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Ukrainian National Police has released a video showing officers raiding company of M.E.Doc accounting software makers, whose systems have been linked to outbreak of Petya (NotPetya) ransomware that recently infected computers of several major companies worldwide. On 4th July, masked police officers from Ukrainian anti-cybercrime unit — carrying shotguns and assault rifles — raided the software development firm " Intellect Service, " in the capital city Kyiv and seized their servers, which were reportedly compromised by hackers to spread (ExPetr, PetrWrap, Petya, NotPetya) ransomware. Researchers from ESET security firm have found a very stealthy malicious code in the M.E.Doc software update which was injected by an unknown hacker or group of hackers in mid-April by exploiting a vulnerability. The malicious software upgrade, designed to install a backdoor and give unauthorized remote access to attackers, was then delivered as an update to nearly 1 million computers belonging...

One of the world's largest Bitcoin and Ether cryptocurrencies exchanges Bithumb has recently been hacked, resulting in loss of more than $1 Million in cryptocurrencies after a number of its user accounts compromised. Bithumb is South Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange with 20% of global ether trades, and roughly 10% of the global bitcoin trade is exchanged for South Korea's currency, the Won. Bithumb is currently the fourth largest Bitcoin exchange and the biggest Ethereum exchange in the world. Last week, a cyber attack on the cryptocurrency exchange giant resulted in a number of user accounts being compromised, and billions of South Korean Won were stolen from customers accounts. Around 10 Million Won worth of bitcoins were allegedly stolen from a single victim's account, according to the Kyunghyang Shinmun, a major local newspaper. A survey of users who lost cryptocurrencies in the cyber attack reveals " it is estimated that hundreds of mill...

Online Privacy has been one of the biggest challenges in today's interconnected world, as the governments across the world have been found censoring the Internet, stealing information and conducting mass surveillance on innocent people. China is one such nation which always wanted to have a tight hold on its citizen and has long been known for its strict Internet censorship laws through the Great Firewall of China. The Great Firewall of China is the nation's Golden Shield project that employs a variety of tricks to censor Internet and block access to various foreign news and social media sites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and The Pirate Bay. So, in order to thwart these restrictions and access blocked websites, hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) which route their traffic to servers overseas free of the Great Firewall filters, but this may not be an option soon. For those unfamiliar, Virtual P...

Security boffins have discovered a critical vulnerability in a GnuPG cryptographic library that allowed the researchers to completely break RSA-1024 and successfully extract the secret RSA key to decrypt data. Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is popular open source encryption software used by many operating systems from Linux and FreeBSD to Windows and macOS X. It's the same software used by the former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden to keep his communication secure from law enforcement. The vulnerability, labeled CVE-2017-7526 , resides in the Libgcrypt cryptographic library used by GnuPG, which is prone to local FLUSH+RELOAD side-channel attack. A team of researchers — from Technical University of Eindhoven, the University of Illinois, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, and the University of Adelaide — found that the "left-to-right sliding window" method used by the libgcrypt library for carrying out the mathematics o...

A teenage student has been charged with running a supplying malware that was used for launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against websites of some of the world's leading businesses. Jack Chappell , an 18-year-old teenager from Stockport, is accused of helping cyber criminals with his DDoS booter service (DDoS-for-hire service) to flood millions of websites around the world with the massive amount of data and eventually bring them down, making them unavailable to their users. Among the victims that were allegedly attacked by Chappell's malware are the National Crime Agency (NCA), T-Mobile, O2, Virgin Media, the BBC, Amazon, Vodafone, BT, Netflix, and NatWest that had its online banking systems down in a 2015 cyber attack. Chappell is charged following an investigation led by the West Midlands Regional Cyber Crime Unit and assisted by Israeli Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). According t...

A SQL Injection vulnerability has been discovered in one of the most popular Wordpress plugins, installed on over 300,000 websites, which could be exploited by hackers to steal databases and possibly hijack the affected sites remotely. The flaw has been discovered in the highly popular WP Statistics plugin, which allows site administrators to get detailed information related to the number of users online on their sites, the number of visits and visitors, and page statistics. Discovered by Sucuri team, WordPress plugin WP Statistics is vulnerable to SQL Injection flaw that allows a remote attacker, with at least a subscriber account, to steal sensitive information from the website's database and possibly gain unauthorized access to websites. SQL Injection is a web application bug that allows hackers to inject malicious Structured Query Language (SQL) code to web inputs in order to determine the structure and location of key databases, which eventually allows stealing of...

