The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Can you get hacked just by clicking on a malicious link or opening a website? — YES . Microsoft has just released its April month's Patch Tuesday security updates, which addresses multiple critical vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other products, five of which could allow an attacker to hack your computer by just tricking you visit a website. Microsoft has patched five critical vulnerabilities in Windows Graphics Component that reside due to improper handling of embedded fonts by the Windows font library and affects all versions of Windows operating systems to date, including Windows 10 / 8.1 / RT 8.1 / 7, Windows Server 2008 / 2012 / 2016. An attacker can exploit these issues by tricking an unsuspecting user to open a malicious file or a specially crafted website with the malicious font, which if open in a web browser, would hand over control of the affected system to the attacker. All these five vulnerabilities in Windows Microsoft Graphics were dis...

Facebook pays millions of dollars every year to researchers and bug hunters to stamp out security holes in its products and infrastructure, but following Cambridge Analytica scandal , the company today launched a bounty program to reward users for reporting "data abuse" on its platform. The move comes as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before Congress this week amid scrutiny over the data sharing controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm that obtained and misused data on potentially 87 million of its users . Through its new " Data Abuse Bounty " program, Facebook would ask users to help the social media giant find app developers misusing data, Facebook announced Tuesday. Similar to its existing bug bounty program, the Data Abuse Bounty program will reward a sum of money to anyone who reports valid events of data collection that violate Facebook's revamped data policies . "This program is complemen...

A serious vulnerability has been exposed in "emergency alert systems" that could be exploited remotely via radio frequencies to activate all the sirens, allowing hackers to trigger false alarms. The emergency alert sirens are used worldwide to alert citizens about natural disasters, man-made disasters, and emergency situations, such as dangerous weather conditions, severe storms, tornadoes and terrorist attacks. False alarms can create panic and chaos across the city, as witnessed in Dallas last year , when 156 emergency sirens were turned on for about two hours, waking up residents and sparking fears of a disaster. Dubbed " SirenJack Attack ," the vulnerability discovered by a researcher at Bastille security firm affects warning sirens manufactured by Boston-based ATI Systems, which are being used across major towns and cities, as well as Universities, military facilities, and industrial sites. According to Balint Seeber, director of threat research at...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress this week to explain how his company collects and handles users' personal information. The past few weeks have been difficult for Facebook over concerns that the data of millions of users has been breached. Facebook stores details of almost every action you have taken and interaction you have engaged in on its platform. What many Facebook users are unaware of, though, is that you can easily download and see all the information Facebook has collected from you in just a few minutes. Here's how to find out what data Facebook has collected over time, including all your past posts, messages, photos, videos and more. Here's how to Download Your Facebook Data: First, sign into Facebook (on a desktop browser, not your mobile). Then, click the drop-down arrow on the top right, and click on "Settings." This will take you to facebook.com/settings, where you will find your "General Account Set...

A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault application that could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the system with the privileges of the web application. Enterprise password manager (EPV) solutions help organizations securely manage their sensitive passwords, controlling privileged accounts passwords across a wide range of client/server and mainframe operating systems, switches, databases, and keep them safe from external attackers, as well as malicious insiders. Discovered by German cybersecurity firm RedTeam Pentesting GmbH, the vulnerability affects one of such Enterprise Password Vault apps designed by CyberArk—a password management and security tool that manages sensitive passwords and controls privileged accounts. The vulnerability (CVE-2018-9843) resides in CyberArk Password Vault Web Access, a .NET web application created by the company to help its customers access their accounts remotely. ...

Since last week, a new hacking group, calling itself ' JHT ,' hijacked a significant number of Cisco devices belonging to organizations in Russia and Iran, and left a message that reads—" Do not mess with our elections " with an American flag (in ASCII art). MJ Azari Jahromi, Iranian Communication and Information Technology Minister, said the campaign impacted approximately 3,500 network switches in Iran, though a majority of them were already restored. The hacking group is reportedly targeting vulnerable installations of Cisco Smart Install Client, a legacy plug-and-play utility designed to help administrators configure and deploy Cisco equipments remotely, which is enabled by default on Cisco IOS and IOS XE switches and runs over TCP port 4786. Some researchers believe the attack involves a recently disclosed remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2018-0171 ) in Cisco Smart Install Client that could allow attackers to take full control of the network ...

