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Is it wrong to hack back in order to counter hacking attack when you have become a victim? — this has been a long time debate. While many countries, including the United States, consider hacking back practices as illegal, many security firms and experts believe it as "a terrible idea" and officially "cautions" victims against it, even if they use it as a part of an active defense strategy. Accessing a system that does not belong to you or distributing code designed to enable unauthorized access to anyone's system is an illegal practice. However, this doesn't mean that this practice is not at all performed. In some cases, retribution is part of current defense offerings, and many security firms do occasionally hack the infrastructure of threat groups to unmask several high-profile malware campaigns. But a new proposed bill intended to amend section 1030 of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that would allow victims of ongoing cyber-attacks to fight ...

WikiLeaks has published a massive trove of confidential documents in what appear to be the biggest ever leak involving the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). WikiLeaks announced series Year Zero , under which the whistleblower organization will reveal details of the CIA's global covert hacking program. As part of Year Zero, Wikileaks published its first archive, dubbed Vault 7 , which includes a total of 8,761 documents of 513 MB ( torrent  | password ) on Tuesday, exposing information about numerous zero-day exploits developed for iOS, Android, and Microsoft's Windows operating system. WikiLeaks claims that these leaks came from a secure network within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence headquarters at Langley, Virginia. The authenticity of such dumps can not be verified immediately, but since WikiLeaks has long track record of releasing such top secret government documents, the community and governments should take it very seriously. CIA's Zero-D...

As vast volumes of digital data are created, consumed and shared by companies, customers, employees, patients, financial institutions, governments and so many other bodies, information protection becomes a growing risk for everyone. Who wants to see personal customer purchasing data flying into the hands of strangers? What company can tolerate the pilfering of its intellectual property by competitors? What government can stand idly by while its military secrets are made public? To protect their valuable and private information, organizations purchase numerous cyber security systems – like intrusion detection systems, firewalls, and anti-virus software – and deploy them across their networks and on all their computers. In fact, a typical bank, manufacturer or government department might have dozens of such products operating at all times. Cyber security systems work non-stop to thwart network infiltration and data-theft. Whenever they notice an activity that seems outside the sc...

A new disk wiping malware has been uncovered targeting a petroleum company in Europe, which is quite similar to the mysterious disk wiper malware Shamoon that wiped data from 35,000 computers at Saudi Arabia's national oil company in 2012. Disk wiping malware has the ability to cripple any organization by permanently wiping out data from all hard drive and external storage on a targeted machine, causing great financial and reputational damage. Security researchers from Moscow-based antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab discovered the new wiper StoneDrill while researching last November's re-emergence of Shamoon malware (Shamoon 2.0) attacks – two attacks occurred in November and one in late January. Shamoon 2.0 is the more advanced version of Shamoon malware that reportedly hit 15 government agencies and organizations across the world, wipes data and takes control of the computer's boot record, preventing the computers from being turned back on. Meanwhile, Kaspersky resea...

A database of 1.4 billion email addresses combined with real names, IP addresses, and often physical address has been exposed in what appears to be one the largest data breach of this year. What's worrisome? There are high chances that you, or at least someone you know, is affected by this latest data breach. Security researcher Chris Vickery of MacKeeper and Steve Ragan of CSOOnline discovered an unsecured and publicly exposed repository of network-available backup files linked to a notorious spamming organization called River City Media (RCM), led by notorious spammers Matt Ferrisi and Alvin Slocombe. Spammer's Entire Operation Exposed The database contains sensitive information about the company's operations, including nearly 1.4 Billion user records, which was left completely exposed to anyone – even without any username or password. According to MacKeeper security researcher Vickery, RCM, which claims to be a legitimate marketing firm, is responsible for s...

Hardly a day goes without headlines about any significant data breach. In past year, billions of accounts from popular sites and services, including LinkedIn , Tumblr , MySpace , Last.FM , Yahoo! , VK.com were exposed on the Internet. Now, according to the recent news, login credentials and other personal data linked to more than one Million Yahoo and Gmail accounts are reportedly being offered for sale on the dark web marketplace. The online accounts listed for sale on the Dark Web allegedly contain usernames, emails, and plaintext passwords. The accounts are not from a single data breach; instead, several major cyber-attacks believed to have been behind it. The hacker going by the online handle 'SunTzu583' has listed a number of cracked email packages on a series of dark websites, HackRead reported. Here's the Full List of Accounts and their Prices: 100,000 Yahoo accounts acquired from 2012 Last.FM data breach , for 0.0084 Bitcoins ($10.76). Another 1...

