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Google has failed to provide a very important security measure in its Gmail application for iOS that left millions of its Apple device users to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks capable of monitoring encrypted email communications. Researcher at mobile security firm Lacoon has discovered that Google's Gmail iOS application, run on Macintosh mobile devices, does not perform what's known as "certificate pinning" when establishing a trusted connection between the mobile applications and back-end web services, which means an attacker can view plaintext emails and steal credentials in MitM attack. WHAT IS CERTIFICATE PINNING Certificate Pinning is a process designed to prevent user of the application from being a victim of an attack made by spoofing the SSL certificate . Certificate pinning automatically rejects the whole connection from sites that offer bogus SSL certificates and allow only SSL connections to hosts signed with certificates stored inside the application, whic...

Today, Microsoft has issued an emergency update for almost all versions of Windows and also for Microsoft devices running Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 to secure users from attacks that abuse the latest issued rogue SSL certificates, which could be used to impersonate Google and Yahoo! websites. A week after the search engine giant Google spotted and blocked unauthorized digital certificates for a number of its domains that could result in a potentially serious security and privacy threat, Microsoft has responded back to block the bogus certificates from being used on its software as well. " Today, we are updating the Certificate Trust List (CTL) for all supported releases of Microsoft Windows to remove the trust of mis-issued third-party digital certificates, " said Dustin Childs, group manager of response communications. The fake digital certificates , issued by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) of India - a unit of India's Ministry of Communications and Infor...

Chinese hackers broke into the computer systems of United States government agency that keeps the personal information of all federal employees, according to the paper published in the New York Times. The attack occurred on the Office of Personnel Management and Senior American officials believe that the attackers successfully gained access to some of the agency's databases in March before the federal authorities detected the threat and blocked them from the network. The hackers targeted the files of tens of thousands of federal employees who have applied for top-secret security clearances, the newspaper reported. " The intrusion at the Office of Personnel Management was particularly disturbing because it oversees a system called e-QIP, in which federal employees applying for security clearances enter their most personal information, including financial data. Federal employees who have had security clearances for some time are often required to update their personal inf...

Cyber criminals are infecting thousands of computers around the world with malware and are utilizing those compromised machines to break into Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals using brute-force techniques, and the attackers have already compromised 60 PoS terminals by brute-force attacks against poorly-secured connections to guess remote administration credentials, says researchers from FireEye. The new botnet campaign, dubbed as BrutPOS , aims to steal payment card information from the POS systems and and other places where payment data is stored, by targeting Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers that were disgracefully using poorly secured and simple passwords. Due to the better track inventory and accuracy of records, the Point-of-sale (POS) machine is used worldwide and it can be easily set-up, depending on the nature of the business. But, Point-of-sale (POS) systems are critical components in any retail environment and the users are not aware of the emerging ...

Another privacy issue has been discovered in Google Drive which could have led sensitive and personal information stored on the cloud service exposed to unauthorized parties. The security flaw has now patched by Google, but its discovery indicates that the vulnerability of cloud data when accessed via a link can allow " anyone who has the link " to access your private data without any further authentication. HOW THE SECURITY FLAW WORKS The security hole addressed a risk to files that included a clickable URL on your cloud file sharing service. When someone opens the file and clicks on an embedded hyperlink, then they get sent to the website of a third-party website owner. Upon accessing this URL, unfortunately the external Internet user - an unauthorized party - could potentially access your sensitive information by accessing the original documents that included the URL. GOOGLE EXPLANATION Google explained the actual nature of the security flaw in a blog p...