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Github – a popular coding website used by programmers to collaborate on software development – was hit by a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for more than 24 hours late Thursday night. It seems like when users from outside countries visit different websites on the Internet that serve advertisements and tracking code from Chinese Internet giant Baidu , the assailants on Chinese border quietly inject malicious JavaScript code into the pages of those websites. The code instructs browsers of visitors to those websites to rapidly connect to GitHub.com every two seconds in a way that visitors couldn't smell, creating "an extremely large amount of traffic," according to a researcher who goes by the name A nthr@x . "A certain device at the border of China's inner network and the Internet has hijacked the HTTP connections went into China, replaced some JavaScript files from Baidu with malicious ones," A nthr@x wrote at Insight La...

Google want to save its users' bandwidth at home. The company has released a " Data Saver extension for Chrome , " bringing its data compression feature for its desktop users for the first time. While tethering to a mobile Hotspot for Internet connection for your laptop, this new Data Saver extension for Chrome helps you reduce bandwidth usage by compressing the pages you visit over the Internet. If you are unaware of it, the data compression proxy service by Google is designed to save users' bandwidth, load pages faster, and increase security (by checking for malicious web pages) on your smartphones and tablets. REDUCE AS MUCH AS 50% OF DATA USAGE  Until now, the data compression service has been meant to benefit only mobile users, but the latest Data Saver Chrome Extension aims at helping desktop users by reducing their data usage by as much as 50 percent. " Reduces data usage [bandwidth] by using Google servers to optimize pages you visit,...

There is no end to users problem when it comes to security. Everything is easily hackable — from home wireless routers to the large web servers that leak users' personal data into the world in one shot. If you love to travel and move hotels to hotels, then you might be dependent on free Wi-Fi network to access the Internet. However, next time you need to be extra cautious before connecting to Hotel's Wi-Fi network, as it may expose you to hackers. Security researchers have unearthed a critical flaw in routers that many hotel chains depend on for distributing Wi-Fi networks. The security vulnerability could allow a hacker to infect guests with malware, steal or monitor personal data sent over the network, and even gain access to the hotel's keycard systems and reservation. HACKING GUEST WIFI ROUTER Several models of InnGate routers manufactured by ANTlabs, a Singapore firm, have a security weakness in the authentication mechanism of the firmware. The se...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Yesterday at its annual F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco, Facebook officially turned its Messenger app into a Platform. Facebook's Messenger Platform allows third-party app developers to integrate their apps with Facebook messenger app. However, other popular messaging apps are already offering similar features, like Chinese WeChat, but Facebook release is much bigger than any other platform. At F8 Developer Conference, Facebook released SDK v4.0 for iOS and Android along with Graph API v2.3 that enable app developers to add new messenger platform features to their custom apps quickly. Facebook users can install these compatible third-party apps from the messenger app, which offers users to send animated GIFs, images, videos, and more content within the Facebook Messenger app easily. BOON FOR BOTH FACEBOOK AND THIRD PARTY DEVELOPERS Facebook Messenger Platform will offer third party app developers to reach out Facebook's 600 Millions of users. So, the move will be a ...

Security researcher has discovered some new features in the most dangerous Vawtrak , aka Neverquest , malware that allow it to send and receive data through encrypted favicons distributed over the secured Tor network . The researcher, Jakub Kroustek from AVG anti-virus firm, has provided an in-depth analysis ( PDF ) on the new and complex set of features of the malware which is considered to be one of the most dangerous threats in existence. Vawtrak is a sophisticated piece of malware in terms of supported features. It is capable of stealing financial information and executing transactions from the compromised computer remotely without leaving traces. The features include videos and screenshots capturing and launching man-in-the-middle attacks. HOW VAWTRAK SPREADS ? AVG anti-virus firm is warning users that it has discovered an ongoing campaign delivering Vawtrak to gain access to bank accounts visited by the victim and using the infamous Pony module in order to ste...

An air-gapped computer system isolated from the Internet and other computers that are connected to external networks believes to be the most secure computers on the planet -- Yeah?? You need to think again before calling them 'safe'. A group of Israeli security researchers at the Cyber Security Labs from Ben Gurion University have found a new technique to hack ultra-secure air-gapped computers and retrieve data using only heat emissions and a computer's built-in thermal sensors. WHAT IS AIR-GAPPED COMPUTERS ? Air-gapped computers or systems are considered to be the most secure and safest computer systems. These systems are isolated from the Internet or any other commuters that are connected to the Internet or external network. Air-gapped systems are used in situations that demand high security because it's very difficult to siphon data from these systems, as it requires a physical access to the machine which is possible by using removable device such as a U...

