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What do you expect from your cat to come back with?? Perhaps with a mouse or a bird – none of your use. But what if she come back with your neighbours' wifi details? Really Interesting! A creative security researcher has found a way to use his pet cat mapping dozens of vulnerable Wi-Fi networks in his neighborhood. Gene Bransfield , a security researcher with Tenacity, managed to turn his wife's grandmother's pet cat Coco into a roaming detector for free Wifi networks by just using a custom-built collar , which was made from a Wi-Fi card, GPS module, Spark Core chip, battery and some fetching leopard print fabric. Bransfield dubbed his experiment " Warkitteh " – on the concept of " Wardriving ", where hackers used unsecured Wi-Fi connections from a parked car. He decided to turn his cat into a hacker because he found the idea amusing, and also because cats are the one that consumes as much as 15 per cent of internet traffic, with the popularity among the internet users....

Scammers have again targeted more than one billion active users of the popular social networking giant Facebook, to infect as many victims as possible. This time, an old Facebook scam is back in action once again! Malicious Facebook "Color Changer" app has resurfaced again on the popular social networking site Facebook, this time compromising more than 10,000 people worldwide. The malicious app promises users to change the characteristic blue colour of Facebook's header and interface to one of nine other colours including pink, purple, green, yellow, orange and black, in order to infect users' phones and computers with malicious software. Researchers at China-based Internet company Cheetah Mobile have detected the " Facebook colour changer " that tricks Facebook users into downloading the app via a malicious phishing site. The phishing website targets users in two ways: First of all, it steals the users' Facebook Access Tokens by asking them ...

Oracle's newly launched Data Redaction security feature in Oracle Database 12c can be easily disrupted by an attacker without any need to use exploit code, a security researcher long known as a thorn in Oracle's side said at Defcon. Data Redaction is one of the new Advanced Security features introduced in Oracle Database 12c. The service is designed to allow administrators to automatically protect sensitive data, such as credit card numbers or health information, during certain operations by either totally obscuring column data or partially masking it. But according to David Litchfield , a self-taught security researcher who found dozens and dozens of critical vulnerabilities in Oracle's products, a close look at this Data Redaction security feature help him found a slew of trivially exploitable vulnerabilities that an attacker don't even need to execute native exploit code to defeat the feature. David Litchfield is a security specialist at Datacomm TSS and th...

Today Microsoft has released its Advance Notification for the month of August 2014 Patch Tuesday Updates releasing a total of nine security Bulletins, which will address several vulnerabilities in its products, out of which two are marked critical and rest are important in severity. The latest updates, which is set to arrive on August 12, will address two critical bugs affect Internet Explorer and Windows with seven other issues rated as important. The vulnerabilities in the company's products range from remote code execution to protection bypasses. Both of the critical fixes will address remote-code execution flaws. The critical Windows update affects only business and professional editions of Windows 7 and Windows 8. Whereas, the Internet Explorer update affects all versions of Windows on all supported platforms. The remaining seven updates affect its various products, including Windows, Office, SQL Server, the .NET Framework and SharePoint Server 2013. There wi...

Today at Black Hat 2014 hacking conference, Yahoo! Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos announced that the company will start giving its consumers the option of end-to-end encryption in its Mail service by next year. Google showed off a PGP-based encryption plugin for Gmail back in June. The Purple-hued company will offer encryption via a modified version of the same End-to-End browser plug-in that Google uses for PGP in Gmail, Alex Stamos told the audience at his talk titled Building Safe Systems at Scale - Lessons from Six Months at Yahoo. The PGP plugin will be native in mobile apps allowing Gmail and Yahoo mail to easily exchange encrypted email. Infact, the email providers themselves won't be able to decrypt messages exchanged between its users. Only senders and recipients will be able to read the messages. In short, it means that Yahoo email users can reportedly send safe and secure messages between Yahoo users and also Gmail adherents without fear, wh...

Till now, he have heard about " Bitcoin digital wallet hacked " or " Bitcoin website hacked ", but now a hacker has stolen cryptocurrency from mining pools and generated $83,000 in digital cash in more than four months by gaining access to a Canadian Internet provider. Bitcoin is a virtual currency that makes use of cryptography to create and transfer bitcoins. Users make use of digital wallets to store bitcoin addresses from which bitcoins are received or sent. Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography so that each address is associated with a pair of mathematically linked public and private keys that are held in the wallet. Researchers at Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) , a cyber intelligence company, have discovered a series of malicious activities in which a cryptocurrency thief used bogus Border Gateway Protocol ( BGP ) broadcasts to hijack networks belonging to no less than 19 Internet service providers, including Amazon and other hosting services like DigitalO...

