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Yahoo has just revealed that around 32 million user accounts were accessed by hackers in the last two years using a sophisticated cookie forging attack without any password. These compromised accounts are in addition to the Yahoo accounts affected by the two massive data breaches that the company disclosed in last few months. The former tech giant said that in a regulatory filing Wednesday that the cookie caper is likely linked to the "same state-sponsored actor" thought to be behind a separate, 2014 data breach that resulted in the theft of 500 Million user accounts . "Based on the investigation, we believe an unauthorized third party accessed the company's proprietary code to learn how to forge certain cookies," Yahoo said in its annual report filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). "The outside forensic experts have identified approximately 32 million user accounts for which they believe forged cookies were used or taken...

Security researchers have discovered a new variant of Dridex – one of the most nefarious banking Trojans actively targeting financial sector – with a new, sophisticated code injection technique and evasive capabilities called " AtomBombing ." On Tuesday, Magal Baz, security researcher at Trusteer IBM  disclosed new research, exposing the new Dridex version 4, which is the latest version of the infamous financial Trojan and its new capabilities. Dridex is one of the most well-known Trojans that exhibits the typical behavior of monitoring a victim's traffic to bank sites by infiltrating victim PCs using macros embedded in Microsoft documents or via web injection attacks and then stealing online banking credentials and financial data. However, by including AtomBombing capabilities, Dridex becomes the first ever malware sample to utilize such sophisticated code injection technique to evade detection. What is "AtomBombing" Technique? Code injection te...

If you are also searching for the answers to what skills are needed for a job in cyber security, you should know that this varies widely based upon the responsibilities of a particular role, the type of company you want to work with, and especially on it's IT architect. However, Linux is the most required skills in information technology and cyber security, as Linux are everywhere! Whether you know it or not you are already using Linux every day – when you Google, you use Linux; when you buy metro tickets, you use Linux; It powers your smart devices; most airplane or automobile entertainment systems are also running on Linux; even your Android phone is Linux. Moreover, nearly all of the hacking and penetration testing tools are developed specifically for Linux. In fact, one of the popular operating systems of hackers, KALI, is also a Linux distro that comes with over 300 tools for penetration testing, forensics, hacking and reverse engineering. So, due to the rapid growth of Li...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Is anything safe? It's 2017, and the likely answer is NO. Making sure your passwords are secure is one of the first line of defense – for your computer, email, and information – against hacking attempts, and Password Managers are the one recommended by many security experts to keep all your passwords secure in one place. Password Managers are software that creates complex passwords, stores them and organizes all your passwords for your computers, websites, applications and networks, as well as remember them on your behalf. But what if your Password Managers itself are vulnerable? Well, it's not just an imagination, as a new report has revealed that some of the most popular password managers are affected by critical vulnerabilities that can expose user credentials. The report, published on Tuesday by a group of security experts from TeamSIK of the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology in Germany, revealed that nine of the most popular Android pass...

With the evolving hacking events around us, cyber-security skills are in high demand across all organizations and industries, because a shortage of skilled cyber security practitioners could leave an organization vulnerable to cyber attacks. But knowledge alone is not sufficient, 'certification as eligibility' also matters, which shows employers that you are serious about your career and eligible as you have demonstrated your technical ability in some form. I frequently receive emails and messages from my readers asking: Should I get certified?, Are certifications important to build up a career in IT?, What certifications can one get to start a career in information security? and more. These are some of the most frequent queries I came across, and in this article, I will attempt to answer these along with a solution on how to get started. Whether you are looking to launch your career in the IT industry, or perhaps get promoted at your current job — getting certified ...

What could be more exciting for hackers than exploiting a vulnerability in a widely used software without having to struggle too much? One such easy-to-exploit, but critical vulnerability has been discovered in ESET's antivirus software that could allow any unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code with root privileges on a Mac system. The critical security flaw, tracked as CVE-2016-9892, in ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 for macOS was discovered by Google Security Team's researchers Jason Geffner and Jan Bee at the beginning of November 2016. As detailed in the full disclosure , all a hacker needs to get root-level remote code execution on a Mac computer is to intercept the ESET antivirus package's connection to its backend servers using a self-signed HTTPS certificate, put himself in as a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacker, and exploit an XML library flaw. The actual issue was related to a service named esets_daemon, which runs as root. The service...

Every parent should think twice before handing out Internet-connected toys or smart toys to their children, as these creepy toys pose a different sort of danger: privacy and data security risks for kids who play with them. This same incident was happened over a year ago when Hong Kong toymaker VTech was hacked , which exposed personal details, including snaps of parents and children and chat logs, of about 6.4 million children around the world. Now, in the latest security failing of the internet-connected smart toys, more than 2 Million voice recordings of children and their parents have been exposed, along with email addresses and passwords for over 820,000 user accounts. And What's even Worse? The hackers locked this data and held it for Ransom. California-based Spiral Toys' line of internet-connected stuffed animal toys, CloudPets , which allow children and relatives to send recorded voicemails back and forth, reportedly left the voice messages recorded between pare...

This month has yet been kind of interesting for cyber security researchers, with Google successfully cracked SHA1 and the discovery of Cloudbleed bug in Cloudflare that caused the leakage of sensitive information across sites hosted behind Cloudflare. Besides this, Google last week disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) library, which affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10. While the Windows vulnerability has yet to be patched by the company, Google today released the details of another unpatched Windows security flaw in its browser, as Microsoft did not act within its 90-day disclosure deadline. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-0037), discovered and disclosed by Google Project Zero team's researcher Ivan Fratric, is a so-called " type confusion flaw " in a module in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer that potentially leads to arbitrary code exec...

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...