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Firewall, VPN and spam filtering products from Barracuda Networks contains hidden hard coded backdoor ed SSH accounts, that allow any hacker to remotely log in and root access sensitive information. According to an advisory published by Stefan Viehböck of SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab reported the vulnerabilities in default firewall configuration and default user accounts on the unit. Barracuda were informed of the vulnerabilities at the end of November. All Barracuda Networks appliances with the exception of the Barracuda Backup Server, Barracuda Firewall, and Barracuda NG Firewall are potentially affected i.e Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall, Barracuda Web Filter, Barracuda Message Archiver, Barracuda Web Application Firewall, Barracuda Link Balancer, Barracuda Load Balancer, Barracuda SSL VPN, CudaTel. Barracuda recommended that all customers immediately update their Barracuda security definitions to v2.0.5, ensure the products' security definitions ar...

Anonymous hackers deface the official website of U.S. Sentencing Commission website (ussc.gov) on Friday under a new campaign called " Operation Last Resort " in memory of  Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz and also threatening to release a massive WikiLeaks-style exposure of sensitive U.S. government secrets. “ The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration. The time has come to give this system a taste of its own medicine. ” hackers said. The hack was performed in opposition to alleged unjust policies of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) with the late Aaron Swartz. They also had distributed encrypted government files and claimed to give away decryption keys publicly as soon as possible. Where as this is not specified exactly what files they have obtained. Swartz was facing up to 50+ years in prison and a $4 million fine after releasing pay-walled academic articles from t...

Iranian hackers deface multiple big companies Turkmenistan domains (.tm) yesterday using DNS poisoning attack. All hacked domains are registered by NIC at Turkmenistan. Hacker managed to find and exploit a SQL Injection vulnerability in NIC website in order to get database of the site. Because the passwords was stored in plain text, that make more easy for those hacker to access the domain panels of each domain and changing the DNS entries to shift websites on a rouge server with defaced page. The defaced message as shown below: Defaced domains : www.youtube.tm www.gmail.tm www.msdn.tm www.intel.tm www.officexp.tm www.xbox.tm www.windowsvista.tm www.orkut.tm www.google.tm Mirror of hacks are available at Zone-H .

The role of hacker is recognized as crucial today in cyber security, these specialists are the nightmare of security experts but their knowledge is fundamental to understand the vulnerabilities of our infrastructures … think like a hacker if you want really protect your system . But hacking is a culture, a way of life that is hard to match ago with the business logic, true hackers don’t do this for money, money are fundamental but not all, the must for them is always to put into question their capabilities, try to consistently exceed their limits. Fortunately industry, private business and governments have understood it and have re-evaluated the importance of hackers, these specialists were once seen as shady individuals to avoid, today they are highly sought professionals in both private business and government sectors. Discover vulnerabilities before attackers could exploit them is essential, millions of people and devices are connected to the network, a unique oppo...

GitHub is a source code repository which lets developers work on programs together as a team, even when they are in different locations. Each repository on the site is a public folder designed to hold the software code that a developer is working on. This Tuesday GitHub announced a major upgrades to the site's search engine, " Finding great code on GitHub just got a whole lot easier, ". Yesterday few twitter users pointed out that there is no shortage of embedded private SSH keys and passwords that can easily be found via GitHub new feature. If you upload security information (keys/passwords etc) to a public repository, new search feature will allow anyone to find them. Today, GitHub's search function stopped working , though the site didn't acknowledge the cause. Updated message is " Search remains unavailable. The cluster is recovering slowly and we continue to monitor its progress. We'll provide further updates as they become available...

NASK the domain registrar that operates the “ .pl ” Polish top-level domain registry has seized multiple domains used for cyber crime activities by spreading Waledac malware distributed by the Virut botnet. According to Poland’s Computer Emergency Response Team, Virut was first detected in 2006 and became a serious threat with an estimated size of more than 300,000 compromised computers. NASK said that on Thursday it began assuming control over 23 .pl domains that were being used to operate the Virut network. Virut was responsible for 5.5% of infections in Q3 2012, making it the fifth most widespread threat of the time. They determined that botnet consists of more than 308,000 uniquely compromised machines and that its primary function is to pump out spam and other malicious emails. The most recent take down effort was in December 2012. Unfortunately, the Virut botnet gang managed to get the malicious botnet domain names moved to a new registrar ca...

The banking Trojan known as Shylock has been updated with new functionality, including the ability to spread over Skype. The program was discovered in 2011 that steals online banking credentials and other financial information from infected computers. Shylock, named after a character from Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice". Shylock is one of the most advanced Trojans  currently being used in attacks against home banking systems. The code is constantly being updated and new features are added regularly. According to security researchers from CSIS Security Group , the Skype infection is based on a malicious plugin called msg.gsm and allows the malware to send messages and transfer files, clean messages and transfers from Skype history and even bypass the Skype warning for connecting to servers. Beside the new ability to spread through Skype, Shylock can also spread through local shares and removable drives. Infection by the Trojan a...

