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Over the past few years, Google has increasingly improved the online security and protections of its Gmail users. Besides two-factor authentication and HTTPS, Google has added new tools and features to Gmail that ensures users security and privacy, preventing cyber criminals and intelligence agencies to hack email accounts . 1. Enhanced State-Sponsored Attack Warnings Apple vs. FBI case urged every company to beef up the security parameters to prevent their services from not just hackers but also the law enforcement. Google for a while now has the capability to identify government-backed hackers , and notify potentially affected Gmail users so they can take action as soon as possible. Google recently announced on its blog post that it will alert Gmail users about the possibility of any state-sponsored attack by showing them a full-page warning with instructions about how to stay safe — very hard to miss or neglect. Meanwhile, the company revealed that ove...

End of Apple vs. FBI . At least for now, when the FBI has unlocked iPhone successfully. Yes, you heard it right. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has unlocked dead terrorist's iPhone 5C involved in the San Bernardino shooting without the help of Apple. After weeks of arguments, the United States government is withdrawing its motion compelling Apple to build a backdoored version of its iOS that can help the agency unlock iPhone of San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook. The Department of Justice (DOJ) says that FBI has successfully accessed iPhone's data with the help of an undisclosed alternative method and that it no longer needs Apple's assistance. "The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook's iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance of Apple," the attorneys wrote in a court filing Monday. "Accordingly, the government hereby requests that the Order Compelling Apple Inc to Assist Agents i...

Police have arrested and charged six people with crimes linked to hacking Connecticut state lottery terminals in order to produce more winning tickets than usual. Prosecutors say all the six suspects are either owners or employees of retail stores that produced a much higher number of winning tickets than the state average, according to the Hartford Courant . Suspects Hacked Lottery Terminal The alleged group set up machines to process a flood of tickets at once that caused a temporary display freeze, allowing operators to see which of the tickets about to be dispensed would be winning tickets, cancel the duff ones, and print the good ones. The hack appears to have exploited some  software weaknesses in lottery terminals  that not only caused ticket requests to be delayed but also allowed operators to know ahead of time whether a given request would produce a winning ticket. The actual culprit, in this case, was a game dubbed " 5 Card Cash ." The a...

Online harassment has been elevated a step with the advent of popular social networks like Facebook. Cyber stalkers create fake profiles impersonating other Facebook users and start doing activities on their behalf until and unless the owners notice the fake profiles and manually report it to Facebook. Even in some cases, cyber stalkers block the Facebook account holders whom they impersonate in order to carry out mischievous tasks through fake profiles without being detected by the actual account holders. But now, online criminals can no longer fool anyone with impersonation method, as Facebook is currently working on a feature that automatically informs its 1.6 Billion user base about the cloned accounts. If the company detects a duplicate Facebook account of a user, it will automatically send an alert to the original account holder, who'll be prompted to identify if the profile in question is indeed a fake profile impersonating you or if it actually belongs t...

After Microsoft's Twitter-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot ' Tay ' badly defeated earlier this week, Microsoft has expressed apology and explained what went wrong. For those unaware, Tay is Millennial-inspired artificial intelligence chatbot unveiled by Microsoft on Wednesday that's supposed to talk with people on social media networks like Twitter, Kik and GroupMe and learn from them. However, in less than 24 hours of its launch, the company pulled Tay down, following incredibly racist and Holocaust comments and tweets praising Hitler and bashing feminists. In a blog post published Friday, Corporate Vice President Peter Lee of Microsoft Research apologized for the disturbing behavior of Tay, though he suggested the bad people might have influenced the AI teenager. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," Lee w...

