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Another day, Another data breach disclosure. This time the popular commenting system has fallen victim to a massive security breach. Disqus, the company which provides a web-based comment plugin for websites and blogs, has admitted that it was breached 5 years ago in July 2012 and hackers stole details of more than 17.5 million users. The stolen data includes email addresses, usernames, sign-up dates, and last login dates in plain text for all 17.5 million users. What's more? Hackers also got their hands on passwords for about one-third of the affected users, which were salted and hashed using the weak SHA-1 algorithm. The company said the exposed user information dates back to 2007 with the most recently exposed from July 2012. According to Disqus, the company became aware of the breach Thursday (5th October) evening after an independent security researcher Troy Hunt, who obtained a copy of the site's information, notified the company. Within about 24 hours, ...

Do you know—United States Government has banned federal agencies from using Kaspersky antivirus software over spying fear? Though there's no solid evidence yet available, an article published by WSJ claims  that the Russian state-sponsored hackers stole highly classified NSA documents from a contractor in 2015 with the help of a security program made by Russia-based security firm Kaspersky Lab. Currently, there is no way to independently confirm if the claims on the popular security vendor published by the Wall Street Journal is accurate—and the story does not even prove the involvement of Kaspersky. "As a private company, Kaspersky Lab does not have inappropriate ties to any government, including Russia, and the only conclusion seems to be that Kaspersky Lab is caught in the middle of a geopolitical fight," Kaspersky said in a statement. The NSA contractor working with the American intelligence agency, whose identity has not yet been disclosed, reportedly do...

If you are an iPhone user and use Uber app, you would be surprised to know that widely popular ride-hailing app can record your screen secretly. Security researcher Will Strafach recently revealed that Apple selectively grants (what's known as an " entitlement ") Uber a powerful ability to use the newly introduced screen-recording API with intent to improve the performance of the Uber app on Apple Watch. The screen-recording API allows the Uber app to record user's screen information even when the app is closed, giving Uber access to all the personal information passing through an iPhone screen. What's more?  The company's access to such permission could make this data vulnerable to hackers if they, somehow, able to hijack Uber's software. "It looks like no other third-party developer has been able to get Apple to grant them a private sensitive entitlement of this nature," Strafach told Gizmodo , who first reported about the issue. ...

A severe programming error has been discovered in Apple's latest macOS High Sierra 10.13 that exposes passwords of encrypted Apple File System (APFS) volumes in plain text. Reported by Matheus Mariano, a Brazilian software developer, the vulnerability affects encrypted volumes using APFS wherein the password hint section is showing the actual password in the plain text. Yes, you got that right—your Mac mistakenly reveals the actual password instead of the password hint. In September, Apple released macOS High Sierra 10.13 with APFS (Apple File System) as the default file system for solid-state drives (SSDs) and other all-flash storage devices, promising strong encryption and better performance. Mariano discovered the security issue while he was using the Disk Utility in macOS High Sierra to add a new encrypted APFS volume to a container. When adding a new volume, he was asked to set a password and, optionally, write a hint for it. So, whenever the new volume is mounted, m...

It seems sophisticated hackers have changed the way they conduct targeted cyber operations—instead of investing in zero-days and developing their malware; some hacking groups have now started using ready-made malware just like script kiddies. Possibly, this could be a smart move for state-sponsored hackers to avoid being attributed easily. Security researchers from multiple security firms, including Arbor Networks and FireEye , independently discovered a series of malware campaigns primarily targeting aerospace, defence contractors and manufacturing sectors in various countries, including the United States, Thailand, South Korea and India. What's common? All these attack campaigns, conducted by various hacking groups, eventually install same information and password stealer malware—dubbed FormBook —on the targeted systems. FormBook is nothing but a " malware-as-as-service ," which is an affordable piece of data-stealing and form-grabbing malware that has been ...

