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Only after a few days of Uber admitting last year's data breach of 57 million customers , the popular image sharing site disclosed that it had suffered a major data breach in 2014 that compromised email addresses and passwords of 1.7 million user accounts. In a blog post published on Friday, Imgur claimed that the company had been notified of a three-year-old data breach on November 23 when a security researcher emailed the company after being sent the stolen data. Imgur Chief Operating Officer (COO) then alerted the company's founder and the Vice President of Engineering to the issue before began working to validate that the data belonged to Imgur users. After completing the data validation, the company confirmed Friday morning that the 2014 data breach impacted approximately 1.7 million Imgur user accounts (a small fraction of its 150 million user base) and that the compromised information included only email addresses and passwords. Since Imgur has never asked fo...

Earlier this month a cybersecurity researcher shared details of a security loophole with The Hacker News that affects all versions of Microsoft Office, allowing malicious actors to create and spread macro-based self-replicating malware. Macro-based self-replicating malware, which basically allows a macro to write more macros, is not new among hackers, but to prevent such threats, Microsoft has already introduced a security mechanism in MS Office that by default limits this functionality. Lino Antonio Buono, an Italian security researcher who works at InTheCyber , reported a simple technique (detailed below) that could allow anyone to bypass the security control put in place by Microsoft and create self-replicating malware hidden behind innocent-looking MS Word documents. What's Worse? Microsoft refused to consider this issue a security loophole when contacted by the researcher in October this year, saying it's a feature intended to work this way only—just like MS Offic...

Security researchers have discovered a potentially dangerous vulnerability in the firmware of various Hewlett Packard (HP) enterprise printer models that could be abused by attackers to run arbitrary code on affected printer models remotely. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-2750), rated as high in severity with 8.1 CVSS scale, is due to insufficiently validating parts of Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) that allows for the potential execution of arbitrary code remotely on affected 54 printer models. The security flaw affects 54 printer models ranging from HP LaserJet Enterprise, LaserJet Managed, PageWide Enterprise and OfficeJet Enterprise printers. This remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability was discovered by researchers at FoxGlove Security when they were analyzing the security of HP's MFP-586 printer (currently sold for $2,000) and HP LaserJet Enterprise M553 printers (sold for $500). According to a technical write-up posted by FoxGlove on Monday, researchers were able to...

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How many times it has happened to you when you look for something online and the next moment you find its advertisement on almost every other web page or social media site you visit? Web-tracking is not new. Most of the websites log its users' online activities, but a recent study from Princeton University has suggested that hundreds of sites record your every move online, including your searches, scrolling behavior, keystrokes and every movement. Researchers from Princeton University's Centre for Information Technology Policy (CITP) analyzed the Alexa top 50,000 websites in the world and found that 482 sites, many of which are high profile, are using a new web-tracking technique to track every move of their users. Dubbed " Session Replay ," the technique is used even by most popular websites, including The Guardian, Reuters, Samsung, Al-Jazeera, VK, Adobe, Microsoft, and WordPress, to record every single movement a visitor does while navigating a web page,...

Uber is in headlines once again—this time for concealing last year's data breach that exposed personal data of 57 million customers and drivers. On Tuesday, Uber announced that the company suffered a massive data breach in October 2016 that exposed names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers of 57 million Uber riders and drivers along with driver license numbers of around 600,000 drivers. However, instead of disclosing the breach, the company paid $100,000 in ransom to the two hackers who had access to the data in exchange for keeping the incident secret and deleting the information, according to a report published by Bloomberg. Uber said none of its own systems were breached, rather two individuals outside the company inappropriately accessed and downloaded 57 million Uber riders' and drivers' data that was stored on a third-party cloud-based service. The cyberattack exposed the names and driver license numbers of some 600,000 drivers in the United States, and t...

Do you own an Android smartphone? If yes, then you are one of those billions of users whose smartphone is secretly gathering location data and sending it back to Google. Google has been caught collecting location data on every Android device owner since the beginning of this year (that's for the past 11 months)—even when location services are entirely disabled, according to an investigation conducted by Quartz. This location-sharing practice doesn't want your Android smartphone to use any app, or turn on location services, or even have a SIM card inserted. All it wants is to have your Android device to be connected to the Internet. The investigation revealed that Android smartphones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers, and this data could be used for " Cell Tower Triangulation "—a technique widely used to identify the location of a phone/device using data from three or more nearby cell towers. Each time your Android device come...

