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A few days back the developers of one of the most advance open source operating system for penetration testing called ' KALI Linux ' announced that they were planning to include " emergency self-destruction of LUKS ". They patched a utility called cryptsetup,  which introduces a self destruction feature that will allow the Kali user to encrypt the full hard disk to make the data inaccessible in an emergency case by entering a secret password at boot time. Offensive Security has finally announced today the release of the latest version i.e. Kali Linux 1.0.6 with Kernel version 3.12, and also added the Self Destruct feature along with many new penetration testing and hacking tools. The new release also includes an ARM image script, that allow the user to build Kali Linux images for various ARM devices. Some more scripts are also added that enables the user to build their own custom Amazon AMI and Google Compute cloud images. If you already have a Kali ...

I think you haven't forgotten the massive data breach occurred at TARGET , the third-largest U.S. Retailer during last Christmas Holidays. People shop during Black Friday sales in which over 40 million Credit & Debit cards were stolen, used to pay for purchases at its 1500 stores nationwide in the U.S. TARGET officially confirmed that the encrypted PINs (personal identification numbers) of payment cards were stolen in the breach, since the stolen pin data were in encrypted form so they were confident that the information was " Safe and Secure ", because PIN cannot be decrypted without the right key. The Breach was caused by a malware attack, that allowed the criminals to manipulate Point of Sale (PoS) systems without raising red flags and the card numbers compromised in the breach are now flooding underground forums for sale. Possibly a group of Eastern European cyber criminals who specializes in attacks on merchants and Point-of-Sale terminals either attached a physical de...

The Military Units that rely on very small aperture terminals (VSATs) for satellite communications in remote areas are vulnerable to cyber attack . Researchers from cyber intelligence company IntelCrawler recently identified nearly 3 million VSATs, many of them in the United States, and found that about 10,000 of them could be easily accessed because of configuration weaknesses. " We have scanned the whole IPv4 address space since 2010 and update the results in our Big Data intelligence database, including details about the satellite operator's network ranges, such as INMARSAT, Asia Broadcast Satellite, VSAT internet iDirect, Satellite HUB Pool, and can see some vulnerabilities, " Researchers have warned that terminals having data transmission rate 4kbps to 16 Mbps used in narrow and broadband data transmission are vulnerable to cyber attack. VSATs are most commonly used to transmit narrowband data such as credit card, polling or RFID data or broadband data for VoIP or ...

The most critical and worst target of a State-sponsored cyber-attack s could be Hospitals, Dams, Dykes and Nuclear power stations and this may cause military conflicts between countries. According to Japan Today , The Monju nuclear power plant in Tsuruga, Japan was accidentally targeted by a malware on 2nd January, when a worker updated the system to the latest version of the video playback program. Monju Nuclear Plant  is a sodium-cooled fast reactor, was launched in April 1994. It has not been operational for most of the past 20 years, after an accident in which a sodium leak caused a major fire. Employees over there are only left with a regular job of company's paperwork and maintenance. So the malware could have stolen only some sensitive documents, emails, training records and employees' data sheets. The Malware command-and-control server suspected to be from South Korea. The malware itself is not much sophisticated like Stuxnet  o...

The Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman ' Patrick Leahy ' reintroduced a revamped version of the " Personal Data Privacy and Security Act " for tough criminal penalties for hackers, that he originally authored in 2005. During last Christmas Holidays, a massive data breach had occurred at the shopping giant  Target,  involving hack of 40 million credit & debit cards, used to pay for purchases at its 1500 stores nationwide in the U.S. Reason: "Target Data Breach? Seriously"?  In a statement, as published below, the Senator wrote: "The recent data breach at Target involving the debit and credit card data of as many as 40 million customers during the Christmas holidays is a reminder that developing a comprehensive national strategy to protect data privacy and cybersecurity remains one of the most challenging and important issues facing our Nation" It seems that the  TARGET Breach  was scheduled, as the best opportunity to ramp u...