wysija Newsletter , is a WordPress plugin with more than 1.7 million downloads that allows developers running WordPress to send newsletters and manage subscribers within the content management system. In a blog post, the security researcher and CEO of the security firm Sucuri , Daniel Cid, pointed out the vulnerability to be serious and said that within three weeks since the vulnerability unveiled, over 50,000 websites have been remotely exploited by the cybercriminals to install backdoors targeting the vulner...

The critical zero-day security flaws, discovered in the privacy and security dedicated Linux-based Tails operating system by the researcher at Exodus Intelligence that could help attackers or law enforcements to de-anonymize anyone's identity, actually lie in the I2P software that's bundled with the Operating System. Exodus Intelligence has released some details and a video evidence that demonstrate an exploit against the found vulnerability unmasking an anonymous user of the Tails operating system. The researchers at Exodus claims they can use the vulnerability to upload malicious code to a system running Tails, execute the payload remotely, and de-anonymize the targeted users' public IP address as well. Tails is a security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution and a suite of applications that can be carried on a USB stick, an SD card or a DVD. It keeps users' communications private by running all connectivity through Tor , the network that routes traffic through ...

The critical zero-day security flaws has been discovered in the privacy and security dedicated Linux-based operating system " Tails " that could be used by an attacker to unmask your identity. Tails, which is been used and recommended by the global surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden to remain Anonymous, has a suite of privacy applications and designed to keep users' communications private by running all connectivity through Tor , the network that routes traffic through various layers of servers and encrypts data. But unfortunately, the highly secured OS has several critical zero-day vulnerabilities that could help attackers or law enforcements to de-anonymize anyone and allows to perform remote code execution , according to a researcher at Exodus Intelligence who uncovered the flaws but didn't publish the details about it. The Texas-based security firm, Exodus Intelligence , tweeted on Monday that it had found several remote code execution vulnerabilities i...

The allegations from a data forensic expert and security researcher that iOS contains a " backdoor " permitting third parties to potentially gain access to large amount of users' personal data instigated Apple to give a strong response. The company has completely denied to the claims published over the weekend by Jonathan Zdziarski, a forensic scientist and iOS security expert. The researcher, better identified as the hacker moniker " NerveGas ", detailed a number of undocumented features in a paper presentation titled, " Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices " showing his findings, from his talk at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE X) conference held in New York on Friday. ALLEGATIONS ON APPLE The issue, what he explained in his finding, arises from the way Apple encrypts or fails to encrypt data from the iPhone's native apps, leaving over 600 million personal iOS devices vulnerable to third parties. ...

Mozilla has officially released its latest build Firefox 31 for all supported platforms, addressing 11 vulnerabilities in total, three of which are marked critical that could have been exploited by hackers to mount remote code execution attacks. Mozilla Firefox recommends its users to install the security update as soon as possible, warning that the three critical vulnerabilities discovered in its browser could be exploited by attackers and leverage them to " run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing ". CRITICAL VULNERABILITIES The three major vulnerabilities are as follows: MFSA 2014-62 - This is one of the three critical vulnerabilities reported by Patrick Cozzi and get fixed in the newer version of the browser. The vulnerability allows the exploitation of a WebGL crash with Cesium JavaScript library. Much details about the flaw are not known at the time, but Mozilla notes that the flaw cannot be exploi...

So far, we have seen the search engine for online underground Black Markets , named ' Grams ' that lets anyone find illegal drugs and other contraband online in an easier way ever and is pretty much fast like Google Search Engine . Now, a new search engine has been launched that primarily exposes all the available information of malicious hackers caught up in the very sort of data breaches  — including the recent massive breaches at Adobe and Yahoo! The search engine dubbed as " Indexeus ", designed by 23-year-old Jason Relinquo of Portugal, boasts a searchable database of "over 200 million entries available to our customers ". It specifically targeted hackers by listing huge amounts of their information such as email addresses, usernames, passwords, Internet address, physical addresses, birthdays and other information that may be associated with those accounts. If in case, any hacker want to get their credentials removed or blacklisted from the search engine...

A distasteful trend among the cyber crooks have began these days that they left no occasion, either good or bad, to snatch users' financial information in order to make money as well as spread malware to victimize users. The tragedy of the crashed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 is no exception for the criminal minds. They are exploiting the disaster that took place last week in the disputed territory. All related to Malaysian Airline Flight MH17 , a Boeing 777 aircraft carrying 283 passengers and 15 crew members, that was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17 by a ground-to-air missile. So far, its unclear that who is behind the tragic incident, while Ukraine and the insurgents blamed each other. Within just a week, at least six bogus Facebook pages that popped up the names of the Boeing 777 victims. According to the Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, three of the fraudulent pages were created in the names of children who were on the plane and died. The bogus Fac...