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The risks associated with data breaches continue to grow, impacting a variety of industries, tech firms, and social networking platforms. In the past few months, over 1 Billion credentials were dumped online as a result of mega breaches in popular social networks. Now, Oracle is the latest in the list. Oracle has confirmed that its MICROS division – which is one of the world's top three point-of-sale (POS) services the company acquired in 2014 – has suffered a security breach. Hackers had infected hundreds of computers at Oracle's point-of-sale division, infiltrated the support portal used by customers, and potentially accessed sales registers all over the world. The software giant came to know about the data breach after its staff discovered malicious code on the MICROS customer support portal and certain legacy MICROS systems. Hackers likely installed malware on the troubleshooting portal in order to capture customers' credentials as they logged in. These us...

Internet of Things (IoT) is the latest buzz in the world of technology, but they are much easier to hack than you think. Until now we have heard many scary stories of hacking IoT devices , but how realistic is the threat? Just think of a scenario where you enter in your house, and it's sweltering, but when you head on to check the temperature of your thermostat, you find out that it has been locked to 99 degrees. And guess what? Your room thermostat is demanding $300 in Bitcoins to regain its control. Congratulations, Your Thermostat has been Hacked! This is not just a hypothetical scenario; this is exactly what Ken Munro and Andrew Tierney of UK-based security firm Pen Test Partners have demonstrated at the DEFCON 24 security conference in Las Vegas last Saturday. Two white hat hackers recently showed off the first proof-of-concept (PoC) ransomware that infects a smart thermostat. Ransomware is an infamous piece of malware that has been known for locking up comput...

After the failure of Facebook's Free Basics -- an initiative to provide free Internet access -- in India due to the violation of Net Neutrality principles, Facebook has reintroduced its plan to provide Internet access in rural India, but this time: The social networking giant is planning to launch a commercial WiFi service in India. Facebook is testing a WiFi service in rural India, allowing people with no internet connection to buy affordable data packages from their local internet service providers (ISPs) in order to access the Internet via local hotspots. Dubbed Express Wi-Fi , the program is in sync with Mark Zuckerberg's Internet.org -- the platform Facebook used for its Free Basics to bring the Internet to all. India banned Free Basics in the country on net neutrality grounds. Net Neutrality advocates argued that by offering some websites and services for free, people are discouraged from visiting other sites. Now, Facebook has partnered with state-owned ...

Android has Fallen! Yet another set of Android security vulnerabilities has been discovered in Qualcomm chipsets that affect more than 900 Million Android smartphones and tablets worldwide. What's even worse: Most of those affected Android devices will probably never be patched. Dubbed " Quadrooter ," the set of four vulnerabilities discovered in devices running Android Marshmallow and earlier that ship with Qualcomm chip could allow an attacker to gain root-level access to any Qualcomm device. The chip, according to the latest statistics, is found in more than 900 Million Android tablets and smartphones. That's a very big number. The vulnerabilities have been disclosed by a team of Check Point researchers at the DEF CON 24 security conference in Las Vegas. Critical Quadrooter Vulnerabilities: The four security vulnerabilities are: CVE-2016-2503 discovered in Qualcomm's GPU driver and fixed in Google's Android Security Bulletin for July ...

On this day 25 years ago, August 6, 1991, the world's first website went live to the public from a lab in the Swiss Alps. So Happy 25th Birthday, WWW! It's the Silver Jubilee of the world's first website. The site was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee , the father of the World Wide Web (WWW), and was dedicated to information on the World Wide Web project. The world's first website, which ran on a NeXT computer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), can still be visited today, more than two decades after its creation. The first website address is https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html . "The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents," the world's first public website reads, going on to explain how others can also create their own web pages. "The project started with the philosophy that much academic information sh...

Pokémon GO has become the world's most popular mobile game since its launch in July, but not everyone loves it. Pokémon GO has officially been banned in Iran. The Iranian High Council of Virtual Spaces – the country's official body that oversees online activity – has prohibited the use of the Pokémon GO app within the country due to unspecified " security concerns, " BBC reports . The Iranian council did not detail why the country has actually banned its citizen from playing the wildly popular game. Although many countries, including Russia and China, have expressed security concerns over the smash hit augmented reality game, Iran has become the first country to introduce an official ban of Pokémon GO. Since its launch, Pokémon GO has officially been released in more than 35 countries so far with over 100 Million downloads and continues to make an estimated $10 Million in daily revenue. Despite strict Internet restrictions in Iran, Pokémon fans have still ...

