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Wi-Fi enabled devices — widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT) — are populating offices and homes in greater and greater numbers. From smartphones to connected printers and even coffee makers, most of these IoT devices have good intentions and can connect to your company's network without a problem. However, as the Internet of Things (IoT) devices are growing at a great pace, they continue to widen the attack surface at the same time, giving attackers a large number of entry points to affect you some or the other way. The attackers can use your smart devices to gain backdoor entry to your network, giving them the capability to steal sensitive data, such as your personal information, along with a multitude of other malicious acts. An interesting attack scenario has recently been demonstrated by one of the renowned hackers, Jayson Street , who said all it is needed is to walk around with the right device to get into someone's device. Before we jump into the te...

A severe security vulnerability has been discovered in the CloudFlare content delivery network that has caused big-name websites to expose private session keys and other sensitive data. CloudFlare, a content delivery network (CDN) and web security provider that helps optimize safety and performance of over 5.5 Million websites on the Internet, is warning its customers of the critical bug that could have exposed a range of sensitive information, including passwords, and cookies and tokens used to authenticate users. Dubbed Cloudbleed , the nasty flaw is named after the Heartbleed bug that was discovered in 2014, but believed to be worse than Heartbleed. The vulnerability is so severe that it not only affects websites on the CloudFlare network but affects mobile apps as well. What exactly is "Cloudbleed," how it works, how are you affected by this bug, and how you can protect yourself? Let's figure it out. What is Cloudbleed? Discovered by Google Project Ze...

British police have arrested a suspect in connection with the massive attack on Deutsche Telekom that hit nearly 1 Million routers last November. Late last year, someone knocked down more than 900,000 broadband routers belonging to Deutsche Telekom users in Germany, which affected the telephony, television, and internet service in the country. Now, Germany's federal criminal police force (BKA) revealed today that the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) reportedly arrested a 29-year-old British suspect at Luton airport in London on Wednesday, who is accused of being the mastermind behind the last year's attack. In a statement , the German police said the last year's attack was especially severe and was carried out to compromise the home routers to enroll them in a network of hijacked machines popularly known as Botnet, and then offer the DDoS services for sale on dark web markets. But ultimately, the attack created a denial-of-service situation, which resulted i...

SHA-1, Secure Hash Algorithm 1, a very popular cryptographic hashing function designed in 1995 by the NSA, is officially dead after a team of researchers from Google and the CWI Institute in Amsterdam announced today submitted the first ever successful SHA-1 collision attack. SHA-1 was designed in 1995 by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a part of the Digital Signature Algorithm. Like other hashes, SHA-1 also converts any input message to a long string of numbers and letters that serve as a cryptographic fingerprint for that particular message. Collision attacks appear when the same hash value (fingerprint) is produced for two different messages, which then can be exploited to forge digital signatures, allowing attackers to break communications encoded with SHA-1. The explanation is technologically tricky, but you can think of it as attackers who surgically alters their fingerprints in order to match yours, and then uses that to unlock your smartphone. The researchers h...

Another privilege-escalation vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that dates back to 2005 and affects major distro of the Linux operating system, including Redhat, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu. Over a decade old Linux Kernel bug ( CVE-2017-6074 ) has been discovered by security researcher Andrey Konovalov in the DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) implementation using Syzkaller , a kernel fuzzing tool released by Google. The vulnerability is a use-after-free flaw in the way the Linux kernel's "DCCP protocol implementation freed SKB (socket buffer) resources for a DCCP_PKT_REQUEST packet when the IPV6_RECVPKTINFO option is set on the socket." The DCCP double-free vulnerability could allow a local unprivileged user to alter the Linux kernel memory, enabling them to cause a denial of service ( system crash ) or escalate privileges to gain administrative access on a system. "An attacker can control what object that would be and overwrite...

Next time when you accidentally or curiously land up on a website with jumbled content prompting you to download a missing font to read the blog by updating the Chrome font pack… …Just Don't Download and Install It. It's a Trap! Scammers and hackers are targeting Google Chrome users with this new hacking scam that's incredibly easy to fall for, prompting users to download a fake Google Chrome font pack update just to trick them into installing malware on their systems. Here's What the Scam is and How it works: It's a "The 'HoeflerText' font wasn't found" scam. Security firm NeoSmart Technologies recently identified the malicious campaign while browsing an unnamed WordPress website that had allegedly already been compromised, possibly due to failing to apply timely security updates. The scam is not a new one to identified by NeoSmart. It has been making rounds since last month . The hackers are inserting JavaScript into poorl...

