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Russian Internet traffic, including the domestic one, has continuously been re-routed outside the country due to routing errors by China Telecom , which could result in compromising the security of Russian communications. Internet monitoring service Dyn reported Thursday in a blog post that the apparent networking fault is due to the weakness in the Border gateway protocol (BGP) , which forms the underpinning of the Internet's global routing system. The problem started after the BGP peering agreement signed between the China Telecom and top Russian mobile provider Vimpelcom in order to save money on transit operators, so that some of the domestic traffic may carried over the other's network rather than through a more expensive transit operator. Under this deal, Russian domestic traffic was repeatedly being routed to routers operated by China Telecom. Routing Traffic allows law enforcement agencies and hackers with the ability to monitor. “ Unlike other routin...

The joint operation by authorities of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and European law enforcement seized Silk Road 2.0 , an alternative to the notorious online illegal-drug marketplace last week, and arrested 26-year-old operator Blake Benthall, but that wasn't the end. US and European authorities over the weekend announced the seizure of 27 different websites as part of a much larger operation called Operation Onymous , which led to take-down of more than "410 hidden services" that sell illegal goods and services from drugs to murder-for-hire assassins by masking their identities using the Tor encryption network. " The action aimed to stop the sale, distribution and promotion of illegal and harmful items, including weapons and drugs, which were being sold on online ‘dark’ marketplaces, " according to the Europol press release . This globally-coordinated take down is the combined efforts of 17 nations which includes the law enforcemen...

Microsoft has this time quite a big pile of security patches in its November 2014 Patch Tuesday , which will address almost 60 non-security updates for its Windows OS along with 16 security updates . The software giant released Advance Notification for 16 security bulletins, the most in more than three years, which will be addressed as of tomorrow, 11 November, 2014. Five of the bulletins have been marked as " critical ", nine are " importan t" in severity, while two were labeled " moderate ." The updates will patch vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s various software including Internet Explorer (IE), Windows, Office, Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and the .NET framework as well. Five critical vulnerabilities affect specific versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Server. One of them also affects Internet Explorer versions 7 through 11 as well. Four of the five critical bugs are said to al...

The authorities of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation have announced that they have arrested " Silk Road 2.0 " operator Blake Benthall , used the alias " Defcon " in California on Wednesday and charged him with conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, computer hacking, money laundering and other crimes. Silk Road 2, an alternative to the notorious online illegal-drug marketplace that went dark in October of 2013, has been seized in a joint action involving the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and European law enforcement. " As alleged, Blake Benthall attempted to resurrect Silk Road, a secret website that law enforcement seized last year, by running Silk Road 2.0, a nearly identical criminal enterprise, " Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement . " Let’s be clear—this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison. Those looking to follow in the footsteps of alleged cybercriminals should understand that we will r...

Google introduced a new security tool to help developers detect bugs and security glitches in the network traffic security that may leave passwords and other sensitive information open to snooping. The open source tool, dubbed as Nogotofail , has been launched by the technology giant in sake of a number of vulnerabilities discovered in the implementation of the transport layer security, from the most critical Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL to the Apple's gotofail bug to the recent POODLE bug in SSL version 3. The company has made the Nogotofail tool available on GitHub, so that so anyone can test their applications, contribute new features to the project, provide support for more platforms, and help improve the security of the internet. Android security engineer Chad Brubaker said that the Nogotofail main purpose is to confirm that internet-connected devices and applications aren't vulnerable to transport layer security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encry...

Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have unearthed new capabilities in the BlackEnergy Crimeware weapon that has now ability to hacking  routers , Linux systems and Windows, targeting industry through Cisco network devices. The antivirus vendor’s Global Research & Analysis Team released a report Monday detailing some of the new “ relatively unknown ” custom plug-in capabilities that the cyber espionage group has developed for BlackEnergy to attack Cisco networking devices and target ARM and MIPS platforms. The malware was upgraded with custom plugins including Ciscoapi.tcl which targets The Borg's kit, and According to researchers, the upgraded version contained various wrappers over Cisco EXEC-commands and " a punchy message for Kaspersky , " which reads, " F*uck U, Kaspersky!!! U never get a fresh B1ack En3rgy. So, thanks C1sco 1td for built-in backd00rs & 0-days. " BlackEnergy malware program was originally created and used by cy...

