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Brace yourself guys. Microsoft is going to release its Windows Defender ATP antivirus software for Mac computers. Sounds crazy, right? But it's true. Microsoft Thursday announced that the company is bringing its anti-malware software to Apple's macOS operating system as well—and to more platforms soon, like Linux. As a result, the technology giant renamed its Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) in an attempt to minimize name-confusion and reflect the cross-platform nature of the software suite. But wait, does your Macbook need antivirus protection? Of course! For all those wondering if Mac even gets viruses—macOS is generally more secure than Windows, but in recent years cybercriminals have started paying attention to the Mac platform, making it a new target for viruses, Trojans, spyware, adware, ransomware, backdoors, and other nefarious applications. Moreover, hackers have been successful many ti...

Holy moly, Facebook is again at the center of a new privacy controversy after revealing today that its platform mistakenly kept a copy of passwords for "hundreds of millions" users in plaintext. What's more? Not just Facebook, Instagram users are also affected by the latest security incident. So, if you are one of the affected users, your Facebook or Instagram password was readable to some of the Facebook engineers who have internal access to the servers and the database. Though the social media company did not mention exactly what component or application on its website had the programmatic error that caused the issue, it did reveal that the company discovered the security blunder in January this year during a routine security check. In a blog post published today, Facebook's vice president of engineering Pedro Canahuati said an internal investigation of the incident found no evidence of any Facebook employee abusing those passwords. "To be clear, t...

Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of two newly identified Magecart attacks targeting online shoppers of bedding retailers MyPillow and Amerisleep . Magecart is an umbrella term researchers gave to at least 11 different hacking groups that are specialized in implanting malware code on e-commerce websites with an intent to steal payment card details of their customers silently. Magecart made headlines last year after attackers conducted several high-profile cyber attacks against major international companies including British Airways , Ticketmaster , and Newegg . Magecart hackers use a digital payment card skimmer, a few lines of malicious Javascript code they insert into the checkout page of hacked websites and designed to captured payment information of customers in real time and then send it to a remote attacker-controlled server. Earlier this year, Magecart attackers also compromised nearly 277 e-commerce websites in a supply-chain attack by inserting its...

The popular SSH client program PuTTY has released the latest version of its software that includes security patches for 8 high-severity security vulnerabilities. PuTTY is one of the most popular and widely used open-source client-side programs that allows users to remotely access computers over SSH, Telnet, and Rlogin network protocols. Almost 20 months after releasing the last version of its software, the developers of PuTTY earlier this week released the latest version 0.71 for Windows and Unix operating systems. According to an advisory available on its website, all previous versions of the PuTTY software have been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious server or a compromised server to hijack client's system in different ways. Here below I have listed all 8 vulnerabilities with brief information that PuTTY 0.71 has patched: 1) Authentication Prompt Spoofing — Since PuTTY doesn't have a way to indicate whether a piec...

Google announced some major changes for its Android mobile operating system in October after the European Commission hit the company with a record $5 billion antitrust fine for pre-installing its own apps and services on third-party Android phones. The European Commission accused Google of forcing Android phone manufacturers to "illegally" tie its proprietary apps and services—specifically, Chrome and Google Search as the default browsers—to Android, unfairly blocking competitors from reaching consumers. This rule led Google to change the way it licenses the Google mobile application suite to Android smartphone makers. Now, Google is further making some changes related to browser and search engine choice. In a blog post published Tuesday, Google announced that the company would prompt Android phone owners in Europe (new and existing ones) in the coming months to choose from a variety of web browsers and search engines for their devices as their default apps. ...

Google has recently released the first beta version of Android Q, the next upcoming version of Google's popular mobile operating system, with a lot of new privacy improvements and other security enhancements. Android Q, where Q has not yet been named, offers more control over installed apps, their access, and permissions, and location settings; more support for passive authentication like face ID, and warnings when you install a new app targeting Android Marshmallow or older. Instead of directly going through dozens of different pages Google published about Android Q, here I have summarized all new privacy and security features of the new version of Android you can quickly learn from: 1) Stop Android Apps From Tracking Your Location in the Background Android Q gives you more control over how an app can use your device location information. Currently, you have a single option to either allow or deny an app access to your device location, doesn't matter if it is in-use...

