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Information on more than 198 Million United States citizens, that's over 60% of the US population, was exposed in what's believed to be the largest ever known exposure of voter-related to date. This blunder was caused by Deep Root Analytics (DRA) , a data analytics firm employed by the US Republican National Committee (RNC), who "mistakenly" left sensitive personal details of more than 198 million US voters exposed on an unsecured Amazon S3 server. Chris Vickery, a security researcher at UpGuard, who discovered the exposed database said anyone could have downloaded more than a Terabytes of files containing voters data without the need for any password from the Amazon S3 server maintained by DRA. Vickery is the same security researcher who discovered over 191 million voter records stored in an unsecured database in late 2015. In April, Vickey also reported information on 93 million Mexican voters. Vickery discovered the exposed databases on June 12, which...

After the disclosure of sophisticated global espionage and disinformation campaign aimed to discredit enemies of the state, Citizen Lab researchers exposed the dirty game of the Mexican government and its politics. The report — " Government Spy: Systematic monitoring of journalists and human rights defenders in Mexico " — published by Citizen Lab today revealed how the Mexican government used advanced spyware tools purchased from the NSO Group to target the country's most prominent human rights lawyers, anti-corruption activists, and journalists. The NSO Group, an Israel-based company that produces the most advanced mobile spyware on the planet, sold the tool to governments with an explicit agreement that it should be used only to fight terrorists or criminal groups that have long kidnapped and killed Mexicans. But, the Mexican government targets include: Lawyers looking into the case of 43 Students disappeared in September 2014 from the town of Iguala. Two ...

Prime Minister Theresa May wants tech companies, like Facebook, Apple, and Google, to create controversial 'backdoors' for police, but even somewhere she knows that it's not that easy as it sounds. The Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee of the European Parliament has released a draft proposal [ PDF ] for new laws on privacy and electronic communications, recommending end-to-end (E2E) encryption on all communications and forbidding backdoors that offer access to law enforcement. "The protection of confidentiality of communications is also an essential condition for the respect of other related fundamental rights and freedoms, such as the protection of freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and freedom of expression and information," the draft reads. Draft Says, Your Security is Our Top Priority According to the draft, EU citizens need more protection, not less and they need to know that the "confidentiality and safety" of their...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

After years of waiting, Mozilla last week launched Firefox 54 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android, with multi-process support — a "major improvement" to improve your browsing experience — but many users are still struggling to take advantage of this feature. Mozilla's multi-process support in Firefox has been in development for over eight years as part of a project, codenamed Electrolysis or E10S, which aimed at improving responsiveness and speed by streamlining memory use by different processes. Describing the latest release as the largest change to Firefox code ever, Mozilla says it has worked hard to avoid increased memory consumption, and slower performance, as Firefox now uses up to four processes to run web page content across all open tabs. In other words, Firefox is finally making use of "significantly less RAM" of your computer, as heavy web pages in one tab will now have a much lower impact on responsiveness and speed in other tabs. ...

It is no secret that hackers and 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 come with limitless attack vectors with low detection rates. Security researchers have recently discovered a new fileless ransomware, dubbed " Sorebrect, " which injects malicious code into a legitimate system process (svchost.exe) on a targeted system and then self-destruct itself in order to evade detection. Unlike traditional ransomware, Sorebrect has been designed to target enterprise's servers and endpoint. The injected code then initiates the file encryption process on the local machine and connected network shares. This fileless ransomware first compromises administrator credentials by brute forcing or some other means and then uses Microsoft's Sysinternals PsExec command-line utility to encry...

A British computer hacker who allegedly hacked a United States Department of Defense satellite system in 2014 and accessed the personal information of hundreds of military personnel has pleaded guilty on Thursday. Sean Caffrey, a 25-year-old resident of Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, has admitted to breaking into a US military communications system in June 2014 and stealing usernames and email addresses of over 800 employees and data from 30,000 satellite phones, the UK's National Crime Agency announced on Thursday. The UK authorities arrested Caffrey in March 2015 after they traced back the hack to his home IP address, which indicates the hacker did not use any anonymity service, such as VPN, proxy or Tor, to hide its track. The NCA officials also discovered that an online messaging account linked to the Pentagon satellite system attack was opened and operated from Caffrey's computer. After a forensic examination of his seized computers, the investigators d...