The Supreme Court of India today struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act -- a controversial law that allowed law enforcement officials to arrest people for posting "offensive" comments on social networks and other internet sites. After hearing a clutch of petitions by defenders of free speech, the Supreme Court described the 2009 amendment to India's Information Technology Act known as section 66A as vague and ambiguous and beyond ambit of the constitutional right to freedom of speech. " Section 66A is unconstitutional and we have no hesitation in striking it down, " said Justice R F Nariman, reading out the judgement. " The public's right to know is directly affected by section 66A. " SECTION 66A OF THE IT ACT The Information Technology Act 2000 was amended in the year 2008 and this amended act contains the 66A section. Under this section, " Any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communi...

A critical vulnerability in the firmware of Cisco small business phones lets an unauthenticated attacker to remotely eavesdrop on private conversation and make phone calls from vulnerable devices without needing to authenticate, Cisco warned. LISTEN AND MAKE PHONE CALLS REMOTELY The vulnerability ( CVE-2015-0670 ) actually resides in the default configuration of certain Cisco IP phones is due to " improper authentication ", which allows hackers to remotely eavesdrop on the affected devices by sending specially crafted XML request. Moreover, the vulnerability could be exploited by hackers to make phone calls remotely from the vulnerable phones as well as to carry out other attacks by making use of the information gathered through the audio interception activity. AFFECTED DEVICES The devices affects the Cisco's small business SPA300 and SPA500 Internet Protocol (IP) phones running firmware version 7.5.5, however, Cisco alerts that later versions of these...

You might be not aware of the companies that know pretty much everything related to your email activities like when you've opened email sent by one of their clients, where you are located, what device you're using, what link you click, all without your consent, even if you haven't click any link provided in that email. Companies like Yesware , Bananatag, and Streak track emails , usually by adding small pixels or images to those emails which inform the companies that when and where their emails have been opened by the recipients. If you find this something different then let you know that this sort of email tracking is very common practice adopted by many companies. However, in order to detect these tracking emails, now you have a simple but effective tool. UGLY EMAIL -- DETECT EMAIL TRACKERS Dubbed " Ugly Email ", a new Chrome extension warns you when an email you receive in your Gmail inbox have the ability to track you, and it even works before opening t...

A new and terribly awful breed of Point-of-Sale (POS) malware has been spotted in the wild by the security researchers at Cisco's Talos Security Intelligence & Research Group that the team says is more sophisticated and nasty than previously seen Point of Sale malware. The Point-of-Sale malware, dubbed " PoSeidon ", is designed in a way that it has the capabilities of both the infamous Zeus banking Trojan and BlackPOS malware which robbed Millions from US giant retailers, Target in 2013 and Home Depot in 2014. PoSeidon malware scrapes memory from Point of Sale terminals to search for card number sequences of principal card issuers like Visa, MasterCard, AMEX and Discover, and goes on using the Luhn algorithm to verify that credit or debit card numbers are valid. The malware then siphon the captured credit card data off to Russian (.ru) domains for harvesting and likely resale, the researchers say. "PoSeidon is another in the growing number ...

The Annual Pwn2Own Hacking Competition  2015 held in Vancouver is over and participants from all over the world nabbed $557,500 in bug bounties for 21 critical bugs in top four web browsers as well as Windows OS, Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash. During the second and final day of this year's hacking contest, the latest version of all the four major browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari, were compromised by the two security researchers. Sponsored by HP's Zero Day Initiative program, the Pwn2Own Hacking Competition ran two days at a security conference in Vancouver, Canada. The final highlights for Pwn2Own 2015 are quite impressive: 5 bugs in the Windows operating system 4 bugs in Internet Explorer 11 3 bugs in Mozilla Firefox 3 bugs in Adobe Reader 3 bugs in Adobe Flash 2 bugs in Apple Safari 1 bug in Google Chrome $557,500 USD bounty paid out to researchers The star of the show was South Korean ...

Another popular WordPress plugin by Yoast has been found to be vulnerable to a critical flaw that could be exploited by hackers to hijack the affected website. The critical vulnerability actually resides in the highly popular Google Analytics by Yoast plugin, which allows WordPress admins to monitor website traffic by connecting the plugin to their Google Analytics account. The Google Analytics by Yoast WordPress plugin has been downloaded nearly 7 Million times with more than 1 million active installs, which makes the issue rather more serious. A week back, we reported that all the versions of ' WordPress SEO by Yoast ' was vulnerable to Blind SQL Injection web application vulnerability that allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary payload on the victim WordPress site in order to take control of it. However, the Google Analytics by Yoast plugin is vulnerable to persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that allows hackers to execute malicious PHP code on the server, whic...

