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Researchers have demonstrated how sonic and ultrasonic signals (inaudible to human) can be used to cause physical damage to hard drives just by playing ultrasonic sounds through a target computer's own built-in speaker or by exploiting a speaker near the targeted device. Similar research was conducted last year by a group of researchers from Princeton and Purdue University, who demonstrated a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against HDDs by exploiting a physical phenomenon called acoustic resonance. Since HDDs are exposed to external vibrations, researchers showed how specially crafted acoustic signals could cause significant vibrations in HDDs internal components, which eventually leads to the failure in systems that relies on the HDD. To prevent a head crash from acoustic resonance, modern HDDs use shock sensor-driven feedforward controllers that detect such movement and improve the head positioning accuracy while reading and writing the data. However, according to a ne...

The US-CERT has released a joint technical alert from the DHS and the FBI, warning about two newly identified malware being used by the prolific North Korean APT hacking group known as Hidden Cobra. Hidden Cobra, often known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by the North Korean government and known to launch attacks against media organizations, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The group was even associated with the WannaCry ransomware menace that last year shut down hospitals and businesses worldwide. It is reportedly also linked to the 2014 Sony Pictures hack , as well as the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016. Now, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI have uncovered two new pieces of malware that Hidden Cobra has been using since at least 2009 to target companies working in the media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The malware Hidden Cobra is...

Russia's communications regulator Roskomnadzor has threatened Apple to face the consequences if the company does not remove secure messaging app Telegram from its App Store. Back in April, the Russian government banned Telegram in the country for the company's refusal to hand over private encryption keys to Russian state security services to access messages sent using the secure service. However, so far, the Telegram app is still available in the Russian version of Apple's App Store. So in an effort to entirely ban Telegram, state watchdog Roskomnadzor reportedly sent a legally binding letter to Apple asking it to remove the app from its Russian App Store and block it from sending push notifications to local users who have already downloaded the app. Roskomnadzor's director Alexander Zharov said he is giving the company one month to remove the Telegram app from its App Store before the regulator enforces punishment for violations. For those unfamiliar with...

A 23-year-old Canadian man, who pleaded guilty last year for his role in helping Russian government spies hack into email accounts of Yahoo users and other services, has been sentenced to five years in prison. Karim Baratov (a.k.a Karim Taloverov, a.k.a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov), a Kazakhstan-born Canadian citizen, was also ordered on Tuesday by United States Judge Vince Chhabria to pay a fine of $250,000. Baratov had previously admitted his role in the 2014 Yahoo data breach that compromised about 500 million Yahoo user accounts. His role was to "hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to the FSB," Russia's spy agency. In November, Baratov pleaded guilty to a total of nine counts, including one count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and eight counts of aggravated identity theft. According to the US Justice Department, Baratov and his co-defendant hacker Alexsey Belan worked for two agents—Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushch...

Security researchers have discovered a series of new vulnerabilities in EOS blockchain platform, one of which could allow remote hackers to take complete control over the node servers running the critical blockchain-based applications. EOS is an open source smart contract platform, known as 'Blockchain 3.0,' that allows developers to build decentralized applications over blockchain infrastructure, just like Ethereum. Discovered by Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360 —Yuki Chen of Vulcan team and Zhiniang Peng of Core security team—the vulnerability is a buffer out-of-bounds write issue which resides in the function used by nodes server to parse contracts. To achieve remote code execution on a targeted node, all an attacker needs to do is upload a maliciously crafted WASM file (a smart contract) written in WebAssembly to the server. As soon as the vulnerable process parser reads the WASM file, the malicious payload gets executed on the node, which could then al...

German security researchers claim to have found a new practical attack against virtual machines (VMs) protected using AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology that could allow attackers to recover plaintext memory data from guest VMs. AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology, which comes with EPYC line of processors, is a hardware feature that encrypts the memory of each VM in a way that only the guest itself can access the data, protecting it from other VMs/containers and even from an untrusted hypervisor. Discovered by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security in Munich, the page-fault side channel attack, dubbed SEVered, takes advantage of lack in the integrity protection of the page-wise encryption of the main memory, allowing a malicious hypervisor to extract the full content of the main memory in plaintext from SEV-encrypted VMs. Here's the outline of the SEVered attack, as briefed in the paper :...

