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Remember " Crackas With Attitude "? The hacking group behind a series of embarrassing hacks that targeted personal email accounts of senior officials at the FBI, the CIA, and the White House, among other United States federal agencies in 2015. A member of Crackas With Attitude , who was arrested last year in September, has now been sentenced to five years in federal prison. Justin Liverman, a 25-year-old man from Morehead City, who was known under the online alias "D3F4ULT," was arrested last year along with another member of the group—Andrew Otto Boggs, 23, of North Wilkesboro, who allegedly used the handle "INCURSIO." The duo hacked into multiple government organizations between October 2015 and February 2016. Boggs was sentenced to two years in prison on June 30, 2017, for his role. Liverman pleaded guilty on January 6 this year to conspiracy to hack U.S. government computers and accounts and was sentenced to 5 years in prison on Friday. ...

Equifax has suffered one of the largest data breaches in history that has left highly sensitive data of as many as 143 million people —that's nearly half of the US population—in the hands of hackers. Based on the company's investigation, some unknown hackers managed to exploit a security flaw on the Equifax website and gained unauthorized access to certain files between mid-May and July 2017. The information accessed primarily include full names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and, in some cases, driver's license numbers—most of the information that's banks, insurance companies, and other businesses use to confirm a consumer identity. The company added that 209,000 credit card numbers were also obtained by the attackers, along with "certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers." Equifax is one of the three major organizations in the United States that calculates credit scor...

The Shadow Brokers , a notorious hacking group that leaked several hacking tools from the NSA, is once again making headlines for releasing another NSA exploit—but only to its "monthly dump service" subscribers. Dubbed UNITEDRAKE , the implant is a "fully extensible remote collection system" that comes with a number of "plug-ins," enabling attackers to remotely take full control over targeted Windows computers. In its latest post, the hacking group announced a few changes to its monthly dump service and released encrypted files from the previous months as well. Notably, the September dump also includes an unencrypted PDF file, which is a user manual for the UNITEDRAKE (United Rake) exploit developed by the NSA. According to the leaked user manual, UNITEDRAKE is a customizable modular malware with the ability to capture webcam and microphone output, log keystrokes, access external drives and more in order to spy on its targets. The tool c...

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...

It's ironic—the company that offers credit monitoring and ID theft protection solutions has itself been compromised, exposing personal information of as many as 143 million Americans—that's almost half the country. Equifax, one of the three largest credit reporting firm in the United States, admitted today that it had suffered a massive data breach somewhere between mid-May and July this year, which it actually discovered on July 29—that means the data of 143 million people were exposed for over 3 months. However, it's unknown why Equifax waited 6 weeks before informing their millions of affected customers about the massive security breach. Based on Equifax's investigation, unknown hackers exploited a security vulnerability on its website to gain unauthorized access to certain files. Stolen data includes consumers' names, Social Security numbers, and birth dates for 143 million Americans, and in some instances, driving licence numbers and credit card n...

Germany's democracy is in danger, as the upcoming federal elections in the country, where nearly 61.5 million citizens are going to vote on September 24th, could be hijacked. Hackers have disclosed how to hack the German voting software to tamper with votes and alter the outcome of an election. Yes, election hacking is no theory—it is happening. A team of researchers from German hacking group Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has discovered several critical vulnerabilities in PC-Wahl—software used to capture, tabulate and transfer the votes from local polling centres to the state level during all parliamentary elections for decades. According to the CCC analysis, vulnerabilities could lead to multiple practicable attack scenarios that eventually allow malicious agents in the electoral office to change total vote counts. Critical Flaws Found In German Voting-Software The hacker collective found that the automatic software update module of PC-Wahl downloads packages over in...

The notorious hacking group that has been in operation since at least 2011 has re-emerged and is still interested in targeting the United States and European companies in the energy sector. Yes, I am talking about the ' Dragonfly ,' a well-resourced, Eastern European hacking group responsible for sophisticated cyber-espionage campaigns against the critical infrastructure of energy companies in different countries in past years. In 2014, we reported about the Dragonfly groups ability to mount sabotage operations against their targets—mainly petroleum pipeline operators, electricity generation firms and other Industrial Control Systems (ICS) equipment providers for the energy sector. Researchers from cyber security firm Symantec who discovered the previous campaign is now warning of a new campaign, which they dubbed Dragonfly 2.0 , saying "the group now potentially has the ability to sabotage or gain control of these systems should it decide to do so" and has ...

