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Windows 10 here, Windows 10 there, and it is everywhere. This is exactly what Microsoft dreamed of, and it seems like the company is actively working to reach its One Billion goal by the end of 2017 or mid-2018. Proudly announcing its first huge success, Microsoft reported that its newest Windows 10 operating system is now officially installed on more than 200 Million devices worldwide since its launch five months ago. Windows 10 is the latest as well as the greatest operating system from Microsoft that took less than six months to hit 200 Million milestone. The growth is really impressive, and Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Windows and Devices Yusuf Mehdi outlined other milestones for Windows 10 in a blog post on Monday. Here's the list: Windows 10's adoption is growing 140% faster than Windows 7 and over 400% faster than Windows 8. More than 40% of the new Windows 10 devices were activated since Black Friday. Over 11 Billion hours have b...

Here's New Year's first Ransomware: Ransom32 . A new Ransomware-as-a-service, dubbed Ransom32 , has been spotted that for the first time uses a ransomware written in JavaScript to infect Mac, Windows as well as Linux machines. Ransom32 allows its operators to deploy the malware very quickly and easily. It has a dashboard that enables operators to designate their Bitcoin addresses to which the ransom can be sent. The dashboard also shows stats about how much Bitcoins they have made. In short, this new ransomware-as-a-service is so simple, and efficient at the same time, that anyone can download and distribute his/her own copy of the ransomware executable as long as he/she have a Bitcoin address. The copy of Ransom32 was first analysed by Emsisoft, which found that the new ransomware family, which embedded in a self-extracting WinRAR archive, is using the NW.js platform for infiltrating the victims' computers, and then holding their files by encrypting the...

A British-educated businessman who later joined Islamic State (ISIS) militant group in Syria has been killed in a US drone strike. Siful Haque Sujan , a Bangladesh-born man, was killed on 10 December 2015 by a US drone strike near Raqqa, Syria. Sujan has been described as one of the ISIS's top computer hackers who also coordinated anti-surveillance technology and weapons development by a senior United States Army official. A statement issued by Army Col. Steve Warren , a spokesman from Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, via CENTCOM (United States Central Command) reads : "Sujan was an external operations planner and a United Kingdom-educated computer systems engineer. Sujan supported ISIS hacking efforts, anti-surveillance technology and weapons development. Now that he is dead, ISIL has lost a key link between networks." The 31-year-old man not just suspected of running a global money-laundering ring for ISIS from his former base i...

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...

Tibet is an area in the Republic of China that has been the point of conflict for many years in China. While China believes that Tibet has been under Chinese rule for many centuries, Tibetans claim that they declared itself an independent republic in 1912. Tibetan Groups, especially pro-democracy activists, are being repeatedly targeted by persistent Cyber Attacks by Chinese State-sponsored hackers. Our Sources in Tibetan Community told The Hacker News that they are once again being targeted by Chinese hackers; this time their social network website. Chinese hackers are believed to have targeted a Tibetan only social networking site, unitib.com ( United Tibet ) as Beijing views the platform as a threat promoting free Tibet movement. The Unitib technical team sought assistance from Taiwanese and Indian security experts after they were forced to take the platform offline for few days due to the attack. Tashi, a member of the technical team at Unitib told The Hac...

What's the coolest part of the Iron Man movies? The hyper-intelligent Artificial Intelligence that helps Tony Stark by doing data analysis, charging his armor, presenting information at crucial times and doing other business operations. That's right — we are talking about J.A.R.V.I.S. , Iron Man's personal assistant. We all dream of having one of its kinds, and even Facebook's Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has ambitions to live more like Iron Man's superhero Tony Stark. While disclosing his 2016 resolution via a Facebook post on Sunday, Zuckerberg revealed that he is planning to build his own Artificial Intelligence to help him run his home and assist him at office — similar to Iron Man's digital butler Edwin Jarvis . "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," Zuckerberg wrote in his Facebook post . "I'll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home — music, lights, tempe...

Hackers enjoy much playing with PlayStation and Xbox, rather than playing on them. And this time, they have done some crazy things with Sony's PlayStation gaming console. It appears that a console-hacking that goes by the name of Fail0verflow have managed to hack PlayStation 4 (PS4) to run a Linux kernel-based operating system. Fail0verflow announced this week that they successfully cracked the PlayStation 4 and managed to install a full version of Linux on the system, turning the PlayStation 4 into a real PC . With this latest PS4 hack, the console-hacking group gave the homebrew software community hope that Sony's popular game console will soon become a valuable tool in their arsenal. Group Managed to Run Game Boy Advance and Pokémon on PS4 What's even more interesting? The hacking group didn't stop with Linux. The group also managed to install an emulator for the Game Boy Advance and a version of Pokémon , dubbing it the "PlayStat...