Researchers have found that even after having an advanced encryption scheme in place, more than 100 million Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices from thousands of vendors are vulnerable to a downgrade attack that could allow attackers to gain unauthorized access to your devices. The issue resides in the implementation of Z-Wave protocol —a wireless, radio frequency (RF) based communications technology that is primarily being used by home automation devices to communicate with each other. Z-Wave protocol has been designed to offer an easy process to set up pairing and remotely control appliances—such as lighting control, security systems, thermostats, windows, locks, swimming pools and garage door openers—over a distance of up to 100 meters (330 feet). The latest security standard for Z-Wave, called S2 security framework, uses an advanced key exchange mechanism, i.e., Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) anonymous key agreement protocol, to share unique network keys between the con...

Pornhub wants you to keep your porn viewing activities private, and it is ready to help you out with its all-new safety and privacy free VPN service. Yes, you heard that right. Adult entertainment giant Pornhub that allows porn videos download has launched its very own free VPN service today with "unlimited bandwidth" to help you keep prying eyes away from your browsing activity. Dubbed VPNhub, the VPN service by Porn Hub and developed by AppAtomic, is available for both mobile as well as desktop platform, including Android, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. VPN, or Virtual Private Network, hides IP address, allows users to transmit data anonymously, avoids ISP-level website blocking or tracking and keeps your internet connections ans browsing activity private by encrypting your data, even when you are on public Wi-Fi connections. Isn't it the great reason to use a VPN? Of course, Yes. Pornhub App Launches Fast VPN Service Like Hotspot shield and others, Pornhub...

Apple is making it easier for its users to download their data the company has collected about them so far. On Wednesday, Apple just launched a new Data and Privacy website that allows you to download everything that the company knows about you, from Apple ID info, device info, App Store activity, AppleCare history, your online shopping habits to all of your data stored in its iCloud. A similar feature was recently offered by Facebook, enabling its users to download all of their data , not only what they have posted, but also information like facial recognition and location data, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal . Apple has currently made this feature only available for people having accounts in European Union (along with Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland), to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) act, which goes into effect on May 25. However, Apple is planning to roll out this feature worldwide in the coming months. "We inten...

Shortly after Cisco's released its early report on a large-scale hacking campaign that infected over half a million routers and network storage devices worldwide, the United States government announced the takedown of a key internet domain used for the attack. Yesterday we reported about a piece of highly sophisticated IoT botnet malware that infected over 500,000 devices  in 54 countries and likely been designed by Russia-baked state-sponsored group in a possible effort to cause havoc in Ukraine, according to an early report published by Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence unit on Wednesday. Dubbed VPNFilter by the Talos researchers, the malware is a multi-stage, modular platform that targets small and home offices (SOHO) routers and storage devices from Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link, as well as network-access storage (NAS) devices. Meanwhile, the court documents unsealed in Pittsburgh on the same day indicate that the FBI has seized a key web domain communic...

More than half a million routers and storage devices in dozens of countries have been infected with a piece of highly sophisticated IoT botnet malware, likely designed by Russia-baked state-sponsored group. Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence unit have discovered an advanced piece of IoT botnet malware, dubbed VPNFilter , that has been designed with versatile capabilities to gather intelligence, interfere with internet communications, as well as conduct destructive cyber attack operations. The malware has already infected over 500,000 devices in at least 54 countries, most of which are small and home offices routers and internet-connected storage devices from Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link. Some network-attached storage (NAS) devices known to have been targeted as well. VPNFilter is a multi-stage, modular malware that can steal website credentials and monitor industrial controls or SCADA systems, such as those used in electric grids, other infrastructure and factori...

Even after being aware of various active cyber attacks against the GPON Wi-Fi routers, if you haven't yet taken them off the Internet, then be careful—because a new botnet has joined the GPON party, which is exploiting an undisclosed zero-day vulnerability in the wild. Security researchers from Qihoo 360 Netlab have warned of at least one botnet operator exploiting a new zero-day vulnerability in the Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers, manufactured by South Korea-based DASAN Zhone Solutions. The botnet, dubbed TheMoon, which was first seen in 2014 and has added at least 6 IoT device exploits to its successor versions since 2017, now exploits a newly undisclosed zero-day flaw for Dasan GPON routers. Netlab researchers successfully tested the new attack payload on two different versions of GPON home router, though they didn't disclose details of the payload or release any further details of the new zero-day vulnerability to prevent more attacks. Th...