Terrorist organisations are increasingly using high-grade encryption technologies to prevent being caught by the law enforcement. But, that was not in the case of last year's Paris attacks that killed 129 people, as Encryption seems to have played little to no role. So, Who was the Real Culprit Behind the Attacks? The 'Burner' Phones. Burner Phones, or Prepaid mobile phones, are often the quick, easy, and anonymous method of communication. All you need to do is head to your nearest big-box store and pick up a cheap prepaid "burner" phone and a phone card. Now you have an entirely useable phone with no ID that could reveal your identity. It seems that these prepaid "burner" phones are a dream tool for terrorist organisations that bring them in bulk and then disposed of each time they make a communication. The same prepaid phones were utilized in the terrorist attacks in Paris late last year. Therefore, by using different phon...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has lengthened its Most Wanted List by adding seven Iranian hackers who are accused of attacking a range of US banks and a New York dam. On Thursday, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) charged seven Iranian hackers with a slew of computer hacking offences for breaking into computer systems of dozens of US banks, causing Millions of dollars in damages, and tried to shut down a New York dam. The individual hackers, who allegedly worked for computer security companies linked to the Iranian government, were indicted for an " extensive campaign " of cyber attacks against the US financial sector. All the seven hackers have been added to the FBI's Most Wanted list, and their names are: Ahmad Fathi , 37 Hamid Firoozi , 34 Amin Shokohi , 25 Sadegh Ahmadzadegan (aka Nitr0jen26), 23 Omid Ghaffarinia (aka PLuS), 25 Sina Keissar , 25 Nader Saedi (aka Turk Server), 26 All the hackers have been charg...

A critical zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in all versions of Apple's OS X operating system that allows hackers to exploit the company's newest protection feature and steal sensitive data from affected devices. With the release of OS X El Capitan, Apple introduced a security protection feature to the OS X kernel called System Integrity Protection ( SIP ). The feature is designed to prevent potentially malicious or bad software from modifying protected files and folders on your Mac. The purpose of SIP is to restrict the root account of OS X devices and limit the actions a root user can perform on protected parts of the system in an effort to reduce the chance of malicious code hijacking a device or performing privilege escalation. However, SentinelOne security researcher Pedro Vilaça has uncovered a critical vulnerability in both OS X and iOS that allows for local privilege escalation as well as bypasses SIP without kernel exploit, impacting all versions...

Tay, Microsoft's new Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot on Twitter had to be pulled down a day after it launched, following incredibly racist comments and tweets praising Hitler and bashing feminists. Microsoft had launched the Millennial-inspired artificial intelligence chatbot on Wednesday, claiming that it will become smarter the more people talk to it. The real-world aim of Tay is to allow researchers to "experiment" with conversational understanding, as well as learn how people talk to each other and get progressively "smarter." "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement," a Microsoft spokesperson said. "It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are...

Despite so many messaging apps, Email is still one of the widely used and popular ways to communicate in this digital age. But are your Emails secure? We are using email services for decades, but the underlying 1980s transport protocol used to send emails, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), is ancient and lacks the ability to secure your email communication entirely. However, to overcome this problem, SMTP STARTTLS was invented in 2002 as a way to upgrade an insecure connection to a secure connection using TLS. But, STARTTLS was susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks and encryption downgrades. But worry not. A new security feature is on its way!!! SMTP STS: An Effort to Make Email More Secure Top email providers, namely Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Comcast, LinkedIn, and 1&1 Mail & Media Development, have joined forces to develop a new email standard that makes sure the emails you send are going through an encrypted channel and cannot be sniffed. Dubbed SMT...

Meet the security company that is helping Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in unlocking San Bernardino shooters' iPhone: The Israeli mobile forensics firm Cellebrite . Yes, Cellebrite – the provider of mobile forensic software from Israel – is helping the FBI in its attempt to unlock iPhone 5C that belonged to San Bernardino shooter, Syed Rizwan Farook, the Israeli YNetNews reported on Wednesday. The company's website claims that its service allows investigators to unlock Apple devices running iOS 8.x " in a forensically sound manner and without any hardware intervention or risk of device wipe. " If Cellebrite succeeds in unlocking Farook's iPhone, the FBI will no longer need Apple to create a backdoored version of its iOS operating system that could let it access data on Farook's locked iPhone 5C. Apple is engaged in a legal encryption battle with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) over a court order that forces the company to write ...

Security researchers have discovered a new data-stealing Trojan that makes special use of USB devices in order to spread itself and does not leave any trace of activity on the compromised systems. Dubbed USB Thief ( or Win32/PSW.Stealer.NAI), the malware has the capability of stealthy attacking against air-gapped or isolated computers, warns ESET security firm. The malware author has employed special programs to protect the USB Thief from being reproduced or copied, making it even harder to detect and reverse-engineer. USB Thief has been designed for targeted attacks on computer systems that are isolated from the Internet, according to the ESET malware analyst Tomáš Gardoň. The 'USB Thief' Trojan Malware The USB Thief Trojan malware is stored either as a portable application's plugin source or as a Dynamically Linked Library (DLL) used by the portable application. Since USB devices often store popular applications like Firefox, Notepad++ or TrueCrypt portab...