It is no secret that cybercriminals are becoming dramatically more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. While new forms of cybercrime are on the rise, traditional activities seem to be shifting towards more clandestine techniques that involve the exploitation of standard system tools and protocols, which are not always monitored. The latest example of such attack is DNSMessenger – a new Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that uses DNS queries to conduct malicious PowerShell commands on compromised computers – a technique that makes the RAT difficult to detect onto targeted systems. The Trojan came to the attention of Cisco's Talos threat research group by a security researcher named Simpo, who highlighted a tweet that encoded text in a PowerShell script that said 'SourceFireSux.' SourceFire is one of Cisco's corporate security products. DNSMessenger Attack Is Completely Fileless Further analysis of the malware ultimately led Talos researchers to...

Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years. Just last year, Microsoft purchased 10 Million strands of synthetic DNA from San Francisco DNA synthesis startup called Twist Bioscience and collaborated with researchers from the University of Washington to focus on using DNA as a data storage medium. However, in the latest experiments, a pair of researchers from Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) have come up with a new technique to store massive amounts of data on DNA, and the results are marvelous. The duo successfully stored around 2mb in data, encoding a total number of six files, which include: A full computer operating system An 1895 French movie "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" A $50 Amazon gift card A computer virus A Pioneer plaque A 1948 study by information theorist Claude Shannon The new research, which comes courtesy of Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski, has been published in the jou...

Well, there's some good news for hackers and bug bounty hunters! Both tech giants Google and Microsoft have raised the value of the payouts they offer security researchers, white hat hackers and bug hunters who find high severity flaws in their products. While Microsoft has just doubled its top reward from $15,000 to $30,000, Google has raised its high reward from $20,000 to $31,337, which is a 50 percent rise plus a bonus $1,337 or 'leet' award. In past few years, every major company, from Apple to P*rnHub and Netgear , had started Bug Bounty Programs to encourage hackers and security researchers to find and responsibly report bugs in their services and get rewarded. But since more and more bug hunters participating in bug bounty programs at every big tech company, common and easy-to-spot bugs are hardly left now, and if any, they hardly make any severe impact. Sophisticated and remotely exploitable vulnerabilities are a thing now, which takes more time and...

The major internet outage across the United States earlier this week was not due to any virus or malware or state-sponsored cyber attack, rather it was the result of a simple TYPO. Amazon on Thursday admitted that an incorrectly typed command during a routine debugging of the company's billing system caused the 5-hour-long outage of some Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers on Tuesday. The issue caused tens of thousands of websites and services to become completely unavailable, while others show broken images and links, which left online users around the world confused. The sites and services affected by the disruption include Quora, Slack, Medium, Giphy, Trello, Splitwise, Soundcloud, and IFTTT, among a ton of others. Here's What Happened: On Tuesday morning, members of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team were debugging the S3 cloud-storage billing system. As part of the process, the team needed to take a few billing servers offline, but unfortunately, it end...

Bad News for privacy concerned people! It will be once again easier for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to sell your personal data for marketing or advertisement purposes without taking your permission. Last October, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a set of privacy rules on ISPs that restrict them from sharing your online data with third parties without your consent and require them to adopt "reasonable measures" to protect consumers' data from hackers. However, now the FCC suspended privacy rules before they came into effect. The reason? President Donald Trump's newly appointed FCC chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican and ex-Verizon lawyer. Ajit Pai, who has openly expressed his views against net neutrality in the past, just last week said during a speech at Mobile World Congress that Net Neutrality was "a mistake" and indicated that the Commission is now moving back to internet regulations. Now, Pai suspends p...

Last year Google employees took an initiative to help thousands of Open Source Projects patch a critical remote code execution vulnerability in a widely used Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library. Dubbed Operation Rosehub , the initiative was volunteered by some 50 Google employees, who utilized 20 percent of their work time to patch over 2600 open source projects on Github, those were vulnerable to "Mad Gadget vulnerability." Mad Gadget vulnerability ( CVE-2015-6420 ) is a remote code execution bug in the Java deserialization used by the Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system. The ACC Library is widely deployed by many Java applications to decode data passed between computers. To exploit this flaw, all an unauthorized attacker need to do is submit maliciously crafted input to an application on a targeted system that uses the ACC library. Once the vulnerable ACC libra...