Following in the footsteps of Twitter, Facebook and Google, Microsoft promises to notify users of its e-mail ( Outlook ) and cloud storage ( OneDrive ) services if government hackers may have targeted their accounts. The company already notifies users if an unauthorized person tries to access their Outlook or OneDrive accounts. But from now on, the company will also inform if it suspects government-sponsored hackers. Ex-Employee: Microsoft Didn't Notify When China Spied Tibetans Leaders The move could be taken in the wake of the claims made by Microsoft's former employees that several years ago Chinese government hacked into more than a thousand Hotmail email accounts of international leaders of Tibetan and Uighur minorities , but the company decided not to tell the victims, allowing the hackers to continue their campaign. Instead of alerting those leaders of the hacking attempts, Microsoft simply recommended them to change their passwords without disclosi...

Ian Murdock , the founder the Debian Linux operating system and the creator of apt-get, has passed away. Yes, it is very sad to announce that Ian Murdock is not between us. His death has touched the entire software community. He was just 42. The announcement of Murdock death came out via a blog post on Docker website, where Murdock was working as a member of the technical staff. The cause of death is unclear at present, but Murdock tweeted the same day that he would commit suicide that night. His Twitter account had since been deleted. However, at that time, some people speculated that Murdock's account had been hacked and that the tweets were not by him. Murdock posted some Tweets  on Monday suggesting he had been involved in a police case and has been beaten by the police and charged with battery. However, neither Docker, nor the San Francisco Police Department immediately commented on Murdock's actual cause of death. Murdock developed Debian in ...

Google appears to be no longer using Java application programming interfaces (APIs) from Oracle in future versions of its Android mobile operating system, and switching to an open source alternative instead. Google will be making use of OpenJDK – an open source version of Oracle's Java Development Kit (JDK) – for future Android builds. This was first highlighted by a "mysterious Android codebase commit" submitted to Hacker News. However, Google confirmed to VentureBeat that the upcoming Android N will use OpenJDK, rather its own implementation of the Java APIs. Google and Oracle have been fighting it out for years in a lawsuit, and it is hard to imagine that such a massive change is not related to the search engine giant's ongoing legal dispute with Oracle, however. What Google and Oracle are Fighting About The dispute started when Oracle sued Google for copyright in 2010, claiming that Google improperly used a part of its programming language...

The non-profit organization behind TOR – the largest online anonymity network that allows people to hide their real identity online – will soon be launching a " Bug Bounty Program " for researchers who find loopholes in Tor apps. The bounty program was announced during the recurring ' State of the Onion' talk by Tor Project at Chaos Communication Congress held in Hamburg, Germany. Bug bounty programs are cash rewards gave by companies or organizations to white hat hackers and researchers who hunt for serious security vulnerabilities in their website or products and then responsibly disclose them. Bug bounties are designed to encourage security researchers and hackers to responsibly report the vulnerabilities they discovered, rather than exploiting it. Here's what one of the founders of the Tor Project, Nick Mathewson , said about the bug bounty program as reported by Motherboard: "We are grateful to the people who have looked at ou...

North Korea has its own homegrown computer operating system that looks remarkably just like Apple's OS X, which not only prevents potential foreign hacking attempts but also provides extensive surveillance capabilities. Two German researchers have just conducted an in-depth analysis of the secretive state's operating system and found that the OS does more than what is known about it. Dubbed Red Star OS , the operating system based on a Linux 2009 version called Fedora 11 limits its users to a government-approved view of the world and has the tendency to ' watermark ' files on USB sticks to track user's shuttling contraband material. Red Star OS Tracks User's Every Move In short, whenever a user inserts a USB storage device containing photos, videos or other documents, into a computer running Red Star, the OS takes the current hard disk's serial number, encrypts that number, and writes that encrypted serial into the file, marking it. The p...

Washington State Department of Corrections (DoC) is facing an investigation after it early released around 3,200 prisoners over the course of 13 years , since 2002, when a bug was introduced in the software used to calculate time credits for inmates' good behavior. The software glitch led to a miscalculation of sentence reductions that US prisoners were receiving for their good behaviour. Over the next 13 years, the median number of days of those released early from prison was 49 days before their correct release date. "This problem was allowed to continue for 13 years is deeply disappointing to me, totally unacceptable and, frankly, maddening," Washington State Governor Jay Inslee said in a statement . "I've [many] questions about how and why this happened, and I understand that members of the public will have those same queries." What's the Bug and How did it Remain Undetected for 13 Years? The issue lies in DoC software that is...

A former employee of Russian search engine Yandex allegedly stole the source code and key algorithms for its search engine site and then attempted to sell them on the black market to fund his own startup. Russian publication Kommersant reports that Dmitry Korobov downloaded a type of software nicknamed " Arcadia " from Yandex's servers, which contained highly critical information, including the source code and some of the "key algorithms," of its search engine. Korobov then tried to sell the stolen codes to an electronics retailer called NIX, where a friend of his allegedly worked, and on the dark underground market in search of potential buyers. But What's the Punchline? The funniest part is that Korobov requested only $25,000 and 250,000 rubles (a total of almost $29,000) for Yandex's source code and algorithms, which actually cost "Billions of Rubles," or somewhere near $15 Million USD . However, Korobov was arrest...