Photo by Terje Pedersen / NTB scanpix One of the world's largest producers of aluminum has been forced to shut down several of its plants across Europe and the U.S. after an "extensive cyber attack" hit its operations, leaving companies' IT systems unusable. According to a press release shared by Aluminum giant Norsk Hydro today, the company has temporarily shut down several plants and switched to manual operations, "where possible," in countries including Norway, Qatar, and Brazil in an attempt to continue some of its operations. The cyber attack, that began in the U.S.,was first detected by the company's IT experts around late Monday evening CET and the company is working to neutralize the attack, as well as investigating to know the full extent of the incident. "Hydro's main priority is to continue to ensure safe operations and limit operational and financial impact. The problem has not led to any safety-related incidents," t...

Libssh2, a popular open source client-side C library implementing the SSHv2 protocol, has released the latest version of its software to patch a total of nine security vulnerabilities. The Libssh2 library is available for all major distributors of the Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, and also comes bundled within some distributions and software as a default library. According to an  advisory published Monday, all the below listed vulnerabilities that were patched with the release of libssh2 version 1.8.1 lead to memory corruption issues which could result in arbitrary code execution on a client system in certain circumstances. Here's the list of security vulnerabilities patched in Libssh: 1. CVE-2019-3855: Possible integer overflow in transport read that could lead to an out-of-bounds write. A malicious server, or a remote attacker who compromises an SSH server, could send a specially crafted packet which could result in executing malicious ...

Security researchers have uncovered a new variant of the infamous Mirai Internet of Things botnet , this time targeting embedded devices intended for use within business environments in an attempt to gain control over larger bandwidth to carry out devastating DDoS attacks . Although the original creators of Mirai botnet have already been arrested and jailed , variants of the infamous IoT malware, including Satori and Okiru , keep emerging due to the availability of its source code on the Internet since 2016. First emerged in 2016, Mirai is well known IoT botnet malware that has the ability to infect routers, and security cameras, DVRs, and other smart devices—which typically use default credentials and run outdated versions of Linux—and enslaves the compromised devices to form a botnet, which is then used to conduct DDoS attacks . New Mirai Variant Targets Enterprise IoT Devices Now, Palo Alto Network Unit 42 researchers have spotted the newest variant of Mirai that...

A hacker who was selling details of nearly 890 million online accounts stolen from 32 popular websites in three separate rounds has now put up a fourth batch of millions of records originating from 6 other sites for sale on the dark web. The Hacker News today received a new email from the Pakistani hacker, who goes by online alias Gnosticplayers and previously claimed to have hacked dozens of popular websites from companies which, according to him, probably had no idea that they were compromised. The hacker last month made three rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on the popular dark web market called Dream Market, posting details of 620 million accounts stolen from 16 websites in the first round, 127 million records from 8 sites in the second, and 92 million from 8 websites in the third. Although while releasing the third round Gnosticplayers told The Hacker News that it would be his last batch of the stolen database, the hacker released the fourth round containing nearl...

Various cyber criminal groups and individual hackers are still exploiting a recently patched critical code execution  vulnerability in WinRAR , a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide. Why? Because the WinRAR software doesn't have an auto-update feature, which, unfortunately, leaves millions of its users vulnerable to cyber attacks. The critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-20250) that was patched late last month by the WinRAR team with the release of WinRAR version 5.70 beta 1 impacts all prior versions of WinRAR released over the past 19 years. For those unaware, the vulnerability is "Absolute Path Traversal" bug that resides in the old third-party library UNACEV2.DLL of WinRAR and allows attackers to extract a compressed executable file from the ACE archive to one of the Windows Startup folders, where the malicious file would automatically run on the next reboot. Therefore, to successfully exploit this vulnerability and tak...

WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram faced a widespread outage yesterday with users from around the world reporting issues with sending messages on WhatsApp and Messenger, posting feeds on Facebook and accessing other features on the three Facebook-owned platforms. While the outage was quite troubling both for the social media giant and its millions of users, guess who benefits the most out of the incident? TELEGRAM. Pavel Durov, the founder of the popular secure messaging platform Telegram, claims to have had a surge in sign-ups within the last 24 hours, at the time duration when its rival messaging services were facing downtime. "I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours," Durov wrote on his Telegram channel. "Good. We have true privacy and unlimited space for everyone." Telegram is an excellent alternative to Facebook's Messenger and WhatsApp services, offering users an optional end-to-end encrypted messaging feature,...