Security researchers from Newcastle University in the UK have found a way to steal larger amounts of money from people's pockets using just a mobile phone, due to a security glitch Visa’s contactless payment cards. Contactless payment cards use a cryptoprocessor and RFID technology to perform secure transactions without a need to insert the card in a reader, even an NFC-equipped mobile device may also be used as a payment card. But there is a specified limits country-wise. Contactless payment cards are meant to have a limit of £20 per purchase in UK, using which shoppers can buy things by simply tapping their card on a scanner, without having to type in a PIN. But exploiting a flaw in its protocol could allow cyber criminals to manipulate the cards to transfer up to $999,999.99 in foreign currency into a scammer’s account. Researchers on Wednesday at the 21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, detailed the attack which rely on a “rogue POS te...

Fredrik Neij – known online as " TiAMO ", third and the last founder of the popular file sharing website The Pirate Bay   has been arrested driving across the border of Laos and Thailand. The 36-year-old fugitive  Fredrik Neij  was convicted by a Swedish court in 2009 of aiding copyright infringement and now he has been arrested under an Interpol warrant after four years on the run. The Pirate Bay allows users to share files, including copyrighted content such as movies and music, through peer-to-peer technology. He fled the country after being released on bail and had been living in Laos with his wife and children since 2012. Neij was arrested on Monday while trying to cross a border checkpoint in Nong Khai province, about 385 miles northeast of Bangkok, with his wife, Police said. " Mr. Neij will be transferred to the immigration headquarters in Bangkok on Wednesday where the Swedish embassy is expected to pick him up and bring him back to S...

A Swedish Security researcher has discovered a critical vulnerability in Apple’s OS X Yosemite that gives hackers the ability to escalate administrative privileges on a compromised machine, and allows them to gain the highest level of access on a machine, known as root access. The vulnerability, dubbed as " Rootpipe ", was uncovered by Swedish white-hat hacker Emil Kvarnhammar , who is holding on the full details about the privilege escalation bug until January 2015, as Apple needs some time to prepare a security patch. " Details on the #rootpipe exploit will be presented, but not now. Let's just give Apple some time to roll out a patch to affected users, " Emil Kvarnhammar, IT specialist and hacker security company Truesec, tweeted from his twitter account. By exploiting the vulnerability in the Mac OS X Yosemite , an attacker could bypass the usual safeguard mechanisms which are supposed to stop anyone who tries to root the operating system through a tempora...

Do you use  TextSecure Private Messenger  for your private conversations? If yes, then Are you sure you are actually using a Secure messaging app? TextSecure , an Android app developed by Open WhisperSystems , is completely open-source and claims to support end-to-end encryption of text messages. The app is free and designed by keeping privacy in mind. However, while conducting the first audit of the software, security researchers from Ruhr University Bochum found that the most popular mobile messaging app is open to an Unknown Key-Share attack . After Edward Snowden revealed state surveillance programs conducted by the National Security Agency, and meanwhile when Facebook acquired WhatsApp , TextSecure came into limelight and became one of the best alternatives for users who want a secure communication. " Since Facebook bought WhatsApp , instant messaging apps with security guarantees became more and more popular ," the team wrote in the paper titled,...

One of the most popular content management systems, Drupal , is warning its users to consider their websites as compromised unless their sites were updated immediately with a security patch released on 15 October 2014. Drupal is an open source software package which provides a Content management system (CMS) for websites including MTV, Popular Science, Sony Music, Harvard and MIT. Drupal is used to power roughly 1 billion websites on Internet, which puts Drupal in third place behind the juggernaut Wordpress and then Joomla. Drupal’s security team has released a " public service announcement " on Wednesday for its users to warn them of the SQL injection attack revealed two weeks ago, compromising almost 12 million of the widely used Drupal 7 websites. Users are asked to immediately update their websites to Drupal 7.32 within seven hours of the announcement of the vulnerability. " Automated attacks began compromising Drupal 7 websites that were not patched ...

