The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

Today, most users surf the web unaware of the fact that websites collect their data and track their locations – and if this is not enough, then there are hackers and cyber criminals who can easily steal sensitive data from the ill-equipped. In short, the simple truth is that you have no or very little privacy when you're online. So, if you're worried about identity thieves, or ISPs spying on or throttling your traffic, the most efficient way to secure your privacy on the Internet is to avoid using public networks; use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) instead. When it comes to digital security, the first thing most users probably think of is a good Antivirus for protecting their sensitive data on their systems. But, what they forget is that the data they send over the Internet needs protection, too. That's where Virtual Private Network (VPN) services come in. VPN allows you to access a private network securely and to share data remotely through public networks, ...

Doing conversations with your friend on iMessage and thinking that they are safe and out of reach from anyone else other than you and your friend? No, it's not. End-to-end encryption doesn't mean that your iMessages are secure enough to hide your trace because Apple not only stores a lot of information about your iMessages that could reveal your contacts and location, but even share that information with law enforcement via court orders. According to a new document obtained by The Intercept , Apple records a log of which phone numbers you typed into their iPhone for a message conversation, along with the date and time when you entered those numbers as well as your IP address, which could be used to identify your location. Actually, every time a user type a phone number into their iPhone for a message conversation, iMessage contacts Apple servers to find out whether to route a given message over the iMessage system. "Apple records each query in which your phone c...

Do you know — Your Smart Devices may have inadvertently participated in a record-breaking largest cyber attack that Internet has just witnessed. If you own a smart device like Internet-connected televisions, cars, refrigerators or thermostats, you might already be part of a botnet of millions of infected devices that was used to launch the biggest DDoS attack known to date, with peaks of over 1 Tbps of traffic. France-based hosting provider OVH was the victim to the record-breaking Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that reached over one terabit per second (1 Tbps) over the past week. As the Internet of Things (IoT) or connected devices are growing at a great pace, they continue to widen the attack surface at the same time, giving attackers a large number of entry points to affect you some or the other way. 1 Tbps DDoS Attack Hits OVH IoTs are currently being deployed in a large variety of devices throughout your home, businesses, hospitals, and even entire cities (...

OSquery , an open-source framework created by Facebook that allows organizations to look for potential malware or malicious activity on their networks, was available for Mac OS X and Linux environments until today. But now the social network has announced that the company has developed a Windows version of its osquery tool , too. When Facebook engineers want to monitor thousands of Apple Mac laptops across their organization, they use their own untraditional security tool called OSquery. OSquery is a smart piece of cross-platform software that scans every single computer on an infrastructure and catalogs every aspect of it. Then SQL-based queries allow developers and security teams to monitor low-level functions in real-time and quickly search for malicious behavior and vulnerable applications on their infrastructure. In simple words, OSquery allows an organization to treat its infrastructure as a database, turning OS information into a format that can be queried using SQL...

Just last month, the most popular messaging app WhatsApp updated its privacy policy and T&Cs to start sharing its user data with its parent company, and now both the companies are in trouble, at least in Germany and India. Both Facebook, as well as WhatsApp, have been told to immediately stop collecting and storing data on roughly 35 Million WhatsApp users in Germany. The Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Johannes Caspar even ordered Facebook on Tuesday to delete all data that has already been forwarded to WhatsApp since August. Also in India, the Delhi High Court on September 23 ordered WhatsApp to delete all users' data from its servers up until September 25 when the company's new privacy policy came into effect. When Facebook first acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash in 2014, WhatsApp made a promise that its users' data would not be shared between both companies. But now apparently this has changed, which, according to Caspa...