If you're currently on a Mac computer and using a Chrome browser then a weird little Apple's OS X quirk, just a special thirteen-characters string could cause your tab in Chrome to crash instantly. A string of 13 characters (appear to be in Assyrian ), shown below in an image, is all needed to crash any tab in Chrome for OS X, however, this text has no impact on Windows, Android, or iOS operating systems. This Chrome crash vulnerability has already been reported by an open-source project Chromium project, which means that Google is likely aware of this troublesome issue. What steps will reproduce the problem? Any page with [ that special character ] will crash the chrome tab on a Mac. Just create any dummy page with the unicode characters, and the Mac Chrome tab will crash hard. What is the expected result? Expect it not to crash What happens instead? It crashes Warning : Do not click on this link , which actually points to the bug report on the Chromiu...

Drupal , one of the widely used open source content management system is recommending its users to update their software to the latest versions 6.35 and 7.35 after the company discovered two moderately critical vulnerabilities that may allow an attacker to hack Drupal websites. According to a security advisory published yesterday, a flaw found in the Drupal core could allow a potential hacker under certain circumstances to bypass security restrictions by forging the password reset URLs. ACCESS BYPASS / PASSWORD RESET URLs VULNERABILITY Successful exploitation of this Access Bypass vulnerability could leverage the hacker to gain unauthorized access to user accounts without knowing their password. This vulnerability is considered as moderately critical in which an attacker can remotely trick a registered user of Drupal based website, such as an administrator, into launching a maliciously crafted URL in an attempt to take control of the target server. AFFECTED DRUPA...

China finally admits it has special cyber warfare units — and a lot of them. From years China has been suspected by U.S. and many other countries for carrying out several high-profile cyber attacks, but every time the country strongly denied the claims. However, for the first time the country has admitted that it does have cyber warfare divisions – several of them, in fact. In the latest updated edition of a PLA publication called The Science of Military Strategy , China finally broke its silence and openly talked about its digital spying and network attack capabilities and clearly stated that it has specialized units devoted to wage war on computer networks. An expert on Chinese military strategy at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, Joe McReynolds told TDB that this is the first time when China has explicit acknowledged that it has secretive cyber-warfare units, on both the military as well as civilian-government sides. CHINESE CYBER WARFARE...

Despite anti-skimmer ATM Lobby access control system available in the market, we have seen a number of incidents in recent years where criminals used card skimmers at ATM doors. Few years back, cyber criminals started using card skimmers on the door of the ATM vestibule , where customers have to slide their credit or debit cards to gain access to the ATM. The typical ATM Skimming devices are used by fraudsters capture both magnetic stripe data contained on the back of a debit or credit card as well as the PIN number that is entered by the customer when using the ATM. In recent case discussed by Brian, cyber criminal installed the card skimming device on the ATM Lobby Card Access Control and a pinhole hidden camera pointed at the ATM's keyboard. Basically, it's an ATM skimmer that requires no modification to the ATM. The card skimmer hidden on the ATM door records the debit and credit card information , and the pinhole camera records the PIN number the ...

If you have enabled automatic Facebook Photo Sync feature on your iPhone, iPad or Android devices, then Beware ! Hackers can steal your personal photographs without your knowledge. In 2012, the social network giant introduced Facebook Photo Sync feature for iPhone, iPad and Android devices which, if opt-in, allows Facebook to automatically sync all your photos saved on your mobile device with your Facebook account. The photos that you have synced from your phone are automatically uploaded in the background to a private Facebook album, which is not visible to any of your Facebook friends or other Facebook users. However, you may can choose then to share photos from the album on your Facebook timeline or send them as a message to a friend. A bug bounty hunter, Laxman Muthiyah , discovered a critical flaw in the Facebook Photo Sync feature and Facebook API that could allow any third-party app to access your personal photos from the hidden Facebook Photo Sync album. It...

Evolution -- The largest Deep Web drugs marketplace, disappeared suddenly overnight from the Internet. But unlike Silk Road, there is no indication that the law enforcement took down the Evolution marketplace. The Darknet's most popular markets for drugs and bespoke carjacking services is mysteriously offline Wednesday with rumours circulating over the Internet that its own administrators may have just scammed its huge user base and stole $12 Millions in Bitcoin. The Evolution black marketplace opened in January 2014, and gained popularity after the shutdown of Silk ​Road and arrest of its unassuming founder, Ross U​lbricht , with a promise of less fraud. Like Silk Road , Evolution also dealt in drugs, as well as illegal weapons, counterfeit goods, stolen credit cards and guides to committing fraud. Evolution was only accessible through anonymity Tor network. At the time of its apparent vanish, Evolution was home to nearly 20,000 drug sales, far more than Silk Road...