WikiLeaks has just published a new batch of the ongoing Vault 7 leak , this time detailing an alleged CIA project that allowed the agency to hack and remotely spy on computers running the Linux operating systems. Dubbed OutlawCountry , the project allows the CIA hackers to redirect all outbound network traffic on the targeted computer to CIA controlled computer systems for exfiltrate and infiltrate data. The OutlawCountry Linux hacking tool consists of a kernel module, which the CIA hackers load via shell access to the targeted system and create a hidden Netfilter table with an obscure name on a target Linux user. "The new table allows certain rules to be created using the "iptables" command. These rules take precedence over existing rules, and are only visible to an administrator if the table name is known. When the Operator removes the kernel module, the new table is also removed," CIA's leaked  user manual reads. Although the installation and persi...

Ransomware Ransomware Everywhere Not a Single Place to Hide! But, Microsoft has a simple solution to this problem to protect millions of its users against most ransomware attacks. Two massive ransomware attacks — WannaCry and Petya (also known as NotPetya ) — in a month have caused chaos and disruption worldwide, forcing hospitals, ATMs, shipping companies, governments, airports and car companies to shut down their operations. Most ransomware in the market, including WannaCry and NotPetya, are specifically designed to target computers running Windows operating system, which is why Microsoft has been blamed for not putting proper defensive measures in place to prevent such threats. But not now! In the wake of recent devastating global ransomware outbreaks, Microsoft has finally realized that its Windows operating system is deadly vulnerable to ransomware and other emerging threats that specifically targets its platform. To tackle this serious issue, the tech giant has ...

The author of original Petya ransomware is back. After 6 months of silence, the author of the now infamous Petya ransomware appeared today on Twitter to help victims unlock their files encrypted by a new version of Petya, also known as NotPetya . "We're back having a look in NotPetya," tweeted Janus, a name Petya creator previously chose for himself from a villain in James Bond. "Maybe it's crackable with our privkey. Please upload the first 1MB of an infected device, that would help." This statement made by the Petya author suggests he may have held onto a master decryption key , which if it works for the new variant of Petya infected files, the victims would be able to decrypt their files locked in the recent cyber outcry. Janus sold Petya as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) to other hackers in March 2016, and like any regular ransomware, original Petya was designed to lock victim's computer, then return them when a ransom is paid. This ...

After being threatened with a ban in Russia , end-to-end encrypted Telegram messaging app has finally agreed to register with new Russian Data Protection Laws, but its founder has assured that the company will not comply to share users' confidential data at any cost. Russia's communications watchdog Roskomnadzor had recently threatened to block Telegram if the service did not hand over information required to put the app on an official government list of information distributors. The Russian government requirement came following terrorists' suicide bombings that killed 15 people in Saint Petersburg in April in which terrorists allegedly used the Telegram 's app to communicate and plot attacks. "There is one demand, and it is simple: to fill in a form with information on the company that controls Telegram," said Alexander Zharov, head of Roskomnadzor.  "And to officially send it to Roskomnadzor to include this data in the registry of organizers...

A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Systemd , the popular init system and service manager for Linux operating systems, that could allow remote attackers to potentially trigger a buffer overflow to execute malicious code on the targeted machines via a DNS response. The vulnerability, designated as CVE-2017-9445 , actually resides in the ' dns_packet_new ' function of 'systemd-resolved,' a DNS response handler component that provides network name resolution to local applications. According to an advisory published Tuesday, a specially crafted malicious DNS response can crash 'systemd-resolved' program remotely when the system tries to lookup for a hostname on an attacker-controlled DNS service. Eventually, large DNS response overflows the buffer, allowing an attacker to overwrite the memory which leads to remote code execution. This means the attackers can remotely run any malware on the targeted system or server via their evil DNS service...

What if I say the Tuesday's devastating global malware outbreak was not due to any ransomware infection? Yes, the Petya ransomware attacks that began infecting computers in several countries, including Russia, Ukraine, France, India and the United States on Tuesday and demands $300 ransom was not designed with the intention of restoring the computers at all. According to a new analysis, the virus was designed to look like ransomware but was wiper malware that wipes computers outright, destroying all records from the targeted systems. Comae Technologies Founder Matt Suiche, who closely looked the operation of the malware, said after analyzing the virus, known as Petya, his team found that it was a " Wiper malware ," not ransomware. Security experts even believe the real attack has been disguised to divert world's attention from a state-sponsored attack on Ukraine to a malware outbreak. "We believe the ransomware was, in fact, a lure to control the...