Have you recently purchased a Windows computer? Congratulations! As your new Windows computer has inbuilt disk encryption feature that is turned on by default in order to protect your data in case your device is lost or stolen. Moreover, In case you lost your encryption keys then don't worry, Microsoft has a copy of your Recovery Key. But Wait! If Microsoft already has your Disk Encryption Keys then what's the use of using disk encryption feature? Doesn't Encryption mean Only you can unlock your disk ? Microsoft Probably Holds your Encryption Keys Since the launch of Windows 8.1, Microsoft is offering disk encryption as a built-in feature for Windows laptops, Windows phones and other devices. However, there is a little-known fact, highlighted by The Intercept, that if you have logged into Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your system had automatically uploaded a copy of your recovery key to Microsoft's servers secretly, and you can't pre...

The Adobe Flash Player just said goodbye to the year with another bunch of vulnerability patches. Adobe released an out-of-band security update on Monday to address Nineteen ( 19 ) vulnerabilities in its Flash Player, including one ( CVE-2015-8651 ) that is being exploited in the wild. All the programming loopholes could be abused to execute malicious code (here malicious Flash file on a web page) on victims' computers in order to hijack an unpatched PC or Mac entirely. So, if you are running the Flash Player plugin on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or Chrome OS, it is time for you to upgrade your system as soon as possible before criminals start taking advantage of the bugs. Here're the details of the Flash's 19 security vulnerabilities patched in the emergency APSB16-01 update posted Monday afternoon: A Type Confusion Vulnerability that could lead to arbitrary code execution ( CVE-2015-8644 ) An Integer Overflow Vulnerability that also leads to code e...

BREAKING: A misconfigured database has resulted in the exposure of around 191 Million voter records including voters' full names, their home addresses, unique voter IDs, date of births and phone numbers. The database was discovered on December 20th by Chris Vickery , a white hat hacker, who was able to access over 191 Million Americans' personal identifying information (PII) that are just sitting in the public to be found by anyone looking for it. Vickery is the same security researcher who uncovered personal details of 13 Million MacKeeper users two weeks ago, which included names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, IP addresses, phone numbers, and system information. However, the recent discovery made him shocked when he saw his own information in the database, according to DataBreaches.net, whom the researcher contacted and provided all the details about his finding. 300GB Trove of Voters' Information Leaked Vickery has his hands on all ...

Some of Bitcoin's Core developers have left the Bitcoin project and started building their separate cryptocurrency called DECRED . Decred aims to prevent the issues Bitcoin is currently facing regarding project governance and development funding. CEO of ' Company 0 ', Mr. Jacob Yocom-Piatt , who has funded Bitcoin development since early 2013, said the actual development of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency is funded by external entities that forms a conflict of interests between the groups and the project's core developers. According to Bitcoin's developers, these group puts limitations on input in Bitcoin's governance, selecting options that are favorable to their own interests only, and generally ignoring the developers' and project's best interests. "The Bitcoin software is controlled by a small group of people who decide exclusively what can and cannot be changed," Jacob says in a press release . "This is in part due to a la...

If you rely on encrypted services to keep your data private and, unfortunately, you are in China, then you are about to be worried. As of now Chinese government could snoop into the operations of technology companies as well as circumvent privacy protections in everyday gadgets. China So-called Anti-Terrorism Law Despite months of objections from major technology firms and concerns over human rights… China passed its controversial new anti-terrorism law on Sunday that requires tech companies to help decrypt information or hand over encryption keys to officials when they want to spy on someone's communication in order to counter terror operations. However, the officials swear that the law wouldn't require technology firms to install " backdoors " in their products, but it doesn't make any difference when the government mandate companies operating in China to provide encryption keys and passwords when requested. Just like recent propo...

The Raspberry Pi is now gaining attention from malware distributors who want the popular mini-computers to deliver with pre-install malware. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has made a shocking revelation that the charitable foundation has been offered money to install malware onto the Raspberry Pi machines before they were shipped out to users. The Raspberry Pi is an extremely simple computer that looks and feels very basic, but could be built into many geeky projects. Due to the low-cost appeal of the Raspberry Pi, the Foundation has sold over 4 million units. Just Last month, Raspberry Pi unveiled its latest wonder: The Raspberry Pi Zero – a programmable computer that costs just $5 (or £4), may rank as the world's cheapest computer. Last Wednesday, the Foundation tweeted a screenshot of an email in which " business officer"  Linda effectively asked Foundation's director of communications Liz Uptonto to install a suspicious executable file onto Ras...

Raise your hands if you want Free Video Calling feature in WhatsApp. I am in, and I think most of you people. And the good news is that it looks like WhatsApp's much-awaited Free Video Calling feature is on its way, according to the recently leaked screenshots. Free Video Calling Feature in WhatsApp German technology blog Macerkopf.de has posted what it claims are screenshots from an unreleased version of the popular messaging client WhatsApp for iOS. The screenshots are from an unreleased version of the software ( version 2.12.16.2 ), which is currently being tested internally, but at present it is not clear whether or not those screenshots are legitimate. But, if the leaked screenshots are real, and WhatsApp adds the Free Video Calling feature , then the company could take an enormous bite out of some of its top rival. WhatsApp Video Calling feature will allow you to make video calls to your friends and family anywhere in the world for free as l...