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The White House acknowledged Monday that one of its computer networks was hit by a cyber attack, but said there was no breach of any classified systems and no indication any data was lost. Including systems used by the military for nuclear commands were breached by Chinese hackers. A conservative newspaper that has been regularly critical of the Obama administration, called The Washington Free Beacon, first published the report on Sunday and said that the attackers were linked to the Chinese government. One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing's most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks. Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved two U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups and Marine amphibious units near waters by Japan's Senkaku islands. The official called the incident a " spear-phishing " a...

According to reports, some of the United States biggest financial institutions  including Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Bancorp were hit by a series of cyber attacks last week, by a group claiming Middle Eastern ties, that caused Internet blackouts and delays in online banking. The banks suffered denial-of-service attacks, in which hackers barrage a website with traffic until it is overwhelmed and shuts down. Such attacks, while a nuisance, are not technically sophisticated and do not affect a company's computer network or, in this case, funds or customer bank accounts. Hacktivists, calling themselves " Mrt. Izz ad-Din alQasssam Cyber Fighters ," attacked Wells Fargo and posted on Pastebin that U.S. Bancorp and PNC Financial Services Group are next. The group said it had attacked the banks in retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocks the Prophet Muhammad. It also pledged to continue to attack American credit and financial in...

A ban on the use of pen drives has not been able to safeguard cyber security as it has now been labeled as a major threat in defence forces, the Army officials said. The use of pen drives as an easy-to-carry storage device has increased in the recent past and internal reports have confirmed that over 70 percent cyber security breaches in the armed forces are due to their unauthorised use " These pen drives, which are mostly manufactured in China, have emerged as a big threat to our cyber security systems ," they said. Generally it is found that officials use pen drive to store official data for use at their personal computers but from there, it is transmitted from their IP addresses to hackers from the 'malware' present in the pen drives. About a couple of years ago, a Major posted in Andaman and Nicobar Islands was apprehended as it was found that sensitive data was being transferred from his computer.  However, it later emerged that his system had been hacked and...

It's a fact that as smartphones get more capable, the possibilities for their misuse also increase. They're already exploited by crooks to swipe personal information, but a new Android app created by the U.S. Navy is on another level entirely. It's a scary piece of malware called " PlaceRaider " that was developed by the US Naval Surface Warfare center and for now it is being viewed as just a proof of concept. According to the MIT Technology Review, researchers at Indiana University and the Naval Surface Warfare Center have developed a new form of malware designed to record and reconstruct a victim's environment. They has just worked out how to infect a mobile phone with a Trojan that can take photos without you knowing anything about it and send sensor data back to a server. The data are used to construct a 3D model which can be used not only to perform the reconnaissance necessary to break in, but also to steal confidential information such as bank details. O...

Raphael Mudge (Creator of Cobalt Strike ) announced Another Advance Payload for Cobalt Strike called " Beacon ". In a conversation with The Hacker News  Raphael said " A big gap in the penetration tester's toolbox are covert command and control options, especially for long engagements. Beacon is a new feature in Cobalt Strike to remedy this problem ." Cobalt Strikes's graphical user interface offers direct control of the 700+ exploits and advanced features in the open source Metasploit Framework. Beacon is a Cobalt Strike payload for long-term asynchronous command and control of compromised hosts. It works like other Metasploit Framework payloads. You may embed it into an executable, add it to a document, or deliver it with a client-side exploit. Beacon downloads tasks using HTTP requests. You may configure Beacon to connect to multiple domains. For extra stealth, Beacon may use DNS requests to check if a task is available. This limits the comm...

Researchers at Security Explorations disclosed a new vulnerability in Java that could provide an attacker with control of a victim's computer. The researchers have confirmed that Java SE 5 – Update 22, Java SE 6 – Update 35, and Java SE 7 Update 7 running on fully patched Windows 7 32-bit operating systems are susceptible to the attack. This Flaw allowing a malicious hackers to gain complete control of a victim's machine through a rigged website. The affected web browsers are Safari 5.1.7, Opera 12.02, Chrome 21.0.1180.89, Firefox 15.0.1, and Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421. Though Oracle released a fix for the most critical vulnerabilities reported by Security Explorations on August 30th, the security firm quickly found another flaw in that fix that would allow a hacker to bypass the patch. That bug in Oracle's patch still hasn't been patched, leaving users vulnerable to both the new flaw and the previous attack. " We hope that news about one billion users of Oracle Java SE so...

A Romanian researcher - Radu Drăgușin  found that 100000 usernames and passwords of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) was stored in plaint-text on a publicly accessible FTP server. According to him, on Sept. 18 he first discovered a log with usernames and passwords in plaintext, publicly available via IEEE's FTP server for at least a month. He informed them of his find yesterday, and evidently the organization is addressing the issue. On the FTP server, according Dragusin were the logfiles for the offers and ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org - Total data to approximately 376 million HTTP requests. Including 411,308 log entries with login and password in plain text. Among the users who's information was exposed are researchers at NASA, Stanford, IBM, Google, Apple, Oracle and Samsung. IEEE's membership of over 340,000 is roughly half American (49.8 percent as of 2011). " IEEE suffered a data breach which I discovered on September 18. For a few da...