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In order to secure sensitive information such as Finance, many companies and government agencies generally use totally secure computer systems by making sure it aren't connected to any network at all. But the most secure systems aren't safe anymore. Security researchers at the Cyber Security Labs at Ben Gurion University in Israel have found a way to snoop on a personal computer even with no network connection. STEALING DATA USING RADIO SIGNALS Researchers have developed a proof-of-concept malware that can infiltrate a closed network to lift data from a machine that has been kept completely isolated from the internet or any Wi-Fi connection by using little more than a mobile phone’s FM radio signals. Researcher Mordechai Guri , along with Professor Yuval Elovici of Ben Gurion University, presented the research on Thursday in the 9th IEEE International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software ( MALCON 2014 ) held at Denver. This new technology is kno...

If you are fan of the largest social networking site Facebook, but also want to remain anonymous while using your Facebook account, then there is really a Good news for you. Facebook on Friday began offering a way for security and Privacy conscious users to connect to its social networking service using the anonymizing service running on the Tor networ k, by launching a .onion address. This is really a historic move of the social network. Tor Browser is an open source project, launched in 2002, designed to increase the anonymity of your activities on the Internet by not sharing your identifying information such as your IP address and physical location with websites and your service providers. Browsing and data exchange over a network is made through encrypted connections between computers. The social network just created a special URL – https://facebookcorewwwi.onion – that will allow users running Tor-enabled browsers to connect Facebook’s Core WWW Infrastructure. Hidden service...

The co-founder of The Pirate Bay torrent site Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (Anakata) and his 21-year-old Danish co-defendant have been found guilty by a Danish court of hacking into systems operated by American IT giant CSC and illegally downloading files. It was the biggest hacking case ever conducted in the history of Denmark . By breaking into the servers maintained by CSC, Svartholm Warg illegally accessed police email accounts and stolen email addresses and passwords of over 10,000 policemen, explored the European border control database, and downloaded millions of social security numbers belonging to Danish citizens. The initial hack attack took place for about six months. " This is the largest hacking case to date. The crime is very serious, and this must be reflected in the sentence, " Prosecutor Maria Cingali said. Gottfrid Svartholm allegedly committed the crime along with his his 21-year-old co-defendant between February and August 2012. His co-defendant ...

Nearly a decade-long cyber espionage group that targeted a variety of Eastern European governments and security-related organizations including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been exposed by a security research firm. The US intelligence firm FireEye released its latest Advanced Persistent Threat ( APT ) report on Tuesday which said that the cyber attacks targeting various organisations would be of the interest to Russia, and " may be " sponsored by the Russian government. The Report entitled " APT28: A Window Into Russia's Cyber Espionage Operations " published by FireEye has " evidence of long-standing, focused operations that indicate a government sponsor - specifically, a government based in Moscow. " " Despite rumours of the Russian government's alleged involvement in high-profile government and military cyber attacks, there has been little hard evidence of any link to cyber espionage, " Dan McWhort...

The open-source Wget application which is most widely used on Linux and Unix systems for retrieving files from the web has found vulnerable to a critical flaw. GNU Wget is a command-line utility designed to retrieve files from the Web using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP, the most widely used Internet protocols. Wget can be easily installed on any Unix-like system and has been ported to many environments, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, OpenVMS, MorphOS and AmigaOS. When a recursive directory fetch over FTP server as the target, it would let an attacker " create arbitrary files, directories or symbolic links " due to a symlink flaw. IMPACT OF SYMLINK ATTACK " It was found that wget was susceptible to a symlink attack which could create arbitrary files, directories or symbolic links and set their permissions when retrieving a directory recursively through FTP ," developer Vasyl Kaigorodov wrote in a Red Hat Bugzilla comment . A remote unauthentica...

China’s number one — and the world’s 3rd largest — smartphone manufacturer, Xiaomi , which is trying to make inroads into India’s booming mobile phone market, was found secretly sending users’ personal data , including IMEI numbers, phone numbers and text messages to the web servers back to Beijing in China. INDIA AND TAIWAN vs XIAOMI This issue raised higher concerns across many countries, proactively in India, Singapore and Taiwan. The Indian Air Force (IAF) — among the largest in the world — warned its employees and their belongings that their private information was being shipped over to servers in China, and asked them to avoid using Xiaomi smartphones due to security risk. Taiwanese Government underlined similar concerns before Xiaomi’s launch in India. Xiaomi is facing an investigation in Taiwan for alleged cyber security threat, as a result of which last month the Taiwanese government decided to ban the company due to several privacy controversies. When i...