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A cybersecurity professional today demonstrated a long-known unpatched weakness in Microsoft's Azure cloud service by exploiting it to take control over Windows Live Tiles , one of the key features Microsoft built into Windows 8 operating system. Introduced in Windows 8, the Live tiles feature was designed to display content and notifications on the Start screen, allowing users to continuously pull up-to-date information from their favorite apps and websites. To make it easier for websites to offer their content as Live Tiles, Microsoft had a feature available on a subdomain of a separate domain, i.e., " notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com ," that allowed website admins to automatically convert their RSS feeds into a special XML format and use it as a meta tag on their websites. The service, which Microsoft had already shut down, was hosted on its own Azure Cloud platform with the subdomain configured/linked to an Azure account operated by the company. However,...

An unprotected database belonging to JustDial , India's largest local search service, is leaking personally identifiable information of its every customer in real-time who accessed the service via its website, mobile app, or even by calling on its fancy "88888 88888" customer care number, The Hacker News has learned and independently verified. Founded over two decades ago, JustDial (JD) is the oldest and leading local search engine in India that allows users to find relevant nearby providers and vendors of various products and services quickly while helping businesses listed in JD to market their offerings. Rajshekhar Rajaharia , an independent security researcher, yesterday contacted The Hacker News and shared details of how an unprotected, publicly accessible API endpoint of JustDial's database can be accessed by anyone to view profile information of over 100 million users associated with their mobile numbers. The leaked data includes JustDial users' na...

Even after Google's security oversight over its already-huge Android ecosystem has evolved over the years, malware apps still keep coming back to Google Play Store. Sometimes just reposting an already detected malware app from a newly created Play Store account, or using other developers' existing accounts, is enough for 'bad-faith' developers to trick the Play Store into distributing unsafe apps to Android users. Since the mobile device platform is growing rapidly, every new effort Google makes apparently comes with trade-offs. For example, Google recently made some changes in its Play Store policies and added new restriction in Android APIs that now makes it mandatory for every new app to undergo rigorous security testing and review process before appearing in the Google Play Store. These efforts also include: restricting developers from abusing Android accessibility services, restricting apps access to certain permissions like call logs and SMS permi...

A new powerful rootkit-enabled spyware operation has been discovered wherein hackers are distributing multifunctional malware disguised as cracked software or trojanized app posing as legitimate software like video players, drivers and even anti-virus products. While the rootkit malware—dubbed Scranos —which was first discovered late last year, still appears to be a work in progress, it is continuously evolving, testing new components and regularly making an improvement to old components, which makes it a significant threat. Scranos features a modular design that has already gained capabilities to steal login credentials and payment accounts from various popular services, exfiltrate browsing history and cookies, get YouTube subscribers, display ads, as well as download and execute any payload. According to a 48 page in-depth report Bitdefender shared with The Hacker News prior to its release, the malware gains persistence on infected machines by installing a digitally-signed ...

It's no secret that Google tracks you everywhere, even when you keep Google's Location History feature disabled. As revealed by an Associated Press investigation in 2018 , other Google apps like Maps or daily weather update service on Android allows the tech giant to continuously collect your precise latitude and longitude. According to Google, the company uses this location-tracking features with an intent to improve its users' experience, like "personalized maps, recommendations based on places you've visited, help finding your phone, real-time traffic updates about your commute, and more useful ads." Moreover, it's also known that Google could share your location data with federal authorities in criminal investigations when asked with a warrant. Google 'SensorVault' Database Help Police Solve Crimes But what many people weren't aware of is that Google also helps federal authorities identify suspects of crimes by sharing locati...

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released new versions of its Tomcat application server to address an important security vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code and take control of an affected server. Developed by ASF, Apache Tomcat is an open source web server and servlet system, which uses several Java EE specifications such as Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Expression Language, and WebSocket to provide a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java concept to run in. The remote code execution vulnerability ( CVE-2019-0232 ) resides in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Servlet when running on Windows with enableCmdLineArguments enabled and occurs due to a bug in the way the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) passes command line arguments to Windows. Since the CGI Servlet is disabled by default and its option enableCmdLineArguments is disabled by default in Tomcat 9.0.x, the remote code execution vulnerability has ...