A security issue has been reported in phpMyAdmin, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system. The security issue is caused due to the distribution of a compromised phpMyAdmin source code package containing a backdoor, which can be exploited to e.g. execute arbitrary PHP code. One of the SourceForge.net mirrors, namely cdnetworks-kr-1, was being used to distribute a modified archive of phpMyAdmin, which includes a backdoor. This backdoor is located in file server_sync.php and allows an attacker to remotely execute PHP code. Another file, js/cross_framing_protection.js, has also been modified. SourceForge.Net is the world's largest open source software development website. A very large impact on the domestic users with this incident. The vulnerability has been cataloged as being a critical one. A screenshot as shown of a system containing a malicious backdoor that was snuck into the open-source phpMyAdmin package. On official website in issue ...

Symantec is looking into claims more of its products' source code has been leaked online, following a similar incident earlier this year. This time source code from Norton Utilities 2006 was reportedly leaked on The Pirate Bay by Anonymous member STUN. " As you all see its fully 7z packed content, whats in it!? The loosely Source Code of Norton Utilities 2006 made by one of the worse security vendors on planet earth, Symantec! Also as many of you know this was planned back before Sabu was arrested. Yeah McAfee you suck too! " says the accompanying text. The security vendor then admitted its servers had been hacked, but maintained it was unlikely its customers were affected by the leak. Symantec said it was investigating it. "Symantec is one of the most visible targets in the world for cyber attacks on a daily basis. We take each and every claim very seriously and have a process in place for investigating each incident," a spokesperson said, in an emailed statement sent to...

Clicking one wrong link can cause malicious code to execute, which could do anything from infecting your computer with malware to, apparently, wiping your phone data completely. At the Ekoparty security conference, researcher Ravi Borganokar demonstrated at the Ekoparty security conference in Argentina last week, that how a single line of HTML code could be used to run a factory reset or even clear the SIM card on certain Samsung phones. Malicious hackers can hide a code in a web page that will trigger a full factory reset of Samsung's best-selling Galaxy S3 smartphone, deleting contacts, photographs, music, apps and other valuable data. The devastating flaw lies in Samsung's dialling software, triggered by the tel protocol in a URL. It isn't applicable to all the company's Android handsets, but those that are vulnerable can have their PIN changed or be wiped completely just by visiting a web page or snapping a bad QR code, or even bonking up against the wrong wireless N...

iPhone 5  is vulnerable to the same attack that successfully breached an iPhone 4S at the mobile Pwn2Own hacker contest held this week at the EUSecWest event in Amsterdam . As we reported that Joost Pol and Daan Keuper won the mobile Pwn2Own contest by compromising a fully patched iPhone 4S device and stealing contacts, browsing history, photos and videos from the phone. The vaunted security of the iPhone (4S) took an epic fail tumble during the event when they was able to build an exploit for a vulnerability in WebKit to beat Apple's code-signing features and the MobileSafari sandbox. The same bug is present in the iOS6 Golden Master development code base, which means iPhone 5 is  also vulnerable to the same exploit. Apple iPads and iPod Touch devices are also vulnerable. " We specifically chose this one because it was present in iOS 6, which means the new iPhone coming out today will be vulnerable to this attack ," Pol said. The duo won $30,000 for their ...

Oracle suffered with serious vulnerability in the authentication protocol used by some Oracle databases. This Flaw enable a remote attacker to brute-force a token provided by the server prior to authentication and determine a user's password. A researcher - Esteban Martinez Fayo, a researcher with AppSec tomorrow will demonstrate a proof-of-concept attack. Martinez Fayo and his team first reported the bugs to Oracle in May 2010. Oracle fixed it in mid-2011 via the 11.2.0.3 patch set, issuing a new version of the protocol. " But they never fixed the current version, so the current 11.1 and 11.2 versions are still vulnerable ," Martinez Fayo says, and Oracle has no plans to fix the flaws for version 11.1. The first step in the authentication process when a client contacts the database server is for the server to send a session key back to the client, along with a salt. The vulnerability enables an attacker to link a specific session key with a specific password hash. Th...

The founders over at FixMeStick sent us a pair of their latest devices to check out. The FixMeStick is, in short, a malware removal device for dummies . The FixMeStick is a bootable USB device running Lubuntu and integrates three separate anti-virus scanners from Kaspersky Labs, Sophos, and GFI. While our readers will probably never need it for themselves, we may all wish we had something like this for our non-technical friends and family, or the 9 million PCs infected with ZeroAccess botnet . The FixMeStick does a lot of things that nobody else does on a bootable USB, and let's be real, removing rootkits is never pleasant or easy. Why I Want it For My Parents Linux: the FixMeStick is a Linux-based device that runs before Windows boots enabling it to remove infections without the infection getting stealthy or playing war with my parent's anti-virus software. N-Scanner architecture: contains an integrated multi-scanner composed of three engines: Kaspersky Labs, Sophos, and GFI's VI...