FinFisher spyware, a spyware application used by government and law enforcement agencies for the purpose of surveillance, appears to have been hacked earlier this week and a string of files has been dumped on the Internet. The highly secret surveillance software called " FinFisher " sold by British company Gamma International can secretly monitors computers by turning ON webcams, recording everything the user types with a keylogger, and intercepting Skype calls, copying files, and much more. A hacker has claimed on Reddit and Twitter that they'd infiltrated the network of one of the world's top surveillance & motoring technology company Gamma International, creator of FinFisher spyware, and has exposed 40GB of internal data detailing the operations and effectiveness of the FinFisher suite of surveillance platforms. The leaked information was published both on a parody Gamma Group Twitter account ( @GammaGroupPR ) and Reditt by the hacker that began publishi...

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 31-year-old global surveillance whistleblower and former U.S. intelligence contractor, who has received a three- year residence permit from Russia, his lawyer announced on Today. " On the first of August he received a three-year residence permit, " lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told RT . He had not asked for political asylum, his lawyer added. The former NSA contractor has not apply for Russian citizenship for now, as he will be able to apply for the Russian citizenship in five years. " A foreign citizen, who got a residence permit, will certainly be able to apply for citizenship, " Kucherena said. " He will be able to travel freely within the country and go abroad. He'll be able to stay abroad for not longer than three months ," Kucherena said. Snowden is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations the NSA. The ...

When I say Ransomware, the first nasty piece of malware strikes in the mind is CryptoLocker . A nasty strain of ransomware malware that threatened most of the people around the world by effectively destroying important files of the victims forever. CRYPTOLOCKER - A DEVASTATING THREAT CryptoLocker is a simple rather a devastating piece of Ransomware that encrypts the files on a victim's computer and issues an ultimatum - Pay up or lose your data. CryptoLocker is particularly designed to extort money from computer users by holding computer files hostage until the computer user pays a ransom fee to get them back. Cryptolocker hijacker sniffs out your personal files and wraps them with strong AES-256-bit encryption before it demands money. HOW TO DECRYPT CRYPTOLOCKER? FREE TOOL RELEASED Thanks to security experts, who created an online service where victims whose systems have been encrypted by the CryptoLocker ransomware can get the decryption keys for free. This o...

Users running the website on a self-hosted WordPress or on Drupal are strongly recommended to update their websites to the latest version immediately. A moderately critical vulnerability was discovered in the way Drupal and WordPress implement XMLRPC, which can lead an attacker to disable your website via a method known as Denial of Service (DoS) . VULNERABILITY RESULTS IN DoS ATTACK The latest update of WordPress 3.9.2 mainly addresses an issue in the PHP's XML processor that could be exploited to trigger a DoS (denial of service) attack . The vulnerability affects all previous versions of WordPress. The XML vulnerability was first reported by Nir Goldshlager , a security researcher from Salesforce.com's product security team, that impacts both the popular website platforms. The issue was later fixed by Michael Adams and Andrew Nacin of the WordPress security team and David Rothstein of the Drupal security team. ATTACK MAKES YOUR WEBSITE COMPLETELY INACCES...

Yahoo-owned Flickr, one of the biggest online photo management and sharing website in the world was recently impacted by a web application vulnerability , which could allow an attacker to modify users' profile image. Flickr is one of the most popular photo sharing website with more than 87 million users, therefore some top major target for cybercriminals. The site was vulnerable to the most common vulnerability known as Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF or CSRF), which is very easy to exploit by attackers. Cross-Site Request Forgery is a method of attacking a Web site in which an intruder masquerades as a legitimate and trusted user. All the attacker need to do is get the target browser to make a request to your website on their behalf. If they can either: Convince your users to click on a HTML page they've constructed Insert arbitrary HTML in a target website that your users visit Not too difficult, is it? Abdullah Hussam , a 17 years old programmer from Iraq found that just...

Tor has always been a tough target for law enforcement for years, but the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) has found a way to successfully track users across the network. Just a few days back, Tor made a difficult announcement that an attack on its system likely exposed its users of anonymity. Now, a new report from Wired suggests that the FBI has been running a malware campaign to identify Tor users by infecting their computers for years on a large scale. FBI USES DRIVE-BY HACKING TO TRACK USERS Tor is generally thought to be a place where users come online to hide their activities and remain anonymous, but a court case has revealed an opposite story. FBI has been using a tactic called drive-by hacking to track computers using the Tor anonymous computing system. Security researchers call the tactic a " drive-by download " in which a hacker infiltrates a high-traffic website to deliver the malware to large swaths of visitors. That simply means t...

