The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Hackers have compromised a private e-mail list used by Linux and BSD distributors to share information on embargoed security vulnerabilities and used a backdoor to sniff e-mail traffic, according to the moderator of the list. In a note to “ Vendor-Sec ” members, moderator Marcus Meissner said he noticed the break-in on January 20 but warned that it might have existed for much longer. I have disabled the specific backdoor, but as I am not sure how the break-in happened it might reappear. So I recommend not mailing embargoed issues to vendor-sec@….de at this time. Immediately after Meissner’s warning e-mail, the attacker re-entered the compromised machine and destroyed the installation. The “Vendor-Sec” list is used by distributors of free/open-source OS and software to discuss potential distribution element (kernel, libraries, applications) security vulnerabilities, as well as to co-ordinate the release of security updates by members. This means that a compromise and the captu...

A vulnerability that a researcher planned to use to compromise an Android cellphone at a hacking contest later this week got squashed after Google fixed the underlying bug in the Android Market. Scio Security CTO Jon Oberheide notified Google of the XSS, or cross-site scripting, bug in the application bazaar because he didn't believe the vulnerability would qualify under terms of the Pwn2Own contest that is scheduled to start on Wednesday. The “incredibly low-hanging naive persistent XSS” allowed attackers to to remotely install malicious apps on Android handsets by tricking users into clicking a link on their phones or computer browsers while logged into a Google account. Oberheide later learned that the vulnerability didn't run afoul of contest rules, allowing him to collect $15,000 and a free handset if he was successful. But he recently discovered Google closed the security hole. The $1,337 awarded to Oberheide under Google's bug bounty program, is little consolati...

In coordination with Metasploit Express and Metasploit Pro, version 3.6 of the Metasploit Framework is now available. Hot on the heels of 3.5.2, this release comes with 8 new exploits and 12 new auxiliaries. A whopping 10 of those new auxiliary modules are Chris John Riley's foray into SAP, giving you the ability to extract a range of information from servers' management consoles via the SOAP interface. This release fixes an annoying installer bug on Linux where Postgres would not automatically start on reboot. The feature I am most excited about is the new Post Exploitation support. I hinted at this new module type in the 3.5.2 release announcement and with 3.6, more than 20 new modules are available. Post modules are a new, more powerful, replacement for meterpreter scripts. Scripts were clearly tied to a single platform: meterpreter for Windows. With modules it is much easier to abstract common tasks into libraries for any platform that can expose a session. For example, f...

Tor 0.2.1.30 fixes a variety of less critical bugs. The main other change is a slight tweak to Tor's TLS handshake that makes relays and bridges that run this new version reachable from Iran again. We don't expect this tweak will win the arms race long-term, but it buys us time until we roll out a better solution. Complete Release description : Click Here Click Here to Download

After recovering from the largest Distributed Denial of Service attack in the service’s history (“multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second”) yesterday morning, blog host WordPress.com was attacked again very early this morning, finally stabilizing its service at 11:15 UTC (around 3:15 am PST). WordPress.com hosts over 30 million blogs, many of them news sites like our own, which lead some to conjecture that the attacks had come from the Middle East, a region experiencing its own Internet issues at the moment. Not so says Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg, who tells me that 98% of the attacks over the past two days originated in China with a small percentage coming from Japan and Korea. According to Mullenweg one of the targeted sites was a Chinese-language site operating on WordPress.com which also appears to be blocked on Baidu, China’s major search engine. WordPress doesn’t know exactly why the site was targeted and won’t release the name until it ...