Forget about security! It turns out that the Chip-and-PIN cards are just as easy to clone as magnetic stripe cards. It took researchers just a simple chip and pin hack to withdraw up to $50,000 in cash from an ATM in America in under 15 minutes. We have been told that EMV ( Europay, MasterCard and Visa ) chip-equipped cards provides an extra layer of security which makes these cards more secure and harder to clone than the old magnetic stripe cards. But, it turns out to be just a myth. A team of security engineers from Rapid7 at Black Hat USA 2016 conference in Las Vegas demonstrated how a small and simple modifications to equipment would be enough for attackers to bypass the Chip-and-PIN protections and enable unauthorized transactions. The demonstration was part of their presentation titled, "Hacking Next-Gen ATMs: From Capture to Washout," [ PDF ]. The team of researchers was able to show the audience an ATM spitting out hundreds of dollars in cash. Here...

Over two weeks after the shutdown of Kickass Torrents and arrest of its admin in Poland, the world's biggest BitTorrent meta-search engine Torrentz.eu has apparently shut down its operation. The surprise shutdown of Torrentz marks the end of an era. Torrentz.eu was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine that hosted no torrents of its own, but combined results from dozens of other torrent search engine sites including The Pirate Bay ,  Kickass Torrents and ExtraTorrent. The meta-search engine has announced " farewell " to its millions of torrent users without much fanfare, suddenly ceasing its operation and disabling its search functionality. At the time of writing, the Torrentz.eu Web page is displaying a message that reads in the past tense: " Torrentz was a free, fast and powerful meta-search engine combining results from dozens of search engines. " When try to run any search or click any link on the site, the search engine refuses to show...

So finally, Apple will pay you for your efforts of finding bugs in its products. While major technology companies, including Microsoft , Facebook and Google , have launched bug bounty programs over last few years to reward researchers and hackers who report vulnerabilities in their products, Apple remained a holdout. But, not now. On Thursday, Apple announced  at the Black Hat security conference that the company would be launching a bug bounty program starting this fall to pay outside security researchers and white hat hackers privately disclose security flaws in the company's products. How much is a vulnerability in Apple software worth? Any Guesses? It's up to $200,000 . Head of Apple security team, Ivan Krstic, said the company plans to offer rewards of up to $200,000 (£152,433) to researchers who report critical security vulnerabilities in certain Apple software. While that's certainly a sizable bounty reward — one of the highest rewards offered in co...

If you think that the HTTP/2 protocol is more secure than the standard HTTP ( Hypertext Transfer Protocol ), then you might be wrong, as it took researchers just four months to discover four flaws in the HTTP/2 protocol. HTTP/2 was launched properly just in May last year after Google bundled its SPDY project into HTTP/2 in February in an effort to speed up the loading of web pages as well as the browsing experience of the online users. Now, security researchers from data center security vendor Imperva today at Black Hat conference revealed details on at least four high-profile vulnerabilities in HTTP/2 – a major revision of the HTTP network protocol that the today's web is based on. The vulnerabilities allow attackers to slow web servers by flooding them with innocent looking messages that carry a payload of gigabytes of data, putting the servers into infinite loops and even causing them to crash. The HTTP/2 protocol can be divided into three layers: The transmissio...

Yet another blow to Bitcoin: One of the world's most popular exchanges of the cryptocurrency has suffered a major hack, leading to a loss of around $72 Million worth of Bitcoins. Hong Kong-based Bitcoin exchange ' Bitfinex ' has posted a note on their website announcing the shutdown of its operation after discovering a security breach that allowed an attacker to steal some user funds. While the company did not mention a total amount lost in the breach, one of their employees — Bitfinex community director Zane Tackett — confirmed on Reddit that the total amount stolen was 119,756 bitcoins — worth up to $72 Million in cash. The cause of the security breach and the hacker behind the incident is still unclear, but the attackers appear to have mysteriously bypassed Bitfinex's mandated limits on withdrawals. "The theft is being reported to — and we are co-operating with — law enforcement," Bitfinex statement reads. "We will look at various options to ...

We have heard a lot about data breaches nowadays. And if you think that switching to an encrypted messaging service may secure you and your data, then you may be wrong. No good deed today can help you protect yourself completely. Reuters and several media outlets are reporting that the phone numbers of 15 Million users in Iran and more than a dozen accounts on the Telegram instant messaging service have been compromised by Iranian hackers exploiting an SMS text message flaw. Telegram is a messaging app " with a focus on security " that promotes itself as an ultra secure instant messaging system as all data is end-to-end encrypted. The service claims to have 100 Million active subscribers. According to research conducted by two security researchers, Collin Anderson and Claudio Guarnieri, this attack has threatened the communications of activists, journalists and other people in Iran, where around 20 Million people use Telegram. The incident is even said to be the...