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The New Year begins with a new form of amplified Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack, a weapon for attackers to bring down websites and servers. As we have reported two weeks ago that the attackers are abusing the Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers to perform an amplified version of DDoS Attack on various targets across the world. Earlier this week a number of popular Gaming services, including League of Legends, EA.com and Battle.net from Blizzard were taken down by similar DDoS attack . 'Network Time Protocol (NTP)' is a distributed network clock time synchronization protocol that is used to synchronize computer clock times in a network of computers and runs over port 123 UDP. " The attacker sends a small spoofed 8-byte UDP packets are sent to the vulnerable NTP Server that requests a large amount of data (megabytes worth of traffic) be sent to the DDoS's target IP Address.  "Security Researcher, Wang Wai  detailed  in a previous article on 'The ...

In this era of Computers and Smartphones, where we are connected to the Internet every second and use it almost for everything. For an Internet connection, one has to plug a device called Router between the ISP (Internet Service Provider) and device. Some Routers are available with USB option, where you can attach an external Hard Disk that allows files to be stored and retrieved across a computer network. Asus one of the largest IT hardware manufacturer providing these kind of devices by which you can connect to the internet and make your external hard disk available on the Internet as FTP server just by configuring AiDisk utility from the router's administrator panel.  Many ASUS Routers have this feature available, including models: RT-N66U, RT-N56U, RT-N15U, RT-N65U, RT-AC66U, DSL-N55U and RT-N16. Recently a vulnerability has been noticed by some Sweden users in the ASUS Routers, that allows an attacker to access your Hard Disk remotely from any part ...

In my last article, we have learnt that how to encrypt our Emails using Gnu Privacy Guard . Previously we used Microsoft Outlook as a desktop mail client and a GpgOL plugin to handle encryption decryption of our communication. Since Microsoft is a US-based company, that has to follow all the laws of that contingent. Should we trust Microsoft product to save our e-mail password and data? Obviously NO!  This made me write a new article on the same topic is that today we are going to use an open source mail client i.e.  Mozilla Thunderbird , available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Thunderbird Installation: Initially you need to download the Thunderbird mail client, and install it to make your email communication more secure and private. Open Thunderbird tool and configure your mail account, as shown: Installing and Configuring ENIGMAIL:  In the next step you need to install an Add-on in Thunderbird, called  ENIGMAIL . You can search and install add-on using...

The TARGET Hack was not the only massive Data breach that happened during the last Black Friday, but also other three major US Retailers were also hacked. Recently, Neiman Marcus also confirmed a data breach that involves Credit card theft from its customers during the holiday shopping season, using similar techniques to the one that penetrated Target last month. Neiman Marcus has 79 stores and reported total sales of $1.1 Billion in the Q4 2013. Neiman Marcus revealed that its customers are at risk after hackers breached servers of the company and accessed the payment information of those who visited its stores. The company is working to inform customers whose cards have been used for fraudulent purchases, but differently from the case of retailer Target, the company hasn't provided information on the nature of data leaked and on the number of customer records exposed. Neiman Marcus spokesperson Ginger Reeder announced that the company does not yet know the cause, size or dur...

Last year Samsung launched a security feature called ' KNOX ' for high-end enterprise mobile devices. It's a nice security addition and free with new Samsung handsets such as the Galaxy Note 3 and Samsung Galaxy S4. Samsung Knox is an application that creates a virtual partition (container) within the normal Android operating system that allows a user to run two different Android systems on a same device, so that you can securely separate your personal and professional activities. KNOX based virtual operating system of your phone requires a password to be accessed and helps you to securely store data that they're especially concerned about, such as personal pictures and video, in protected containers that would be resistant to hacking attempts on stolen devices. You can switch between Knox mode and personal mode using shortcuts in the app tray and notification tray. All the data and applications stored in the KNOX container system are completely isolated from the rest...