WikiLeaks has published a new batch of the ongoing Vault 7 leak , this time detailing a framework – which is being used by the CIA for monitoring the Internet activity of the targeted systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi devices. Dubbed " Cherry Blossom ," the framework was allegedly designed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the help of Stanford Research Institute (SRI International), an American nonprofit research institute, as part of its 'Cherry Bomb' project. Cherry Blossom is basically a remotely controllable firmware-based implant for wireless networking devices, including routers and wireless access points (APs), which exploits router vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access and then replace firmware with custom Cherry Blossom firmware. "An implanted device [ called Flytrap ] can then be used to monitor the internet activity of and deliver software exploits to targets of interest." a leaked CIA manual  reads . "The wi...

Soon you will be able to auto backup and sync your whole computer on Google Drive. Yes, you heard that right. By the end of this month, Google will launch Backup and Sync — a new, simple tool that has been designed to help you backup not only your documents and photos in the cloud but your entire computer as well. Data loss is always the worst thing that can happen to anyone, so having backups of all your data is always a good idea. Also, having regular backups can save you and your company in the events of data breaches and ransomware attacks. "On June 28th, 2017, we will launch Backup and Sync from Google, a tool intended to help everyday users back up files and photos from their computers, so they're safe and accessible from anywhere," reads Google's post on the G Suite Blog. The Backup and Sync tool will replace the current Google Drive uploader client for Mac/PC, and will also be integrated into the desktop Google Photos uploader. So, instead of creati...

Hit by Jaff Ransomware? Don't pay the Ransom. You can unlock your files for Free! Kaspersky Labs has released an updated version 1.21.2.1 of its free ransomware decryption tool, RakhniDecryptor, which can now also decrypt files locked by the Jaff ransomware . Security researchers at Kaspersky Labs have discovered a weakness in the Jaff ransomware code that makes it possible for victims to unlock their Jaff-infected files for free. First identified last month, Jaff is relatively new ransomware that's being distributed with the help of ' Necurs botnet ' that currently controls over 6 million infected computers worldwide. Necurs botnet is the same botnet – army of compromised internet connected devices – that was used to distribute Dridex Banking Trojan and Locky ransomware , which also infects users' machines, encrypt files and then demand a ransom before unlocking them. Jaff ransomware (Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Jaff) attack is primarily carried out by sending ...

The Pirate Bay — a widely popular file-sharing website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge — is once again in trouble, this time in Europe. The European Union Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled today that Dutch ISPs can block access to The Pirate Bay, as the Swedish file-hosting website facilitates an "act of communication" by allowing users to post and obtain torrents for pirated films, TV shows and music for free. Dutch anti-piracy group Stichting Brein (BREIN) in 2009 filed a case against local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) Ziggo and XS4ALL, and in 2012, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the ISPs must block users from accessing The Pirate Bay. However, Ziggo and XS4ALL, ISPs successfully overturned the decision two years later with the court ruling against BREIN and concluding that the blockade restricted the internet providers entrepreneurial freedoms. BREIN group then took the same case to the Supreme Court, who eventually r...

The United States government has released a rare alert about an ongoing, eight-year-long North Korean state-sponsored hacking operation. The joint report from the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provided details on " DeltaCharlie ," a malware variant used by " Hidden Cobra " hacking group to infect hundreds of thousands of computers globally as part of its DDoS botnet network. According to the report, the Hidden Cobra group of hackers are believed to be backed by the North Korean government and are known to launch cyber attacks against global institutions, including media organizations, aerospace and financial sectors, and critical infrastructure. While the US government has labeled the North Korean hacking group Hidden Cobra, it is often known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace – the one allegedly linked to the devastating WannaCry ransomware menace that shut down hospitals and businesses worldwide. DeltaCharlie – DDoS Botnet M...

As part of June's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released security patches for a total of 96 security vulnerabilities across its products, including fixes for two vulnerabilities being actively exploited in the wild. This month's patch release also includes emergency patches for unsupported versions of Windows platform the company no longer officially supports to fix three Windows hacking exploits leaked by the Shadow Brokers in the April's data dump of NSA hacking arsenal . The June 2017 Patch Tuesday brings patches for several remote code execution flaws in Windows, Office, and Edge, which could be exploited remotely by hackers to take complete control over vulnerable machines with little or no interaction from the user. While two of the vulnerabilities have been exploited in live attacks, another three flaws have publicly available proof-of-concept (POC) exploits that anyone could use to target Windows users. Vulnerabilities Under Active Attack The two vul...