Every week since March Wikileaks has been leaking secrets from the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which mainly focus on surveillance techniques and hacking tools employed by its agents. However this time, the whistleblower organisation has released something different from its previous Vault 7 leaks , because it's not about hacking and spying; instead, it's a—Missile Control System. Dubbed Project Protego , the PIC-based missile control system is installed on-board a Pratt and Whitney Aircraft (PWA) equipped with missile launch system, which gives it ability to hit air-to-air and air-to-ground targets. The latest leak contains four secret documents in total from the project Protego, along with "37 related documents (proprietary hardware/software manuals from Microchip Technology Inc)," WikiLeaks says. Leaked documents reveal system design, a guide on how to configure and build Protego images, and also suggest that all micro-controller un...

What if your smartphone starts making calls, sending text messages, and browsing malicious websites on the Internet itself without even asking you? This is no imaginations, as hackers can make this possible using your smartphone's personal assistant like Siri or Google Now. A team of security researchers from China's Zhejiang University have discovered a clever way of activating your voice recognition systems without speaking a word by exploiting a security vulnerability that is apparently common across all major voice assistants. DolphinAttack (Demo): How It Works Dubbed DolphinAttack , the attack technique works by feeding the AI assistants commands in ultrasonic frequencies, which are too high for humans to hear but are perfectly audible to the microphones on your smart devices. With this technique, cyber criminals can "silently" whisper commands into your smartphones to hijack Siri and Alexa, and could force them to open malicious websites and even ...

Nothing is free in this world. If you are searching for free ready-made hacking tools on the Internet, then beware—most freely available tools, claiming to be the swiss army knife for hackers, are nothing but a hoax. Last year, we reported about one such Facebook hacking tool that actually had the capability to hack a Facebook account, but yours and not the one you desire to hack. Now, a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) builder kit that was recently spotted on multiple underground hacking forums for free found containing a backdoored module that aims to provide the kit's authors access to all of the victim's data. Dubbed Cobian RAT , the malware has been in circulation since February of this year and has some similarities with the njRAT and H-Worm family of malware, which has been around since at least 2013. According to ThreatLabZ researchers from Zscaler, who discovered the backdoored nature of the malware kit, the "free malware builder" is likely capable of...

It's been close to five years since we last looked at Incapsula , a security-focused CDN service known for its DDoS mitigation and web application security features. As one would expect, during these five years the company has expanded and improved, introducing lots of new features and even several new products. Most recently, Incapsula underwent an extensive network expansion that includes new PoPs in Asia including two new data centers in New Delhi and Mumbai. This seems like an excellent opportunity to revisit the service and see how it has evolved. Acquisition, Award and Growth Before we jump into Incapsula's service upgrades, we want to mention the changes in the company itself briefly. The most notable of those is Incapsula's 2014 acquisition by Imperva—an authority in web application security and a four-time Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for web application firewalls. The acquisition boosted Incapsula's security capabilities, resulting in its own cloud...

Security researchers have discovered several severe zero-day vulnerabilities in the mobile bootloaders from at least four popular device manufacturers that could allow an attacker to gain persistent root access on the device. A team of nine security researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara created a special static binary tool called BootStomp that automatically detects security vulnerabilities in bootloaders. Since bootloaders are usually closed source and hard to reverse-engineer, performing analysis on them is difficult, especially because hardware dependencies hinder dynamic analysis. Therefore, the researchers created BootStomp, which "uses a novel combination of static analysis techniques and underconstrained symbolic execution to build a multi-tag taint analysis capable of identifying bootloader vulnerabilities." The tool helped the researchers discover six previously-unknown critical security bugs across bootloaders from HiSilicon (Huawe...

Security researchers have discovered a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework, allowing a remote attacker to run malicious code on the affected servers. Apache Struts is a free, open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for developing web applications in the Java programming language, which supports REST, AJAX, and JSON. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-9805) is a programming blunder that resides in the way Struts processes data from an untrusted source. Specifically, Struts REST plugin fails to handle XML payloads while deserializing them properly. All versions of Apache Struts since 2008 (Struts 2.1.2 - Struts 2.3.33, Struts 2.5 - Struts 2.5.12) are affected, leaving all web applications using the framework's REST plugin vulnerable to remote attackers. According to one of the security researchers at LGTM, who discovered this flaw, the Struts framework is being used by "an incredibly large number and va...