In past few months, several research groups have uncovered vulnerabilities in the Intel remote administration feature known as the Management Engine (ME) which could allow remote attackers to gain full control of a targeted computer. Now, Intel has admitted that these security vulnerabilities could "potentially place impacted platforms at risk." The popular chipmaker released a security advisory on Monday admitting that its Management Engine (ME), remote server management tool Server Platform Services (SPS), and hardware authentication tool Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) are vulnerable to multiple severe security issues that place millions of devices at risk. The most severe vulnerability (CVE-2017-5705) involves multiple buffer overflow issues in the operating system kernel for Intel ME Firmware that could allow attackers with local access to the vulnerable system to " load and execute code outside the visibility of the user and operating system. " The...

Again some bad news for cryptocurrency users. Tether, a Santa Monica-based start-up that provides a dollar-backed cryptocurrency tokens, has claimed that its systems have been hacked by an external attacker, who eventually stole around $31 million worth of its tokens. With a market capitalization of $673 million, Tether is the world's first blockchain-enabled platform to allow the traditional currency to be used like digital currency. Tether serves as a proxy for the US dollar, Euro (and soon Japanese yen) that can be sent between exchanges including Bitfinex, Poloniex, Omni, GoCoin and other markets. According to an announcement on the company's official website posted today, the unknown hacker stole the tokens (worth $30,950,010) from the Tether Treasury wallet on November 19 and sent them to an unauthorized Bitcoin address. The stolen tokens will not be redeemed, but the company is in the process of attempting token recovery in order to prevent them from enter...

Even after so many efforts by Google for making its Play Store away from malware, shady apps somehow managed to fool its anti-malware protections and infect people with malicious software. A team of researchers from several security firms has uncovered two new malware campaigns targeting Google Play Store users, of which one spreads a new version of BankBot , a persistent family of banking Trojan that imitates real banking applications in efforts to steal users' login details. BankBot has been designed to display fake overlays on legitimate bank apps from major banks around the world, including Citibank, WellsFargo, Chase, and DiBa, to steal sensitive information, including logins and credit card details. With its primary purpose of displaying fake overlays, BankBot has the ability to perform a broad range of tasks, such as sending and intercepting SMS messages, making calls, tracking infected devices, and stealing contacts. Google removed at least four previous versions...

Security researchers have discovered a new, sophisticated form of malware based on the notorious Zeus banking Trojan that steals more than just bank account details. Dubbed Terdot, the banking Trojan has been around since mid-2016 and was initially designed to operate as a proxy to conduct man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, steal browsing information such as stored credit card information and login credentials and injecting HTML code into visited web pages. However, researchers at security firm Bitdefender have discovered that the banking Trojan has now been revamped with new espionage capabilities such as leveraging open-source tools for spoofing SSL certificates in order to gain access to social media and email accounts and even post on behalf of the infected user. Terdot banking trojan does this by using a highly customized man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy that allows the malware to intercept any traffic on an infected computer. Besides this, the new variant of Terdot...

Refuting allegations that its anti-virus product helped Russian spies steal classified files from an NSA employee's laptop, Kaspersky Lab has released more findings that suggest the computer in question may have been infected with malware. Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab on Thursday published the results of its own internal investigation claiming the NSA worker who took classified documents home had a personal home computer overwhelmed with malware. According to the latest Kaspersky report, the telemetry data its antivirus collected from the NSA staffer's home computer contained large amounts of malware files which acted as a backdoor to the PC. The report also provided more details about the malicious backdoor that infected the NSA worker's computer when he installed a pirated version of Microsoft Office 2013 .ISO containing the Mokes backdoor, also known as Smoke Loader. Backdoor On NSA Worker's PC May Have Helped Other Hackers Steal Classi...

The OnePlus Saga Continues… Just a day after the revelation of the hidden Android rooting backdoor pre-installed on most OnePlus smartphones, a security researcher just found another secret app that records tons of information about your phone. Dubbed OnePlusLogKit , the second pre-installed has been discovered by the same Twitter user who goes by the pseudonym " Elliot Alderson " and discovered the controversial " EngineerMode " diagnostic testing application that could be used to root OnePlus devices without unlocking the bootloader. OnePlusLogKit is a system-level application that is capable of capturing a multitude of things from OnePlus smartphones, including: Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth, and GPS location logs, Modem signal and data logs, hot and power issue logs, list of the running processes, list of running service and battery status, media databases, including all your videos and images saved on the device. Unlike EngineerMode (which was found ...