Today I decided to remove Microsoft Security Essentials Antivirus from my system because Security Essentials failed another certification test by independent testing lab, AV-Test Institute. Microsoft's Security Essentials antivirus for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 is a free add-on to Windows Defender, which blocks adware and spyware on Windows. In its review , AV-Test revealed that 22 of the 25 programs that were tested passed the test, but Security Essentials came up short. The lab tested all programs across three areas: protection, repair ability and usability of the whole computer based on the impact of the software. " We always used the most current publicly-available version of all products for the testing. They were allowed to update themselves at any time and query their in-the-cloud services. We focused on realistic test scenarios and challenged the products against real-world threats. Products had to demonstrate their capabilities using all ...

We continues to recommend users disable the Java program in their Web browsers, because it remains vulnerable to attacks that could result in identity theft and other cyber crimes and less than 24 hours after Oracle Sunday released a security update that addresses two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in Java that are being actively exploited by attackers, an online vulnerability seller began offering a brand-new Java bug for sale. According to a report , a Java exploits was being advertised for $5,000 a piece in an underground Internet forum and the new zero-day vulnerability was apparently already in at least one attacker's hands. The thread has since been deleted from the forum indicating a sale has been made, something sure to bring more concern to Oracle.Oracle can’t predict the future, and its engineers obviously can’t predict what exploits are going to be found in its software. The most recent hold Java fixed allowed hackers to enter a computer by using compro...

Every day we read about an incredible number of successful attacks and data breaches that exploited leak of authentication mechanisms practically in every sector. Often also critical control system are exposed on line protected only by a weak password, in many cases the default one of factory settings, wrong behavior related to the human component and absence of input validation makes many applications vulnerable to external attacks. Today I desire to focus the attention of a report published by the consulting firm's Deloitte titled “ Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions 2013 ” that provide a series of technology predictions, including the outlook for subscription TV services and enterprise social networks. The document correctly express great concern of the improper use of passwords that will continue also in 2013 being causes of many problems, it must to be considered that value of the information protected by passwords continues to grow attracting il...

The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Emergency Response Team has released a report , which stated that two American electrical power plants were compromised late last year and has identified a number of glaring electronic vulnerabilities. Some unknown malware infected two power plants control systems using unprotected USB drives as an attack vector. The tainted USB drive came in contact with a handful of machines at the power generation facility and investigators found sophisticated malware on two engineering workstations critical to the operation of the control environment. The report did not say if the computers did or did not have up-to-date antivirus software, but it did say that current software would have found the malware.  The other infection affected 10 computers in a turbine control system. It was also spread by a USB drive and resulted in downtime for the impacted systems and delayed the plant restart by approximately three weeks. ICS-C...

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in popular Cisco Linksys routers that allows hackers to gain remote root access. Security vendor DefenseCode discovered the flaw and reported it to Cisco months ago and a fix is already on the way. According to Cisco, more than 70 million Linksys routers sold globally. This exploit was successfully tested against a Linksys model WRT54GL router by researchers at security firm DefenseCode who claimed that the latest Linksys firmware 4.30.14 and all previous versions are still vulnerable. It took the team only 12 days to develop an exploit that could be used by hackers to take control of a person’s wireless router and hijack all the information being processed through it. The vulnerability is demonstrated in the following video:

Oracle delivered an unusual emergency patch to Java's critical Zero Day vulnerability on Sunday to fix a malicious bug that allowed hackers access to users web browsers. Exploits for the previously undisclosed flaw were being hosted in a number of exploit kits and attacks have already been seen in the wild dropping ransomware and assorted other malware. Security Alert CVE-2013-0422  include two vulnerabilities that are remotely executable. Oracle confirmed that the flaws were only present in Java 7 versions and did not impact Java on servers, Java desktop applications, or embedded Java. Java is used in 3 billion machines, about 2 billion of which are desktop or laptop computers. Similarly, Back in August last year, Oracle issued an urgent fix to seal a dangerous security flaw within its Java software that’s left thousands of computers wide open to malicious attacks from hackers. Lamar Bailey , director of security research and development for nCircle ...

