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Raphael Mudge (Creator of Cobalt Strike ) announced Another Advance Payload for Cobalt Strike called " Beacon ". In a conversation with The Hacker News  Raphael said " A big gap in the penetration tester's toolbox are covert command and control options, especially for long engagements. Beacon is a new feature in Cobalt Strike to remedy this problem ." Cobalt Strikes's graphical user interface offers direct control of the 700+ exploits and advanced features in the open source Metasploit Framework. Beacon is a Cobalt Strike payload for long-term asynchronous command and control of compromised hosts. It works like other Metasploit Framework payloads. You may embed it into an executable, add it to a document, or deliver it with a client-side exploit. Beacon downloads tasks using HTTP requests. You may configure Beacon to connect to multiple domains. For extra stealth, Beacon may use DNS requests to check if a task is available. This limits the comm...

Researchers at Security Explorations disclosed a new vulnerability in Java that could provide an attacker with control of a victim's computer. The researchers have confirmed that Java SE 5 – Update 22, Java SE 6 – Update 35, and Java SE 7 Update 7 running on fully patched Windows 7 32-bit operating systems are susceptible to the attack. This Flaw allowing a malicious hackers to gain complete control of a victim’s machine through a rigged website. The affected web browsers are Safari 5.1.7, Opera 12.02, Chrome 21.0.1180.89, Firefox 15.0.1, and Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421. Though Oracle released a fix for the most critical vulnerabilities reported by Security Explorations on August 30th, the security firm quickly found another flaw in that fix that would allow a hacker to bypass the patch. That bug in Oracle’s patch still hasn’t been patched, leaving users vulnerable to both the new flaw and the previous attack. “ We hope that news about one billion users of Oracle Java SE so...

A Romanian researcher - Radu Drăgușin  found that 100000 usernames and passwords of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) was stored in plaint-text on a publicly accessible FTP server. According to him, on Sept. 18 he first discovered a log with usernames and passwords in plaintext, publicly available via IEEE's FTP server for at least a month. He informed them of his find yesterday, and evidently the organization is addressing the issue. On the FTP server, according Dragusin were the logfiles for the offers and ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org - Total data to approximately 376 million HTTP requests. Including 411,308 log entries with login and password in plain text. Among the users who's information was exposed are researchers at NASA, Stanford, IBM, Google, Apple, Oracle and Samsung. IEEE's membership of over 340,000 is roughly half American (49.8 percent as of 2011). " IEEE suffered a data breach which I discovered on September 18. For a few da...

A security issue has been reported in phpMyAdmin, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a vulnerable system. The security issue is caused due to the distribution of a compromised phpMyAdmin source code package containing a backdoor, which can be exploited to e.g. execute arbitrary PHP code. One of the SourceForge.net mirrors, namely cdnetworks-kr-1, was being used to distribute a modified archive of phpMyAdmin, which includes a backdoor. This backdoor is located in file server_sync.php and allows an attacker to remotely execute PHP code. Another file, js/cross_framing_protection.js, has also been modified. SourceForge.Net is the world's largest open source software development website. A very large impact on the domestic users with this incident. The vulnerability has been cataloged as being a critical one. A screenshot as shown of a system containing a malicious backdoor that was snuck into the open-source phpMyAdmin package. On official website in issue ...

Symantec is looking into claims more of its products’ source code has been leaked online, following a similar incident earlier this year. This time source code from Norton Utilities 2006 was reportedly leaked on The Pirate Bay by Anonymous member STUN. " As you all see its fully 7z packed content, whats in it!? The loosely Source Code of Norton Utilities 2006 made by one of the worse security vendors on planet earth, Symantec! Also as many of you know this was planned back before Sabu was arrested. Yeah McAfee you suck too! " says the accompanying text. The security vendor then admitted its servers had been hacked, but maintained it was unlikely its customers were affected by the leak. Symantec said it was investigating it. “Symantec is one of the most visible targets in the world for cyber attacks on a daily basis. We take each and every claim very seriously and have a process in place for investigating each incident,” a spokesperson said, in an emailed statement sent to...