A critical authentication bypass vulnerability has been discovered in one of the biggest identity-as-a-service platform Auth0 that could have allowed a malicious attacker to access any portal or application, which are using Auth0 service for authentication. Auth0 offers token-based authentication solutions for a number of platforms including the ability to integrate social media authentication into an application. With over 2000 enterprise customers and managing 42 million logins every day and billions of login per month, Auth0 is one of the biggest identity platforms. While pentesting an application back in September 2017, researchers from security firm Cinta Infinita discovered a flaw ( CVE-2018-6873 ) in Auth0's Legacy Lock API , which resides due to improper validation of the JSON Web Tokens (JWT) audience parameter. Researchers successfully exploited this issue to bypass login authentication using a simple cross-site request forgery (CSRF/XSRF) attack against the...

Over 130,000 Finnish citizens have had their credentials compromised in what appears to be third largest data breach ever faced by the country, local media reports . Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) is warning users of a large-scale data breach in a website maintained by the New Business Center in Helsinki ("Helsingin Uusyrityskeskus"), a company that provides business advice to entrepreneurs and help them create right business plans. Unknown attackers managed to hack the website ( https://liiketoimintasuunnitelma.com ) and stole over 130,000 users' login usernames and passwords, which were stored on the site in plain-text without using any cryptographic hash. Right after knowing of the breach on 3rd April, the company took down the affected website, which is currently showing "under maintenance" notice with a press release about the incident on its homepage. "We are very sorry for all the people who have been subjected to crime a...

Ransomware has been around for a few years, but it has become an albatross around everyone's neck, targeting big businesses, hospitals, financial institutions and individuals worldwide and extorting millions of dollars. Last year, we saw some major ransomware outbreaks, including WannaCry  and  NotPetya , which wreaked havoc across the world, hitting hundreds of thousands of computers and business networks worldwide. From small to mid-range businesses, Microsoft Office 365 remains the most widely used and fastest-growing work office suite, so it's no surprise that it has become a primary target for viruses, ransomware, and phishing scams. In fact, most strains of ransomware target Microsoft productivity apps such as Word, Excel and encrypt sensitive data to hold the company hostage until the ransom is paid. Now, to combat such cyber attacks, Microsoft has announced some new security features for Office 365 that can help users mitigate the damage done by ransomware ...

Security researchers have discovered three vulnerabilities in the Spring Development Framework, one of which is a critical remote code execution flaw that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code against applications built with it. Spring Framework is a popular, lightweight and an open source framework for developing Java-based enterprise applications. In an advisory released today by Pivotal, the company detailed following three vulnerabilities discovered in Spring Framework versions 5.0 to 5.0.4, 4.3 to 4.3.14, and older unsupported versions: Critical : Remote Code Execution with spring-messaging (CVE-2018-1270) High : Directory Traversal with Spring MVC on Windows (CVE-2018-1271) Low : Multipart Content Pollution with Spring Framework (CVE-2018-1272) Vulnerable Spring Framework versions expose STOMP clients over WebSocket endpoints with an in-memory STOMP broker through the 'spring-messaging' module, which could allow an attacker to send a mali...

One of the biggest and most popular multi-antivirus scanning engine service has today launched a new Android sandbox service, dubbed VirusTotal Droidy , to help security researchers detect malicious apps based on behavioral analysis. VirusTotal, owned by Google, is a free online service that allows anyone to upload files to check them for viruses against dozens of antivirus engines simultaneously. Android Sandbox performs both static and dynamic analysis to automatically detect suspicious applications by executing and monitoring applications in a simulated Android OS environment. Behavioral reports for Android applications (APKs) is not new to VirusTotal, as the website already had service since 2013 that worked based on Cuckoo Sandbox , an open source automated malware analysis system. Replacing this existing system, VirusTotal Droidy has been integrated in the context of the multi-sandbox project and can extract "juicy" details, such as: Network communicatio...

Facebook dropped another bombshell on its users by admitting that all of its 2.2 billion users should assume malicious third-party scrapers have compromised their public profile information. On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that "malicious actors" took advantage of "Search" tools on its platform to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide. The revelation once again underlines the failure of the social-media giant to protect users' privacy while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information. The revelation came weeks after the disclosure of the Cambridge Analytica scandal , wherein personal data of 77 million users was improperly gathered and misused by the political consultancy firm, who reportedly also helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. However, the latest scam revealed by the social media giant about the abuse of Facebook's search tools over the...