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The Game of Thrones hacking saga continues, but this time it's the HBO's and GOT's official Twitter and Facebook accounts got compromised, rather than upcoming episodes. As if the leak of episodes by hackers and the accidental airing of an upcoming episode of Game of Thrones by HBO itself were not enough, a notorious group of hackers took over the official Twitter and Facebook accounts for HBO as well as Game of Thrones Wednesday night. The hacker group from Saudi Arabia, dubbed OurMine , claimed responsibility for the hack, posting a message on both HBO's official Twitter and Facebook accounts, which read: "Hi, OurMine are here, we are just testing your security, HBO team, please contact us to upgrade the security," followed by a contact link for the group. This message was followed by another one, wherein hackers asked people to make the hashtag #HBOhacked trending on Twitter, which it did. Ourmine is the same group of hackers from Saudi Arabia ...

HBO doesn't need hackers to leak its widely watched " Game of Thrones " episodes, as it is sufficient enough to leak them by its own. In what seems to be a terrible blunder, HBO Spain appeared to have accidentally broadcast the next episode— Episode 6 —of Game of Thrones season 7 five days before its official premiere. And as expected, the GoT episode 6 quickly began circulating online. HBO has recently been facing trouble from a hacker or group of hackers who claimed to have obtained nearly 1.5 terabytes of information from the entertainment company. Late last month, the unknown hackers dropped upcoming episodes of "Ballers" as well as "Room 104," along with a script of the fourth episode of "Game of Thrones" on the internet. The leak was followed by another dump of a half-gigabyte sample of stolen HBO data, including HBO's emails, employment agreements, and balance sheets, along with the script of the upcoming Game of Thro...

A former the United States Secret Service agent who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoins during an investigation into then-largest underground marketplace Silk Road has now pleaded guilty to money laundering. Shaun W. Bridges is one of two former US undercover agents who pleaded guilty in 2015 to one count of money laundering and one count of obstruction and was sentenced in December same year to almost six years in prison for stealing over $800,000 in Bitcoin while investigating Silk Road. 35-years-old Bridges, who had been a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service for almost 6 years, along with his partner stole money from Silk Road accounts and framed someone else for the laundering, which even led the Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht to plan a murder. Ulbricht was convicted in February 2015 of running the Silk Road underground black market and is now serving life in prison sentence . According to the Department of Justice, Bridges is believed to...

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...

Google's Chrome web browser Extensions are under attack with a series of developers being hacked within last one month. Almost two weeks ago, we reported how unknown attackers managed to compromise the Chrome Web Store account of a developer team and hijacked Copyfish extension , and then modified it to distribute spam correspondence to users. Just two days after that incident, some unknown attackers then hijacked another popular extension ' Web Developer ' and then updated it to directly inject advertisements into the web browser of over its 1 million users. After Chris Pederick, the creator of 'Web Developer' Chrome extension that offers various web development tools to its users, reported to Proofpoint that his extension had been compromised, the security vendor analysed the issue and found further add-ons in the Chrome Store that had also been altered. According to the latest report published by the researchers at Proofpoint on Monday, the expanded ...

Cyber criminals are becoming more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. They are now adopting more clandestine techniques that come with limitless attack vectors and are harder to detect. Recently, cyber crooks managed to infiltrate the update mechanism for a popular server management software package and altered it to include an advanced backdoor, which lasts for at least 17 days until researchers discovered it. Dubbed ShadowPad , the secret backdoor gave attackers complete control over networks hidden behind legit cryptographically signed software sold by NetSarang —used by hundreds of banks, media firms, energy companies, and pharmaceutical firms, telecommunication providers, transportation and logistics and other industries—for 17 days starting last month. Important Note — If you are using any of the affected product (listed below), we highly recommend you stop using it until you update them. Hacker Injected Backdoor Through Software Update Mechani...

More features, more problems! Today, we are living in a digital age that is creating a digital headache for people by connecting every other unnecessary home appliance to the Internet. Last week, nearly hundreds of Internet-connected locks became inoperable after a faulty software update hit some models. Users of remotely accessible smart locks made by Colorado-based company LockState have taken to social media platforms including Twitter to complain that their $469 Lockstate 6000i locks started to fail from last Monday, leaving the keypad entirely useless. LockState's RemoteLock 6i (6000i) is an Internet-connected smart lock that connects to your home Wi-Fi network for remote control and monitoring as well as firmware updates. LockState is even a partner with Airbnb, allowing Airbnb hosts' to give their guests entry code in order to get into hotel properties without having to share physical keys. However, last week many Airbnb customers were unable to use the bu...