Remember BlueBorne? A series of recently disclosed critical Bluetooth flaws that affect billions of Android, iOS, Windows and Linux devices have now been discovered in millions of AI-based voice-activated personal assistants, including Google Home and Amazon Echo . As estimated during the discovery of this devastating threat, several IoT and smart devices whose operating systems are often updated less frequently than smartphones and desktops are also vulnerable to BlueBorne. BlueBorne is the name given to the sophisticated attack exploiting a total of eight Bluetooth implementation vulnerabilities that allow attackers within the range of the targeted devices to run malicious code, steal sensitive information, take complete control, and launch man-in-the-middle attacks. What's worse? Triggering the BlueBorne exploit doesn't require victims to click any link or open any file—all without requiring user interaction. Also, most security products would likely not be abl...

As governments and enterprises migrate toward controller-based architectures, the role of a core network engineer are evolving and more important than ever. There is a growing number of jobs in Networking, but if you lack behind, you need to pass some certification exams to enter into this industry and get a significant boost in your IT career. If you are looking forward to making career advancement in Networking, then Cisco Certifications — CCNA and CCNP — are one of the most highly reputed entry-level networking certifications in the industry. While CCNA, or Cisco Certified Network Associate, is for entry-level network engineers to maximise their foundational networking knowledge, CCNP or Cisco Certified Network Professional is intended for professionals to implement, maintain and plan Cisco's wide range of high-end network solution products. But how long have you wanted to take CCNA and CCNP training classes to achieve the certifications, only to realise the cost is simpl...

Another day, another data breach. This time a fast-fashion retailer has fallen victim to payment card breach. American clothes retailer Forever 21 announced on Tuesday that the company had suffered a security breach that allowed unknown hackers to gain unauthorized access to data from payment cards used at a number of its retail locations. The Los Angeles based company, which operates over 815 stores in 57 countries, didn't say which of its stores were affected, but it did note that customers who shopped between March and October this year may be affected. Forever 21 learned of the breach after the retailer received a report from a third-party monitoring service, suggesting there may have been "unauthorized access to data from payment cards that were used at certain FOREVER 21 stores." Besides this, the company also revealed that it implemented encryption and token-based authentication systems in 2015 that are intended to protect transaction data on its point-...

You should be extra careful when opening files in MS Office. When the world is still dealing with the threat of 'unpatched' Microsoft Office's built-in DDE feature , researchers have uncovered a serious issue with another Office component that could allow attackers to remotely install malware on targeted computers. The vulnerability is a memory-corruption issue that resides in all versions of Microsoft Office released in the past 17 years, including Microsoft Office 365, and works against all versions of Windows operating system, including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Creators Update. Discovered by the security researchers at Embedi , the vulnerability leads to remote code execution, allowing an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute malicious code on a targeted system without requiring user interaction after opening a malicious document. The vulnerability, identified as  CVE-2017-11882 , resides in EQNEDT32.EXE, an MS Office component which is responsibl...

It's Patch Tuesday—time to update your Windows devices. Microsoft has released a large batch of security updates as part of its November Patch Tuesday in order to fix a total of 53 new security vulnerabilities in various Windows products, 19 of which rated as critical, 31 important and 3 moderate. The vulnerabilities impact the Windows OS, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Scripting Engine, .NET Core, and more. At least four of these vulnerabilities that the tech giant has now fixed have public exploits, allowing attackers to exploit them easily. But fortunately, none of the four are being used in the wild, according to Gill Langston at security firm Qualys . The four vulnerabilities with public exploits identified by Microsoft as CVE-2017-8700 (an information disclosure flaw in ASP.NET Core), CVE-2017-11827 (Microsoft browsers remote code execution), CVE-2017-11848 (Internet Explorer information disclosure) and CVE-2017-11883 (denial of ser...

It is time to give Firefox another chance. The Mozilla Foundation today announced the release of its much awaited Firefox 57 , aka Quantum web browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which claims to defeat Google's Chrome. It is fast. Really fast. Firefox 57 is based on an entirely revamped design and overhauled core that includes a brand new next-generation CSS engine written in Mozilla's Rust programming language, called Stylo. Firefox 57 "Quantum" is the first web browser to utilize the power of multicore processors and offers 2x times faster browsing experience while consuming 30 percent less memory than Google Chrome. Besides fast performance, Firefox Quantum, which Mozilla calls "by far the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004," also brings massive performance improvements with tab prioritization, and significant visual changes with a completely redesigned user interface (UI), called Photon . This new version also adds in support for AMD V...