Microsoft on Tuesday released security update (KB 4010250) to patch flaws in Adobe Flash Player for its customers using Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1 and later, as well as Edge for Windows 10, but two already disclosed flaws remain unpatched. Just last week, Microsoft announced that its February patches would be delayed until March due to a last minute issue, a move that led to Google publishing details of an unpatched Windows bug . However, the software giant emailed a handful of big business to alert them to the incoming patches on Monday, advising them to update their systems as soon as possible. The security patches are now available to all Windows customers over Windows Update, and " No other security updates are scheduled for release until the next scheduled monthly update release on March 14, 2017 ," Microsoft says. Bulletin MS17-005 for Adobe Flash Player addresses remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities for some currently supported Windows systems....

This newly discovered bugs in Java and Python is a big deal today. The two popular programming languages, Java and Python, contain similar security flaws that can be exploited to send unauthorized emails and bypass any firewall defenses. And since both the flaws remain unpatched, hackers can take advantage to design potential cyber attack operations against critical networks and infrastructures. The unpatched flaws actually reside in the way Java and Python programming languages handle File Transfer Protocol (FTP) links, where they don't syntax-check the username parameter, which leads to, what researchers call, protocol injection flaw. Java/Python FTP Injection to Send Unauthorized SMTP Emails In a blog pos t published over the past week, security researcher Alexander Klink detailed the FTP protocol injection vulnerability in Java's XML eXternal Entity (XXE) that allows attackers to inject non-FTP malicious commands inside an FTP connection request. To demonst...

Russian cyber security and antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab has made available the much awaited KasperskyOS , a secure-by-design operating system based on Microkernel architecture which is specially designed for network devices, industrial control systems and the Internet of Things. The operating system is not made for your average home PC; instead, it is meant to protect industrial systems and embedded devices from cyber attacks by preventing any third-party or malicious code from executing. Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky confirmed the rumors of a new operating system on his official blog published on Monday, saying this project under the codename 11-11 has been in the works for 14 years and has been designed from scratch. The reason behind developing KasperskyOS is simple: Growing Internet-of-Things and embedded devices in industrial control systems (ICS) to power critical infrastructure. It's quite easy for most companies to get rid of the virus-infected computer, ...

Ukraine has once again been a target of a potential hacking attack that infected computer systems from dozens of Ukrainian businesses with highly sophisticated malware, allowing hackers to exfiltrate sensitive data and eavesdrop on their network. Late last year, the country also suffered a power outage caused by the same group of hackers that targeted Ukraine's power grid with the BlackEnergy malware in late 2015, causing 225,000 residents to lose electricity. Now security researchers from threat intelligence firm CyberX have uncovered an advanced malware-based operation that has already siphoned over 600 gigabytes of data from about 70 victim organizations, including critical infrastructure, news media, and scientific research. Operation BugDrop: Damages and Modus Operandi Dubbed " Operation BugDrop ," the large-scale malware campaign has been perpetrated against targets in the Ukraine, though targets from other countries include Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Austr...

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, we reported about how insecure was the mail servers operated by the Trump organization that anyone with little knowledge of computers can expose almost everything about Trump and his campaign. Now, some unknown hackers calling themselves "Pro_Mast3r" managed to deface an official website associated with President Donald Trump's presidential campaign fundraising on Sunday. The hacker, claiming to be from Iraq, reportedly defaced the server, secure2.donaldjtrump.com, which is behind CloudFlare's content management system and security platform. The server appears to be an official Trump campaign server, reported Ars, as the certificate of the server is legitimate, " but a reference to an image on another site is insecure, prompting a warning on Chrome and Firefox that the connection is not secure. " The defaced website displayed an image of a black hat man and included a text message, which reads: Ha...

Are you a programmer? If yes, then you would know the actual pain of... "forgetting a semicolon," the hide and seek champion since 1958. Typos annoy everyone. Remember how a hacker's typo stopped the biggest bank heist in the history, saved $1 billion of Bangladesh bank from getting stolen. But this time a typo in the Zerocoin source code costs the company more than $585,000 in losses. Zerocoin cryptocurrency protocol is designed to add true cryptographic anonymity to Zcoin transactions that take full advantage of "Zero-Knowledge proofs" to ensure the complete financial privacy of users. Zcoin announced Friday that " a typographical error on a single additional character " in the Zerocoin source code helped an attacker to steal 370,000 Zerocoin, which is over $585,000 at today's price. "We estimate the attacker has created about 370,000 Zcoins which has been almost completely sold except for about 20,000+ Zcoin and absorbed on...