If we talk about old days, a hacker often rely on the natural helpfulness as well as weaknesses of people whom he wanted to target. This tactic to break into a computer network by gaining the confidence of an authorized user and get them to reveal information that compromises the network's security is known as Social Engineering . WHAT IS SOCIAL ENGINEERING Social engineering is nothing but a non technical kind of intrusion that relies heavily on human interaction and involves manipulating people so they give up confidential information. Social engineering was very effective those old days as well as today, as major targets are made victims using this old trick only and it is also one of the important components of many types of exploits like: Virus writers use social engineering tactics to persuade people to run malicious email attachments Phishers use social engineering tactics to convince people to disclose their sensitive information such as banking credentia...

Researchers have warned users of Android devices to avoid app downloads from particularly unauthorized sources, since a new and sophisticated piece of malware is targeting Android users through phishing emails . The malware, dubbed SandroRAT , is currently being used by cybercriminals to target Android users in Poland via a widely spread email spam campaign that delivers a new variant of an Android remote access tool (RAT). The emails masquerade itself as a bank alert that warns users of the malware infection in their mobile device and offers a fake mobile security solution in order to get rid of the malware infection. The mobile security solution poses as a Kaspersky Mobile Security , but in real, it is a version of SandroRAT, a remote access tool devised for Android devices, whose source code has been put on sale on underground Hack Forums since December last year. A mobile malware researcher at McAfee, Carlos Castillo, detailed the new variant of Android remot...

Almost a year ago, at the ' Hack In The Box ' security summit in Amsterdam, a security researcher at N.Runs and a commercial airline pilot, Hugo Teso presented a demonstration that it's possible to take control of aircraft flight systems and communications using an Android smartphone and some specialized attack code. Quite similar to the previous one, a security researcher claims to have devised a method that can give cyber criminals access to the satellite communications equipment on passenger jets through their WiFi and in-flight entertainment systems. Cyber security expert Ruben Santamarta, a consultant with cyber security firm IOActive , will unveil his research and all the technical details this week at a major Las Vegas hacker convention, Black Hat conference, showing How commercial airliner satellite communication systems can also be compromised by hackers, along with the evidence of satellite communications system vulnerabilities that questions the standards th...

Jobvite , a recruiting platform for the social web, is found vulnerable to the most common, but critical web application vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to compromise and steal the database of the company's website. Jobvite is a Social recruiting and applicant tracking created for companies with the highest expectations of recruiting technology and candidate quality. Growing companies use Jobvite's social recruiting, sourcing and talent acquisition solutions to target the right talent and build the best teams. An independent security researcher Mohamed M. Fouad from Egypt, has found two major flaws in Jobvite website  that could be used by an attacker to comprise the company's web server. As a responsible security researcher, Fouad also reported the critical flaws three months ago to the Jobvite team, but the company didn't fix it till now. According to Fouad, Jobvite is vulnerable to Boolean SQLi (SQL injection) and LFI (local file inclusion) v...

Malware is nothing but a malicious files which is stored on an infected computer system in order to damage the system or steal sensitive data from it or perform other malicious activities. But security researchers have uncovered a new and sophisticated piece of malware that infects systems and steals data without installing any file onto the targeted system. Researchers dubbed this  persistent malware as Poweliks , which resides in the computer registry only and is therefore not easily detectable as other typical malware that installs files on the affected system which can be scanned by antivirus or anti-malware Software. According to Paul Rascagneres , Senior Threat Researcher, Malware analyst at GData software, due to the malware's subsequent and step-after-step execution of code, the feature set was similar to a stacking principles of Matryoshka Doll approach. Paul has made a number of name ripping malware and bots to uncover and undermine cyber crimes. He won l...

Mozilla on Friday notified users of its Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) that the company has accidentally exposed the e-mail addresses and cryptographically protected passwords of thousands of Mozilla developers. The email addresses of over 76,000 members of its Developer Network, along with 4000 "salted" passwords were disclosed through a database glitch that may have been exploited by hackers, Mozilla officials warned Friday. The database glitch caused due to a data " sanitization " process failure, that was lasted for a month beginning on June 23, which inadvertently published the records of members of the MDN and left on a publicly accessible server for around a month until one of the outfit's web developers discovered their presence on a server accessible to the general public around a couple of weeks back, according to a blog post . " As soon as we learned of it, the database dump file was removed from the server immediately, and the process that ge...