If you have an account with Microsoft Outlook email service, there is a possibility that your account information has been compromised by an unknown hacker or group of hackers, Microsoft confirmed The Hacker News. Earlier this year, hackers managed to breach Microsoft's customer support portal and access information related to some email accounts registered with the company's Outlook service. Yesterday, a user on Reddit publicly posted a screenshot of an email which he received from Microsoft warning that unknown attackers were able to access some information of his OutLook account between 1 January 2019 and 28 March 2019. Another user on Reddit also confirmed that he/she too received the same email from Microsoft. According to the incident notification email, as shown below, attackers were able to compromise credentials for one of Microsoft's customer support agents and used it to unauthorisedly access some information related to the affected accounts, but not ...

Yes, you read that right! Russia has fined Facebook with 3,000 rubles, roughly $47, for not complying with the country's controversial Data Localization law. It's bizarre and unbelievable, but true. In December last year, Russian Internet watchdog Roskomnadzor sent notifications to Twitter and Facebook asking them to provide information about the location of servers that store the personal data of its citizens. Roskomnadzor – also known as the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Telecom, Information Technologies, and Mass Communications – is Russian telecommunications watchdog that runs a huge blacklist of websites banned in Russia. Though the social media platforms had one month to reply, they choose not to disclose this information, as a result of which Moscow's Tagansky District Court imposed 3,000 rubles fine on Twitter last week and the same on Facebook today. The fine is the minimum that Russian courts can impose on companies for violatin...

Matrix—the organization behind an open source project that offers a protocol for secure and decentralized real-time communication—has suffered a massive cyber attack after unknown attackers gained access to the servers hosting its official website and data. Hackers defaced Matrix's website, and also stole unencrypted private messages, password hashes, access tokens, as well as GPG keys the project maintainers used for signing packages. The cyber attack eventually forced the organization to shut down its entire production infrastructure for several hours and log all users out of Matrix.org. So, if you have an account with Matrix.org service and do not have backups of your encryption keys or were not using server-side encryption key backup, unfortunately, you will not be able to read your entire encrypted conversation history. Matrix is an open source end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol that allows anyone to self-host a messaging service on their own servers, powering ...

If you have downloaded the VSDC multimedia editing software between late February to late March this year, there are high chances that your computer has been infected with a banking trojan and an information stealer. The official website of the VSDC software — one of the most popular, free video editing and converting app with over 1.3 million monthly visitors — was hacked, unfortunately once again. According to a new report Dr. Web published today and shared with The Hacker News, hackers hijacked the VSDC website and replaced its software download links leading to malware versions, tricking visitors into installing dangerous Win32.Bolik.2 banking trojan and KPOT stealer. Even more ironic is that despite being so popular among the multimedia editors, the VSDC website is running and offering software downloads over an insecure HTTP connection. Though it's unclear how hackers this time managed to hijack the website, researchers revealed that the breach was reportedly ne...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London—that's almost seven years after he took refuge in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden over a sexual assault case. According to a short note released by London's Metropolitan Police Service, Assange was arrested immediately after the Ecuadorian government today withdraws his political asylum. Assange has now been taken into custody at a central London police station, from where he will be presented before Westminster Magistrates' Court as soon as possible. U.S. Department of Justice also confirmed today that Assange would face extradition proceedings for his alleged role in "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States." "The indictment [unsealed today] alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracki...

🔥 Breaking — It has been close to just one year since the launch of next-generation Wi-Fi security standard WPA3 and researchers have unveiled several serious vulnerabilities in the wireless security protocol that could allow attackers to recover the password of the Wi-Fi network. WPA, or Wi-Fi Protected Access, is a standard designed to authenticate wireless devices using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protocol and is intended to prevent hackers from eavesdropping on your wireless data. The Wi-Fi Protected Access III (WPA3) protocol was launched in an attempt to address technical shortcomings of the WPA2 protocol from the ground, which has long been considered to be insecure and found vulnerable to KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack). Though WPA3 relies on a more secure handshake, known as Dragonfly , that aims to protect Wi-Fi networks against offline dictionary attacks, security researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen found weaknesses in the early implementa...