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

Are you experiencing slow Internet speed on your MacBook today? — It's not just you! Here's Why: Following in Microsoft's footsteps , Apple has started " pre-downloading " the latest version of its desktop operating system, macOS 10.12 Sierra, in the background, if you are still running OS X El Capitan. If you have automatic downloads enabled on your Mac, a large file of around 5GB will mysteriously be downloaded to your computer in the background, using your Internet bandwidth for unrequested files. Apple justifies this move by saying that the automatic download would make it easier for users to get the newest operating system, encouraging them to update their Macs. The good news, however, is that the update will not install automatically without your permission. Once downloaded automatically in the background, users who are running OS X El Capitan version 10.11.5 or later will receive a notification that says macOS Sierra is ready to be installed....

Users are still dealing with the Yahoo's massive data breach that exposed over 1 Billion Yahoo accounts and there's another shocking news about the company that, I bet, will blow your mind. Yahoo might have provided your personal data to United States intelligence agency when required. Yahoo reportedly built a custom software programmed to secretly scan all of its users' emails for specific information provided by US intelligence officials, according to a report by Reuters . The tool was built in 2015 after company complied with a secret court order to scan hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail account at the behest of either the NSA or the FBI, according to the report that cites three separate sources who are familiar with the matter. According to some experts, this is the first time when an American Internet company has agreed to such an extensive demand by a spy agency's demand by searching all incoming emails, examining stored emails or scanning a small number...

Do you trust your messaging app even though it uses end-to-end encryption? As I previously said end-to-end encryption doesn't mean that your messages are secure enough to hide your trace. It's because most of the messaging apps still record and store a lot of metadata on your calls and messages that could reveal some of your personal information including dates and durations of communication, as well as the participants' phone numbers. Apple's iMessage app is the most recent and best example of this scenario. Just recently it was reported that the company stores a lot of information about its end-to-end encrypted iMessage, that could reveal your contacts and location, and even share this data with law enforcement via court orders. But if you are using open source end-to-end encrypted Signal   app, you are on the safer side. Trust me! As we previously reported that the Signal app, which is widely considered the most secure of all other encrypted messaging a...

Wikileaks completed its 10 years today, and within this timespan, the whistleblower site has published over 10 million documents, and there's more to come. In the name of celebration of its 10th Anniversary, Wikileaks promises to leak documents pertaining to Google, United States presidential election and more over the next ten weeks. Speaking by video link to an anniversary news conference at the Volksbuhne Theater in Berlin on Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange eagerly announced his plans to release a series of publications every week for the next 10 weeks. The upcoming leaks will include "significant material" related to Google, the US presidential election, military operations, arms trading and, the hot topic of past few years, mass surveillance. Assange also promised to publish all documents related to the US presidential race before the election day on November 8. "There is an enormous expectation in the United States," Assange said f...

Researchers have disclosed a critical zero-day vulnerability in the JPEG 2000 image file format parser implemented in OpenJPEG library , which could allow an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on the affected systems. Discovered by security researchers at Cisco Talos group, the zero-day flaw, assigned as TALOS-2016-0193/ CVE-2016-8332 , could allow an out-of-bound heap write to occur that triggers the heap corruption and leads to arbitrary code execution. OpenJPEG is an open-source JPEG 2000 codec. Written in C language, the software was developed for coding and encoding JPEG2000 images, a format that is often used for tasks like embedding image files within PDF documents through popular software including PdFium, Poppler, and MuPDF. Hackers can exploit the security vulnerability by tricking the victim into opening a specially crafted, malicious JPEG2000 image or a PDF document containing that malicious file in an email. The hacker could even upload the malicious JP...