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Own an Android smartphone? Beware, as just an innocuous-looking image on social media or messaging app could compromise your smartphone. Along with the dangerous Quadrooter vulnerabilities that affected 900 Million devices and other previously disclosed issues, Google has patched a previously-unknown critical bug that could let attackers deliver their hack hidden inside an innocent looking image via social media or chat apps. In fact, there is no need for a victim to click on the malicious photo because as soon as the image's data was parsed by the phone, it would quietly allow a remote attacker to take control over the device or simply crash it. The vulnerability is similar to last year's Stagefright bug ( exploit code ) that allowed hackers to hijack Android devices with just a simple text message without the owners being aware of it. The Stagefright flaw affected more than 950 Million Android devices and resided in the core Android component Stagefright — a multim...

Another data breach from 2012, and this time, it's Russia's biggest internet portal and email provider Rambler.ru . Rambler.ru , also known as Russia's Yahoo, suffered a massive data breach in 2012 in which an unknown hacker or a group of hackers managed to steal nearly 100 Million user accounts, including their unencrypted plaintext passwords. The copy of the hacked database obtained by the breach notification website LeakedSource contained details of 98,167,935 Rambler.ru users that were originally stolen on 17 February 2012, but went unreported. The leaked user records in the database included usernames, email addresses, ICQ numbers (IM chat service), social account details, passwords and some internal data, the data breach indexing site said in a blog post . The data breach was reported by the same hacker using the daykalif@xmpp.jp Jabber ID who handed LeakedSource over 43.5 Million user records from another 2012 hack suffered by the Last.fm music streaming se...

Air-gapped computers that are isolated from the Internet or other networks and believed to be the most secure computers on the planet have become a regular target in recent years. A team of researchers from Ben-Gurion University in Israel has discovered a way to extract sensitive information from air-gapped computers – this time using radio frequency transmissions from USB connectors without any need of specialized hardware mounted on the USB. Dubbed USBee , the attack is a significant improvement over the NSA-made USB exfiltrator called CottonMouth that was mentioned in a document leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden. Unlike CottonMouth , USBee doesn't require an attacker to smuggle a modified USB device into the facility housing the air-gapped computer being targeted; rather the technique turns USB devices already inside the facility into an RF transmitter with no hardware modification required. Must Read: BadUSB Code Released – Turn USB Drives Into Undete...

Recently, two European countries, France and Germany, have declared war against encryption with an objective to force major technology companies to built encryption backdoors in their secure messaging services. However, another neighborhood country, Netherlands, is proactively taking down cyber criminals, but do you know how? Dutch Police has seized two servers belonging to Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider Perfect Privacy , as part of an investigation, without even providing any reason for seizures. Switzerland-based VPN provider said they came to know about the servers seizure from I3D, the company that provides server hosting across Rotterdam. For those unfamiliar, Virtual Private Networks or VPNs are easy security and privacy tools that route your Internet traffic through a distant connection, protecting your browsing, hiding your location data and accessing restricted resources. VPNs have now become a great tool not just for large companies, but also for individual...

Around five years after unknown hackers gained unauthorized access to multiple kernel.org servers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel, police have arrested a South Florida computer programmer for carrying out the attack. Donald Ryan Austin , a 27-year-old programmer from of El Portal, Florida, was charged Thursday with hacking servers belonging to the Linux Kernel Organization ( kernel.org ) and the Linux Foundation in 2011, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. The Linux Kernel Organization runs kernel.org servers for distributing the Linux operating system kernel, which is the heart of the operating system, whereas the Linux Foundation is a separate group that supports kernel.org. According to an indictment [ PDF ] unsealed by federal prosecutors on Monday, Austin managed to steal login credentials of one of the Linux Kernel Organization system administrators in 2011 and used them to install a hard-to-detect malware backdoor, dubbe...