A new sensational discovered has been announced by Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research & Analysis Team result of an investigation after several attacks hit computer networks of various international diplomatic service agencies. A new large scale cyber-espionage operation has been discovered, named Red October , name inspired by famous novel The Hunt For The Red October (ROCRA) and chosen because the investigation started last October. The campaign hit hundreds of machines belonging to following categories: Government Diplomatic / embassies Research institutions Trade and commerce Nuclear / energy research Oil and gas companies Aerospace Military The attackers have targeted various devices such as enterprise network equipment and mobile devices (Windows Mobile, iPhone, Nokia), hijacking files from removable disk drives, stealing e-mail databases from local Outlook storage or remote POP/IMAP server and siphoning files from local network FTP servers. Accordin...

Aaron Swartz has committed suicide on January 11, 2013 in New York City.  I have long been fought if you write something about this extraordinary boy, but not dedicate a tribute would be a shame. Aaron Swartz has decided to leave a huge void in the IT scenario.  For me, as the entire world he is a legend, a guy that has profoundly changed our daily work. Aaron Swartz is an eclectic persona; he is an hacker and active activist, co-founder of social news website Reddit and founder of the group Demand Progress. The EFF in a blog post states: “ Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way. His contributions were numerous, and some of them were indispensable. When we asked him in late 2010 for help in stopping COICA, the predecessor to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills, he founded an organization called Demand Progress, which mobilized over a million online activists and proved to be...

Hackers crew Jember Hacker terrorists (JHT) deface the official website of Indonesian president (http://www.presidensby.info) with a message reads, “ This is a PayBack From Jember Hacker Team ”. Hackers deface website of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) apparently in protest at growing corruption and wealth inequality in the country and because of increasing anger at the current administration. Deface page mention hacker code name as " MJL007 " who performed the hack and government is working with law enforcement teams to examine log files in a bid to trace the origin of the attack. " Corruption is rampant, the poor are everywhere. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer ," hacker told . Mirror of hack is available at Zone-H .

Last week, Happy Hacker   arrested in Thailand on charges of stealing millions from online bank accounts. According to new reports same hacker alleged as ZeuS Mastermind and used to have the profile of a miscreant nicknamed “ bx1 ,” a hacker fingered by Microsoft before as a major operator of botnets powered by the ZeuS banking trojan .  He remained smiling throughout a press conference in which Thai police explained that Thailand will seek to extradite Mr Bendelladj to the US state of Georgia, where a court has issued a warrant for his arrest. 24-year-old Algerian Hacker , Hamza Bendelladj   arrested at a Bangkok airport enroute from Malaysia to Egypt. The ZeuS botnet is one of the most notorious in existence, and it’s also one that has earned its masters some pretty massive payouts. The Email ID's  daniel.h.b@universityofsutton.com , and danieldelcore@hotmail.com  mentioned by Microsoft in a complaint submitted to the U.S. District Co...

A new Java 0-day vulnerability has been discovered, already wind in use by an exploit pack, taking advantage of a fresh zero-day vulnerability in Java and potentially letting hackers take over users’ machines. Java 7 Update 10 and earlier contain an unspecified vulnerability that can allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system. The flaw was first spotted by ‘Malware Don’t Need Coffee’ blog . This vulnerability is being attacked in the wild, and is reported to be incorporated into exploit kits. This exploit is already available in two Exploit Packs, that is available for $700 a quarter or $1,500 for a year. Similar tactics were used in CVE-2012-4681 , which was discovered last August. Source of this new Exploit available to download Here . The two most popular exploits packs used by hackers to distribute malware, the BlackHole Exploit Kit and the Cool Exploit Kit already having thi...

Incapsula security study reveals how a simple neglect in managing the administrative password of a small UK site was quickly exploited by Botnet shepherds operating obscurely out of Turkey to hurl large amounts of traffic at American banks. If you've been following the news, you are probably aware of a wave of DDoS attacks that recently hit several major U.S. banks. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a hacker group that claimed responsibility for these attacks, declared them to be a retaliation for an anti-Islam video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad and a part of the on-going “Operation Ababil.” As the reports of the attack started to roll in, Incapsula security team was able to uncover one of the secret foot-soldiers behind the assault: a compromised general-interest UK-based website that was trying to hurl large chunks of junk traffic at three of the world's largest financial institutions (PNC, HSBC and Fifth Third Bank). At On the eve of the attack, this website su...

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days each year – it’s happening. Whether you are awake or asleep, in a meeting or on vacation, they are out there probing your network, looking for a way in. A way to exploit you; a way to steal your data, a place to store illegal content, a website they can deface, or any of a hundred other ways to mess with you for the simple joy of it all. And they can do this with relative ease, even in an automated fashion, with simple tools that are readily available to all. I’m talking about network scanners. The bad guys use them all day every day to assess networks around the world because a network scanner is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to find the cracks in your armor. If you want to see your network the same way an attacker would, then you want to use a network scanner. Network scanners perform automated tests of systems over the network. They don’t require agents or any other software to be installed on the “target” ...