A Greek court has approved the U.S. extradition of a 38-year-old Russian national accused of laundering more than $4 billion in bitcoin for culprits involved in hacking attacks, tax fraud and drug trafficking with the help of the now-defunct BTC-e exchange. Alexander Vinnik , an alleged operator of BTC-e—a digital currency exchange service that has been in operation since 2011 but seized by the authorities right after Vinnik's arrest in a beachside village in northern Greece in late July 2016 at the request of US law enforcement authorities. Since his arrest, Moscow has also requested Vinnik be returned home, as it has previously done with other Russian nationals wanted by the United States. However, the Greek court ruled Wednesday (4 October) to extradite Vinnik to the U.S., where he will face trial on the charges with the operation of an unlicensed money service business, money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transact...

The Apache Tomcat team has recently patched several security vulnerabilities in Apache Tomcat, one of which could allow an unauthorised attacker to execute malicious code on affected servers remotely. Apache Tomcat, developed by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), is an open source web server and servlet system, which uses several Java EE specifications like Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Expression Language, and WebSocket, and provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java concept to run in. Unlike Apache Struts2 vulnerabilities , which have recently been exploited to breach the systems of American credit reporting agency Equifax , Apache Tomcat flaws are less likely to be exploited. The critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2017-12617) discovered in Apache Tomcat is due to insufficient validation of user-supplied input by the affected software. Only systems with HTTP PUTs enabled (via setting the "read-only" initi...

Spain's National Court ruled on Tuesday to extradite a 36-year-old Russian computer programmer, accused by American authorities of malicious hacking offences, to the United States, according to a court document. Peter Yuryevich Levashov , also known as Peter Severa, was arrested in April this year when he was travelling with his family to Barcelona, Spain from his home in Russia—a country without an extradition treaty with the United States—for his role in a huge computer botnet. However, since Levashov has previously worked with for Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party for ten years, he fears that the US authorities would torture him for information about his political work if sent there to face the charges against him. " If I go to the U.S., I will die in a year. They want to get information of a military nature and about the United Russia party ," RIA news agency quoted Levashov as saying. " I will be tortured, within a year I will be killed, or I wil...

The largest known hack of user data in the history just got tripled in size. Yahoo, the internet company that's acquired by Verizon this year, now believes the total number of accounts compromised in the August 2013 data breach, which was disclosed in December last year, was not 1 billion—it's 3 Billion . Yes, the record-breaking Yahoo data breach affected every user on its service at the time. Late last year, Yahoo revealed the company had suffered a massive data breach in August 2013, which affected 1 billion user accounts . The 2013 hack exposed user account information, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of births, hashed passwords (using MD5), and, in some cases, "encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers," Yahoo said in 2016. At that time, Yahoo did confirm that hackers did not obtain bank account details or credit card information tied to the Yahoo accounts. The data breach was attributed to state-sponsored ...

Etherparty announced Sunday that its ICO (Initial Coin Offering) website selling tokens for a blockchain-based smart contract tool was hacked and the address for sending funds to buy tokens was replaced by a fraudulent address controlled by the hackers. Vancouver-based Etherparty is a smart contract creation tool that allows its users to create smart contracts on the blockchain. Companies like this launch ICO to let them raise funding from multiple sources. Etherparty said the company launched its Fuel token sale on Sunday, October 1 at 9 A.M. PDT, but just 45 minutes, some unknown attackers hacked into its ICO website and replaced the legitimate address by their own, redirecting cryptocurrencies sent by investors into their digital wallet. According to the details released by the Etherparty team, the company detected the hack after just 15 minutes and immediately took its website down for nearly one and half hour to fix the issue, preventing more people from sending funds to ...

Security researchers have discovered not one or two, but a total of seven security vulnerabilities in the popular open source Dnsmasq network services software, three of which could allow remote code execution on a vulnerable system and hijack it. Dnsmasq is a widely used lightweight network application tool designed to provide DNS (Domain Name System) forwarder, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server, router ads and network boot services for small networks. Dnsmasq comes pre-installed on various devices and operating systems, including Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian, home routers, smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A shodan scan for "Dnsmasq" reveals around 1.1 million instances worldwide. Recently, Google's security team reviewed Dnsmasq and discovered seven security issues, including DNS-related remote code execution, information disclosure, and denial-of-service (DoS) issues that can be triggered via DNS or DHCP. ...