Ransomware has been around for a few years but has become an albatross around everyone's neck—from big businesses and financial institutions to hospitals and individuals worldwide—with cyber criminals making millions of dollars. In just past few months, we saw a scary strain of ransomware attacks including WannaCry , Petya and LeakerLocker , which made chaos worldwide by shutting down hospitals, vehicle manufacturing, telecommunications, banks and many businesses. Before WannaCry and Petya , the infamous Mamba full-disk-encrypting ransomware and the Locky ransomware had made chaos across the world last year, and the bad news is—they are back with their new and more damaging variants than ever before. Diablo6: New Variant of Locky Ransomware First surfaced in early 2016, Locky has been one of the largest distributed ransomware infections, infecting organisations across the globe. By tricking victims into clicking on a malicious attachment, Locky ransomware encrypt...

A few months back we reported how opening a simple MS Word file could compromise your computer using a critical vulnerability in Microsoft Office . The Microsoft Office remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2017-0199) resided in the Windows Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) interface for which a patch was issued in April this year, but threat actors are still abusing the flaw through the different mediums. Security researchers have spotted a new malware campaign that is leveraging the same exploit, but for the first time, hidden behind a specially crafted PowerPoint (PPSX) Presentation file. According to the researchers at Trend Micro, who spotted the malware campaign, the targeted attack starts with a convincing spear-phishing email attachment, purportedly from a cable manufacturing provider and mainly targets companies involved in the electronics manufacturing industry. Researchers believe this attack involves the use of a sender address disguised as a legitimate ema...

Phishing — is an older style of cyber-attack but remains one of the most common and efficient attack vectors for attackers, as a majority of banking malware and various ransomware attacks begin with a user clicking on a malicious link or opening a dangerous attachment in an email. Phishing has evolved than ever before in the past few years – which is why it remains one of those threats that we have been combating for many years. We have seen phishing campaigns that are so convincing and effective that even tech-savvy people can be tricked into giving away their credentials to hackers. And some that are " almost impossible to detect " and used to trick even the most careful users on the Internet. To help combat this issue, Google has introduced a security defence for it's over a billion users that will help users weed out phishing emails from their Gmail inbox. Google has rolled out new anti-phishing security checks for its Gmail app for iPhone users that will...

The Chinese market is no doubt a pot of gold for big technology giants with over 700 million internet users, but the Chinese government heavily controls the Internet within its borders through its Golden Shield project – the Great Firewall of China . The Great Firewall has blocked some 171 out of the world's leading websites, including Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and The Pirate Bay in the country. But tech giants like Facebook and Google always try alternative ways to infiltrate the market. Now it seems like Facebook is trying to secretly enter the largest populous market by releasing an all new social networking app in China that does not carry its brand. Dubbed Colorful Balloons , the photo-sharing app appears to mimic the look and feel of Facebook's Moments, an app that allows its users to share photos with their friends and family members. According to The New York Times, Facebook approved the release of Colorful Balloons back in M...

One of the most devastating aspects of the recent WannaCry ransomware attack was its self-propagating capability exploiting a vulnerability in the file access protocol, SMB v1. Most enterprises defences are externally-facing, focused on stopping incoming email and web attacks. But, once attackers gain a foothold inside the network through malware, there are very few security controls that would prevent the spread of the attack between enterprise locations in the Wide Area Network (WAN). This is partly due to the way enterprises deploy security tools, such as IPS appliances, and the effort needed to maintain those tools across multiple locations. It's for those reasons Cato Networks recently introduced a context-aware Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) as part of its secure SD-WAN service . There are several highlights in this announcement that challenge the basic concept of how IT security maintains an IPS device and sustains the effectiveness of its protection. Cato Network...

A growing number of enterprises are showing their interest in blockchains , but the underlying software fails to meet key enterprise requirements like performance, confidentiality, governance, and required processing power. However, Microsoft wants to help solve these issues and make it easier for the enterprises to build their networks using any distributed ledger. Microsoft has unveiled a framework called " Coco " — short for " Confidential Consortium " — a new open-source foundation for enterprise blockchain networks . Coco is an Ethereum-based protocol which has been designed to help commercial companies and large-scale enterprises process information on the Ethereum Blockchain with increased privacy. "Coco presents an alternative approach to Ledger construction, giving enterprises the scalability, distributed governance and enhanced confidentiality they need without sacrificing the inherent security and immutability they expect," Mark Russi...